Escape

Space City #2

by Jared Austin

Summer meant freedom. An Escape from academic responsibilities.

In this collection of tales, Escape becomes personal for some of the Space City Preparatory Academy students.

Nico has created a flying Venice sim to explore, but when he discovers invisible monsters on the prowl, and a classmate hacks the sim as a prank, he finds surviving to the end a precarious prospect. Trini is reluctant to assist her aunt in handling an infectious disease outbreak among the natives on the planet Letos, but a near fatal encounter with what was believed to be a mythical creature forces her to re-examine her perspective. When his father is seriously injured during a hunting trip on a remote exomoon, it is up to Jiro to locate help, a dicey prospect when two rogue aliens pick up their trail. Dirk and Arielle believe they are in for a nice weekend hike until an ambitious town official wants to frame them for a crime they didn't commit during their summer-abroad diplomat training program. Cade hopes to enter the dangerous Tefnot sub race on Araxia, only to be sold into slavery for his troubles.

For these six, Escape means not just survival, but choosing the futures they want, no matter the odds.

264 pages, ebook

Published December 13, 2021

About the author

Jared Austin is a young adult science fiction author who lives in the Rocket City — Huntsville, Alabama. In Space City and the books in the series to follow, he hopes to show and inspire his daughter and son, as well as all of his readers, that science and technology are not dull subjects, but gateways to a brighter, exciting future.

Reviews

[Robert Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I write science fiction also. I have self published three novels. I received an advance e-copy from LibraryThing.com in exchange for a review. This book started off relatively well and then went trite and lazy. The novel is divided into four sections with a few chapters each--all involving different characters but with a similar/same backdrops or settings. The first two sections I felt kept the dramatic tension reasonably well but the last two didn't; the last story line in particular seemed highly reminiscent of the pod racing sequence from "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace." All the sections or short stories involve characters fighting for their lives. Again, full disclosure: I believe this kind of plotting smacks of audience participation and/or least-common-denominator anticipated demographics. To me, this is what bad or mediocre television does when creativity runs dry: when all else fails, put the main character in mortal danger. Television at least has the excuse that it's time sensitive and designed to sell products to certain individuals rather than truly entertain. I think really good science fiction in any medium doesn't explain but provokes thought. Even in the better stories, the aliens are one or two dimensional at best and display human patterns of emotion, behavior or motivation rather than any other points of view. The editing and proofreading were also consistent with a sub-par effort; I caught far too many typos on the first read that suggested someone was relying on spell check to solve all his or her problems.
In sum, the thought that this book provoked in me upon finishing it was, "Why didn't the writer put more effort into his manuscript?"

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first-and-a-half book in Jared Austin's Space City trilogy, Escape is just that – a detour from the main plot of the series to explore fascinating nooks and crannies of a delightful universe that would otherwise get lost. Austin indulges here in developing the world(s) of Space City even deeper, and gives the audience the opportunity to get to know his characters even better, with a series of vignettes that are each entertaining in their own right.

[Torfinn Ingolfsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it.