Review: Pallas Lost by Jake Morrison

Pallas Lost by Jake Morrison is a space-heist sci-fi story with excellent world-building. The first few chapters introduce several characters that eventually come together around the mystery of a mythical lost spaceship - Pallas. The way their stories came together was excellent and made for some great, entertaining reading.

The author also did a wonderful job at slowly revealing the history, myths, and current politics of the human colonies on the various planets. Everything was revealed smoothly at the right time and it made the world (galaxy, I guess!) seem very real while maintaining the fast pace of the storytelling. 

I want to know more about Pallas and the AI that started it all and the politics of the corporations that rule these planets so the book definitely did the job of the first in series quite well, while still telling a complete enough story of this part of the adventure. 

I only had a couple of very minor issues with the book. First of all, Eliot's intro scene where he's interacting with and looking down upon a member of the general public really put me off. Of course, showing a character having negative views of others could be good characterization, but in order for me to categorize it that way I would have needed to see Eliot change his mind or get called out on it by other characters eventually and none of those has happened yet in this first book. He also fit in too well among the others without showing any more arrogance towards any of the other MCs, making that first scene really stand out for me. I realize this may be a minor issue, and he may well have an arc in future books where this is addressed (to be fair, there really wasn't much time for it in the middle of the action) but I just wanted to put that out there. 

I was also sad to see Vasyli's character - and his own problem established in the beginning - take a backseat in the face of everything else that was going on. I would have loved to see more of his thoughts/worries in the later parts of the story. Again, this is very minor and may well be addressed in later books, but I guess he was my favourite of the main characters so I wanted to see more of him and see him get at least part-way to resolving his issue. I also feel there was some lost potential to have him face/interact with Iscara more after what happened to him in the beginning. 

Aside from these minor quibbles the book was excellent and I'm planning to dive back into this world to see the mystery of Pallas through with these characters as soon as I get a chance. 

It's another excellent contender among the SPSFC Quarterfinalists that I will be reading as part of my judging for team Peripheral Prospectors. This review is only my own opinion on the book. The decision will be made on whether to move the book forward in the competition or not as a team once we've all read the books!