Captain Wu’s the name. Smuggling’s her game.
To be fair, they only started shooting after she started insulting them.
She was just about to hand off the package—Wu didn’t know what was inside, and she didn’t want to—when three tentacle-faced strangers attacked.
Wu loves a good fight and lives for a good heist. The Captain and her crew make their living taking undercover assignments from questionable clients… and it pays. Or at least, it used to. But this time the merchandise is a little too hot to handle. So, when the squid-shaped xenos show up and destroy the guys who are there to receive it, Wu is barely able to make it back to her ship alive. Soon the Nameless is racing around the galaxy with not only the powerful Commonwealth on its tail, but another dangerous creature bent on revenge.
And then an unexpected visitor arrives, putting Wu and her crew in the position of taking care of some very precious cargo. Is it time for the Captain to give up criming and retire to a sedate life more suitable for a woman of her age?
Not a chance.
Captain Wu is the definition of a fun sci-fi space romp. It has a ragtag bunch of space smugglers, sailing around the galaxy in a weird little falling apart ship called Nameless, and of course they are on the run from multiple people due to stumbling upon some cargo they probably shouldn’t have messed with. Does this make the book boring or predictable? Not at all!
While the story does tick a lot of sci-fi trope boxes, its characters are a breath of fresh air in the endless vacuum of space. The main character is Captain Wu, a middle-aged Chinese woman, who is definitely getting to old for this sh*t. Her pilot is a plump young woman with a lot of common sense, awesome steering abilities, and an addiction to psychedelic cheese. Her name is Rev, well that’s what everyone calls her.
“The name everyone called her—Rev—was short for her full legal name, which was an eight-line quotation from Shakespeare that ended with ‘In nightly revels and new jollity.’ She’d picked it out herself.”
There is also Gillum, the large bald mechanic, and rounding out the crew is Six, a nonbinary alien who lives in the ship’s vents and walls and has a very non-human outlook on life.
“Their bodies were covered in a thick red-gold fur…Their eyes were large and perfectly black, and arranged in two sets, with a smaller pair above and slightly behind the main pair…Six’s voice was quiet and whispering, as well as oddly flat, without any real intonation in the way they pronounced their words. It made interpreting their meaning tricky for a human.”
Watching the Nameless’s crew get out of one scrape after another is a ton of fun. And the story has enough twists to make it interesting. If you are a fan of science fiction smugglers, like the crew of Firefly, you should definitely check this out!
Congratulations Patrice Fitzgerald and Jack Lyster for making the semi-final list!
Our official SPSFC score is 8.2/10, but for our site review we are rounding to 8/10. For more information on the SPSFC you can check out the official website and follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
JC Kang