Under Jupiter

by J.E. Hunter

One mistake, that’s all it took for Brix to be shipped off to Europa. Sure, it was a big mistake and she nearly died. But did her father really have to exile her to a tiny colony rotating somewhere around Jupiter? Europa has nothing on it doesn’t have real rock concerts, it doesn’t have her best friend, and it doesn’t even have transportation. The only things Europa has to offer are a gorgeous view, one cute guy, and a forgetful group of colonists striving to extend mankind's reach into the stars.


Now Brix is stuck. Stuck with family she barely knows and a town of mysteriously forgetful colonists. Brix quickly becomes enthralled with the memory loss, as proving that Europa's bad for her health might just be her ticket back home. Between classes at her new school and her life with her aunt, uncle, and cousins, Brix digs deeper into Europa’s industry. She's determined to discover the cause of the amnesia. She’s going to get evidence the Europa is bad for her health, even if it means putting her life—and her memories—in jeopardy. Because there’s no way she’s going to remain on Hemlin Colony Three, not if she has any say in the matter.

ebook

Published December 13, 2017

About the author

J. E. Hunter lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and began writing at a young age as an excuse to stay indoors during the cold winters. Several trips to the Pacific coast brought the inspiration for the Black Depths Series. J. E. Hunter has spent many years working in the field of environmental engineering and protection, a common theme in her works. When not reading, writing, or working, J. E. Hunter is often planning future adventures or busy living them.

Reviews

[Pat Cummings · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a time in the 1950s when juvenile science fiction was bowdlerized, tidied up to suit the narrow sensibilities of adults who bought for libraries. The result was often a Leave It to Beaver home-life sprinkled with robots and rocket ships and characters who swore by "My Universe!" and "Asteroids!" Brave teens fought against the stupidity of adults and the cupidity of criminal gangs with all the last-decade science they could muster, and somehow defeated them without taking more damage than a bruise or mussed hairstyle.

That's Under Jupiter in a nutshell.

Ignore the green-haired 40-year-old woman of the cover illustration; Jiden is a teenager banished from Earth by her widowed father after a drug-hazed near-fatal accident. He packs her onto a three-month-long trip to Europa. Which is apparently inhabited by "Europan's," just one of many frustratingly-consistent misapplications of possessive and plural in this novel.

Even with that annoyance, though, the more egregious errors are conceptual. Jiden's fellow colonists survive in a chemically hostile environment despite the memory lapses that should have killed any number of them already. Equipment needed for survival disappears, and the adults around Jiden shrug and say "So what?" And aside from a "newly discovered power source, Amminium," the technology available to the Europan colony seems little advanced beyond that of our era. Or maybe 1990.

Worse, Hunter tosses in a historical "Robot Wars" (by way of a high-school class assignment), apparently to explain why the computing power available on Europa is so limited. No further details are given.

Explaining additional conceptual snafus would provide serious spoilers. I offer only one more detail: a pop band called "The Female Asteroids"—as if any women's band post-1959 would choose that as a name, or survive the inevitable hashtags it would morph into. Suffice it to say that I plan to remove the book from my Kindle after this review, and never re-read it.

I lived through the 50s and the Swifties. Once is enough for anyone.