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Fermi's Progress #1-4
Fermi's Progress
“The Fermi is the Earth’s first and last faster-than-light-spaceship. The last, because it turns out its engine vaporises entire star systems in its wake. And nobody knows how to turn it off.”
Four planets. Four adventures. Four apocalypses.
A Dyson sphere, a philosophical zombie apocalypse, a giant airborne beehive and a galactic telesales scam. Each world brings new wonders, new dangers, and a planetary scale genocide. The Fermi crew must survive by what little wits they have as they bounce a trail of destruction across the galaxy.
For the first time all four parts of Fermi’s Progress are together in one volume.
"Simultaneously hilarious and tragic, a unique and fast-paced ride into new science fiction territory." Adrian Tchaikovsky
"Fermi's Progress is fresh, fun SF with a dark conceit, dangerous thought experiments, thrilling action adventures, and lots of wit and warmth." Ken MacLeod
"A mindbending meditation on human (and inhuman) nature, Fermi's Progress both dances around answering the woefully 21st century question of 'Are we alone in the universe', while ruminating on whether we should be." - Aaron J. Waltke, Co-Executive Producer, Star Trek: Prodigy
"Simultaneously a tribute to the classic TV SF 'planet of the week' format and a very literal demolition job of the same - and so smart that it's never afraid to be silly. Brilliant stuff." Nate Crowley Author of Notes from Small Planets
"Clever and strange, genre-bending and darkly funny, it’ll take you on a ride between myriad times and places, Fermi’s Paradox observed through the lens of interstellar call-centres like it was the grim spawn of The Dark Forest and Hitchhiker’s Guide, or the fleshy junction of Alien, Embassytown, and Office Space." Andrew Skinner, author of Steel Frame
Four planets. Four adventures. Four apocalypses.
A Dyson sphere, a philosophical zombie apocalypse, a giant airborne beehive and a galactic telesales scam. Each world brings new wonders, new dangers, and a planetary scale genocide. The Fermi crew must survive by what little wits they have as they bounce a trail of destruction across the galaxy.
For the first time all four parts of Fermi’s Progress are together in one volume.
"Simultaneously hilarious and tragic, a unique and fast-paced ride into new science fiction territory." Adrian Tchaikovsky
"Fermi's Progress is fresh, fun SF with a dark conceit, dangerous thought experiments, thrilling action adventures, and lots of wit and warmth." Ken MacLeod
"A mindbending meditation on human (and inhuman) nature, Fermi's Progress both dances around answering the woefully 21st century question of 'Are we alone in the universe', while ruminating on whether we should be." - Aaron J. Waltke, Co-Executive Producer, Star Trek: Prodigy
"Simultaneously a tribute to the classic TV SF 'planet of the week' format and a very literal demolition job of the same - and so smart that it's never afraid to be silly. Brilliant stuff." Nate Crowley Author of Notes from Small Planets
"Clever and strange, genre-bending and darkly funny, it’ll take you on a ride between myriad times and places, Fermi’s Paradox observed through the lens of interstellar call-centres like it was the grim spawn of The Dark Forest and Hitchhiker’s Guide, or the fleshy junction of Alien, Embassytown, and Office Space." Andrew Skinner, author of Steel Frame
574 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 1, 2023
Love the imaginative worlds in these collected stories! The base premise of a starship that accidentally destroys every world it encounters is basically the most dramatic of MacGuffins. While this sounds like a criticism, it is not. It's a genius idea as it forces the real story to be about the people on the ship — how they deal with the culture shock of the alien worlds they encounter and how they carry the tragic burden of the wreckage they leave behind.
This framework also allows the author to fully dive into some really creative world building with every alien world they encounter. Every world they encounter is both uniquely different and yet also strangely familiar in how it illuminates some aspect of what it is to be a person. There are some definite nods here and there to philosophy of consciousness and also critiques of capitalism, both of which I'm here for.
Very much worth reading!
This framework also allows the author to fully dive into some really creative world building with every alien world they encounter. Every world they encounter is both uniquely different and yet also strangely familiar in how it illuminates some aspect of what it is to be a person. There are some definite nods here and there to philosophy of consciousness and also critiques of capitalism, both of which I'm here for.
Very much worth reading!
August 11, 2026
"Fermi's Progress" by Chris Farnell is an omnibus of novellas originally published separately, following the titular ship Fermi. It does the usual bouncing around from planet to planet, with one tragic caveat: it's mode of travel destroys that entire systems it leaves behind. To make matters worse, leaving it unused will result in the thing overloading and causing even bigger destruction. Our intrepid crew has to find a way of averting constant crises... while not losing themselves in the process.
When I first began reading this book, I was content to let it explain the bigger, theoretical scientific concepts and just go with the flow. It begins with possibly the hardest planetary concept to understand: the Dyson Sphere. And while I understand the importance of having the sphere first to introduce a necessary character for later, it was a fairly big hurdle to have such a niche concept as the first installment. Their second adventure, following a planet of mushroom-like people in the strangest zombie apocalypse, was much more straightforward. I was really enjoying the mix of "hard" scifi and space opera drama.
And then the book fumbled the explanation of a scientific concept so badly that I could no longer trust any explanation it gave for anything else.
At the end of the second installment, the character who spent the most time with our mushroom people announces that, after her experience, she can no longer view the others as real people. She sees herself as the only one with a real "soul" and everyone else as soulless automatons only acting on stimuli. Our robot character tries to explain it away using Dunbar's Number. Dunbar's Number, it claims, is the theory that human brains only have the capacity to view 150 people as also human. A fact that sounded so supremely wrong and against every single thing I know about Theory of the Mind that I had to immediately stop reading and look it up. Sure enough, a single 30 second internet search proved that Dunbar's Number actually theorizes that the human brain can only maintain 150 intimate relationships.
I'm not against completely making up scientific concepts for a sci-fi. The explanation it gives for why the mushroom people began seeing each other as zombies, using the mycelium network as a base concept, was actually a fun idea. But if an author is going to drop scientific concepts with their full proper names, I expect them to have at least the very basis of it correct. And any changes made for sci-fi fun should still maintain a level of logic that doesn't immediately fall apart the second you think about it more deeply. (Seriously, the entirety of organized human society is predicated on us being able to see strangers as humans.) For this specific character, I suggest Capgras Delusion. Much closer fit.
Benefit of the Doubt now completely lost, I decided to treat all the mentions of scientific concepts as completely made up. Is it possible that there were some that were explained correctly? Most likely, but with the number of them the book name drops, I wasn't about to keep stopping to check. So I went on reading about giant bees and mega corporations. And that's how I discovered this book is best enjoyed as a popcorn, turn-off-your-brain read. Not a type of book I dislike, mind you.
There were some other minor issues, like how all the alien world hopping made it feel like I was repeatedly reading the first page of a sci-fi book, even when in the middle of one of the installments. Or the fact that it tried to introduce a new character, claiming they were there all along and the characters just had their memories wiped. Except the book is written in omniscient third person, repeatedly showing things to the reader that the characters don't know, so her existence still should've been shown earlier. I wish the author had taken the omnibus as a chance to re-edit that.
Still, a lot of the worldbuilding concepts were fun and the heist at the end was a treat. Like I mentioned before, definitely a "turn off your brain" book, but a pleasant one.
When I first began reading this book, I was content to let it explain the bigger, theoretical scientific concepts and just go with the flow. It begins with possibly the hardest planetary concept to understand: the Dyson Sphere. And while I understand the importance of having the sphere first to introduce a necessary character for later, it was a fairly big hurdle to have such a niche concept as the first installment. Their second adventure, following a planet of mushroom-like people in the strangest zombie apocalypse, was much more straightforward. I was really enjoying the mix of "hard" scifi and space opera drama.
And then the book fumbled the explanation of a scientific concept so badly that I could no longer trust any explanation it gave for anything else.
At the end of the second installment, the character who spent the most time with our mushroom people announces that, after her experience, she can no longer view the others as real people. She sees herself as the only one with a real "soul" and everyone else as soulless automatons only acting on stimuli. Our robot character tries to explain it away using Dunbar's Number. Dunbar's Number, it claims, is the theory that human brains only have the capacity to view 150 people as also human. A fact that sounded so supremely wrong and against every single thing I know about Theory of the Mind that I had to immediately stop reading and look it up. Sure enough, a single 30 second internet search proved that Dunbar's Number actually theorizes that the human brain can only maintain 150 intimate relationships.
I'm not against completely making up scientific concepts for a sci-fi. The explanation it gives for why the mushroom people began seeing each other as zombies, using the mycelium network as a base concept, was actually a fun idea. But if an author is going to drop scientific concepts with their full proper names, I expect them to have at least the very basis of it correct. And any changes made for sci-fi fun should still maintain a level of logic that doesn't immediately fall apart the second you think about it more deeply. (Seriously, the entirety of organized human society is predicated on us being able to see strangers as humans.) For this specific character, I suggest Capgras Delusion. Much closer fit.
Benefit of the Doubt now completely lost, I decided to treat all the mentions of scientific concepts as completely made up. Is it possible that there were some that were explained correctly? Most likely, but with the number of them the book name drops, I wasn't about to keep stopping to check. So I went on reading about giant bees and mega corporations. And that's how I discovered this book is best enjoyed as a popcorn, turn-off-your-brain read. Not a type of book I dislike, mind you.
There were some other minor issues, like how all the alien world hopping made it feel like I was repeatedly reading the first page of a sci-fi book, even when in the middle of one of the installments. Or the fact that it tried to introduce a new character, claiming they were there all along and the characters just had their memories wiped. Except the book is written in omniscient third person, repeatedly showing things to the reader that the characters don't know, so her existence still should've been shown earlier. I wish the author had taken the omnibus as a chance to re-edit that.
Still, a lot of the worldbuilding concepts were fun and the heist at the end was a treat. Like I mentioned before, definitely a "turn off your brain" book, but a pleasant one.
July 29, 2026
I came for the sci-fi and stayed for the brilliant mix of humor, imagination, and absolute chaos. Every new world felt wildly creative, and just when I thought I knew what was coming, the story surprised me again. This was an unforgettable ride from start to finish.
November 4, 2024
Really good set of linked stories. Cohesive, original, interesting - some ideas here that I've genuinely not read before. Well worth a punt even for the most jaded scifi nerd.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews