Review: Space Trucker Jess
Oct. 20th, 2025 08:36 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Review: Space Trucker Jess, by Matthew Kressel
Publisher: | Fairwood Press |
Copyright: | July 2025 |
ISBN: | 1-958880-27-2 |
Format: | Kindle |
Pages: | 472 |
Space Trucker Jess is a stand-alone far-future space fantasy novel.
Jess is a sixteen-year-old mechanic working grey-market jobs on Chadeisson Station with a couple of younger kids. She's there because her charming and utterly unreliable father got caught running a crypto scam and is sitting in detention. This was only the latest in a long series of scams, con jobs, and misadventures she's been dragged through since her mother disappeared without a word. Jess is cynical, world-weary, and infuriated by her own sputtering loyalty to her good-for-nothing dad.
What Jess wants most in the universe is to own a CCM 6454 Spark Megahauler, the absolute best cargo ship in the universe according to Jess. She should know; she's worked on nearly every type of ship in existence. With her own ship, she could make a living hauling cargo, repairing her own ship, and going anywhere she wants, free of her father and his endless schemes. (A romantic relationship with her friend Leurie would be a nice bonus.)
Then her father is taken off the station on a ship leaving the galactic plane, no one will tell her why, and all the records of the ship appear to have been erased.
Jess thinks her father is an asshole, but that doesn't mean she can sit idly by when he disappears. That's how she ends up getting in serious trouble with station security due to some risky in-person sleuthing, followed by an expensive flight off the station with a dodgy guy and a kid in a stolen spaceship.
The setup for this book was so great. Kressel felt the need to make up a futuristic slang for Jess and her friends to speak, which rarely works as well as the author expects and does not work here, but apart from that I was hooked. Jess is sarcastic, blustery, and a bit of a con artist herself, but with the idealistic sincerity of someone who knows that her life is been kind of broken and understands the value of friends. She's profoundly cynical in the heartbreakingly defensive way of a sixteen-year-old with a rough life. I have a soft spot in my heart for working-class science fiction (there isn't nearly enough of it), and there are few things I enjoy more than reading about the kind of protagonist who has Opinions about starship models and a dislike of shoddy work. I think this is the only book I've bought solely on the basis of one of the Big Idea blog posts John Scalzi hosts.
I really wish this book had stuck with the setup instead of morphing into a weird drug-enabled mystical space fantasy, to which Jess's family is bizarrely central.
SPOILERS below because I can't figure out how to rant about what annoyed me without them. Search for the next occurrence of spoilers to skip past them.
There are three places where this book lost me. The first was when Jess, after agreeing to help another kid find his father, ends up on a world obsessed with a religious cult involving using hallucinatory drugs to commune with alien gods. Jess immediately flags this as unbelievable bullshit and I was enjoying her well-founded cynicism until Kressel pulls the rug out from under both Jess and the reader by establishing that this new-age claptrap is essentially true.
Kressel does try to put a bit of a science fiction gloss on it, but sadly I think that effort was unsuccessful. Sometimes absurdly powerful advanced aliens with near-telepathic powers are part of the fun of a good space opera, but I want the author to make an effort to connect the aliens to plausibility or, failing that, at least avoid sounding indistinguishable from psychic self-help grifters or religious fantasy about spiritual warfare. Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5 failed on the first part but at least held the second line. Kressel gets depressingly close to Seth territory, although at least Jess is allowed to retain some cynicism about motives.
The second, related problem is that Jess ends up being a sort of Chosen One, which I found intensely annoying. This may be a fault of reader expectations more than authorial skill, but one of the things I like to see in working-class science fiction is for the protagonist to not be absurdly central to the future of the galaxy, or to at least force themselves into that position through their own ethics and hard work. This book turns into a sort of quest story with epic fantasy stakes, which I thought was much less interesting than the story the start of the book promised and which made Jess a less interesting character.
Finally, this is one of those books where Jess's family troubles and the plot she stumbles across turn into the same plot. Space Trucker Jess is far from alone in having that plot structure, and that's the problem. I'm not universally opposed to this story shape, but Jess felt like the wrong character for it. She starts the story with a lot of self-awareness about how messed up her family dynamics were, and I was rooting for her to find some space to construct her own identity separate from her family. To have her family turn out to be central not only to this story but to the entire galaxy felt like it undermined that human core of the story, although I admit it's a good analogy to the type of drama escalation that dysfunctional families throw at anyone attempting to separate from them.
Spoilers end here.
I rather enjoyed the first third of this book, despite being a bit annoyed at the constructed slang, and then started rolling my eyes and muttering things about the story going off the rails. Jess is a compelling enough character (and I'm stubborn enough) that I did finish the book, so I can say that I liked the very end. Kressel does finally arrive at the sort of story that I wanted to read all along. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the path he took to get there.
I think much of my problem was that I wanted Jess to be a more defiant character earlier in the novel, and I wanted her family problems to influence her character growth but not be central to her story. Both of these may be matters of opinion and an artifact of coming into the book with the wrong assumptions. If you are interested in a flawed and backsliding effort to untangle one's identity from a dysfunctional family and don't mind some barely-SF space mysticism and chosen one vibes, it's possible this book will click with you. It's not one that I can recommend, though.
I still want the book that I hoped I was getting from that Big Idea piece.
Rating: 4 out of 10