Curved Space to Corsair

Viridian System #2

by Jemima Pett

Big Pete and the Swede, together with Maggie and Dolores, who is training to qualify as a space pilot, take a holiday in the miners’ new spacecraft while some building work goes on at their villa. “Maybe ten weeks will do it,” Maggie estimates. Pete has been summoned to his home planet, Corsair, to save them from disaster, so they set off in that direction to give Dolores more space hours, only to make a slight course error which leaves them hundreds of light-years from civilisation.


Meanwhile the Imperium declares war on the Federation, while a little personal business by one of the senators leads him off in the direction of the Viridian System to start a canny land grab.


The second in the Viridian System series takes our heroes far far from their home area, and delays Pete's urgent summons. Strange aliens cross their path, only to show that sometimes the curves in spacetime really are the quickest routes to your destination.

ebook

Published January 22, 2019

About the author

Jemima Pett has been living in a world of her own for many years. Writing stories since she was eight, drawing maps of fantasy islands with train systems and timetables at ten. Unfortunately no-one wanted a fantasy island designer then, so she tried a few careers, getting great experiences in business, environmental research and social work. She finally got back to building her own worlds, and wrote about them. Her business background enabled her to become an independent author, responsible for her own publications.

Her first series, the Princelings of the East, is now complete, with ten mystery adventures for advanced readers set in a world of tunnels and castles. There's a strong element of time travel, and relies on thinking yourself out of difficult situations! Jemima does chapter illustrations for these.

Shehas also published two volumes of Christmas stories for young readers, the BookElves Anthologies, and her father's memoirs White Water Landings, about the Imperial Airways flying boat service in Africa. Her current work-in-progress is the third in her (adult) science fiction series set in the Viridian System, in which the aliens include sentient trees.

Jemima now lives in Hampshire with her guinea pigs, the first of whom, Fred, George, Victor and Hugo, provided the inspiration for her first stories, The Princelings of the East. She is currently writing short stories for anthologies, and working on ideas for a new climate-related fiction book.

See my blog at jemimapett.com
The Princelings series at Princelings of the East series
My science fiction books at Viridian System series

Reviews

[Rebecca Douglass · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, I think I have to declare myself a biased reviewer. After all, I was a beta reader and editor for this book, so I might be a wee bit invested in it :) But that said, I still love it, and was in fact eagerly awaiting it!

I first fell in love with Big Pete and the Swede in the early flash fiction bits Ms. Pett wrote featuring the miners. I enjoyed the first book in the series in part for that reason, and encouraged the author not to give up when she decided it needed reworking--which resulted in a much stronger story. This second book in the series shows the effects of that hard work, by being a very strong, tight story, with characters who stand out as individuals and feel entirely human (even when they aren't, if you know what I mean).

The story is complete and stands on its own, but I think it is better to read the books in order, and though this isn't a cliff-hanger at all, I'm eagerly awaiting Book Three.

In summary (since I'm borrowing a computer and need to give it back): this is a strong and original story with interesting and well-developed characters, good intrigue and adventure, and a touch of humor in the right places. There is a bit of space sex, but nothing graphic, so it's suitable for any adult or teen readers.

[Jemima Pett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote this book at Camp NaNoWriMo in 2015, just after I first published The Perihelix. Then I rewrote the Perihelix, so it took a long time to get around to finalising its sequel.

It started from a word used in the BBC's Sky at Night astronomy programme - spaghettification. It's the effect of going down a black hole on an object. Say you went feet first. Your head would go down considerably later than your feet, and the acceleration on your feet means they go at a different rate to your head, leading to deformation of your body. Of course, scientists assume that this is impossible to survive in one piece, but then time travel is only possible if you have infinite mass, so let's just cut to fiction and suppose it's possible.

When I rewrote Corsair because of exactly the same comment I had over the Perihelix, I started with the wormhole event and used the spaghettification effect to fill in some back story. After that, it is all perfectly reasonable space adventure. Including harvester machinery that learns to breed, which is a thought developed from a New Scientist webinar on automation...

People are still people, though. Pete is obsessed with the call to save his world using the Perihelix, which means he needs to find a dragon and a cavy, both called George, according to the legend. Lars is feeling a bit sidelined by this, and has his mind on what happened when he was kidnapped (when he's not thinking of sex). Dolores is trying to pass her space pilot's exams, to make a living as a free woman, and Maggie wishes she had firm ground under her feet and a sensible market to go and buy fresh food from.

And there they are, marooned on the other side of the universe. No wonder things get a bit...adult.

[Torfinn Ingolfsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it.