Lemuria 7

by Allen Steele

179 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 14, 2026

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

The new Allen Steele novel is a fix-up comprised of three novellas that were first printed in Asimov's magazine in 2023 and 2025: Lemuria 7 is Missing, The Hunt for Lemuria 7, and The Recovery of Lemuria 7. It's an excellent old-fashioned hard-sf novel, telling the story of a group of Lunar tourists who get far more than they bargained for when their near-future junket to the Moon is side-railed under mysterious circumstances. It's told in the format of a series of reports and journal entries and interviews that seems to distance the characters a little until you get used to it, but the different viewpoints add a lot of depth. It's the story of a rich man named Edison Smith who buys passage for himself, his wife Mary Alice, his daughter Amelia, and Amelia's fiancé Todd. There are two crewmen, too, Captain Lemmon and co-pilot Jake Skribiski. Todd turns into something of a jerk and in the meantime, Amelia finds herself attracted to the co-pilot (called Ape Man), leading to quite an awkward triangle. Contact is lost when something weird happens and the ship and crew are presumed lost. A few years later a team of robotic dogs is sent to search, but the recovery mission is lost, too. It was developed by Merlin Feng, another former paramour of Amelia, who really must have been quite the busy little heartthrob. Then all of a sudden Amelia turns up on the Great Wall of China and things get mysterious again. She marries one of her doctors, years pass, and then a rescue mission is launched. It all comes to a satisfying conclusion, no spoilers here, except a funny line from page 93: "Watch the skies: the Allens are coming!" It's a well-written story with some cosmic mystery and a little romance some nice scientific development, everything you need for your science fiction day. It has a very nice cover by Ron Miller showing the original crew posing on Luna for a selfie, and an unfortunate blurb from Locus; "Effectively told." Really?!?! They couldn't have found something more complimentary or pyrotechnic than that? Don't be put off by the faint praise. It's a terrific book; it is "effectively told," but it's one heck of a lot more than that, too!