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Science Fiction

SPSFC Finalist Review: Night Music by Tobias Cabral

The SPSFC is in it’s final weeks and I am officially done with the reading! Winners will be announced mid July and the teams are still hard at work reading and scoring the finalists. Team At Boundary’s Edge has decided to review the books individually although not release a score until the entire team has finished reading. As always these are my thoughts alone and don’t necessarily represent the opinions of the team or anyone else. Let’s dive right in to our last book!

Bookish Quick Facts:
  • Title: Night Music
  • Series: N/A
  • Author: Tobias Cabral
  • Release: Self Published, 2010
  • Length: 144 pages
  • Recommend for: those who enjoy science in their space exploration 
Here’s the synopsis via Am*zon:

The colonization of Mars has begun.

Following a rapid expansion of the manned space program due to the discovery of a potentially catastrophic Earth-crossing comet, Zubrin Base has been established on the Red Planet to oversee the capture of the rogue object.

During final preparations for a second expedition, however, contact has been lost with the outpost. Pilot Seth Boaz finds himself re-tasked for a rescue mission, one which will force him to confront his own past, as well as otherworldly forces with profound implications for humanity’s future.

My Thoughts:

 I am so glad we read the finalists from longest to shortest because my burnout on sci-fi is real right now.  Night Music might only be 144 pages but is packed with exceptionally long and dense scientific passages in the first half that felt like reading a much longer book.

I click-Googled a few names and at least some of it is based on real things.  The fact is that (take for example the spaceship building theories or how-life-is-formed lecture) I don’t have the scientific mind or interest for trying to understand these long and dense passages, which resulted in quite a bit of early skimming.

That out of the way, the rest of the book is decent.  A station on Mars went silent and a team is sent on a rescue vs salvage mission to see what’s going on.  They discover something remarkable and spoilery so you’ll have to read to find out what.

I liked the characters well enough for what we saw of them.  In a plot based novella, Cabral was right to just give us the need to knows and stick to the action instead of bogging down with character details too.  Maybe the same should have gone for the science, although it must have taken a lot of research and I want to give the book credit for being well presented and edited.

Overall: I struggled with the first half of the novella and then finished the last half in an hour.  It’s too scientifically dense for me but I liked the more digestible elements.

Thanks for checking out my SPSFC book review of Night Music by Tobias Cabral.  I was granted a copy for judging purposes, although I found my copy on Kindle Unlimited. As always, all opinions are my own 🚀

All the finalist reviews: 

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