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89 points, 4 ½ stars
Quote:

“Bless my odorous ass,” Rigel said. “That blue stuff isn’t rock. It appears to be the surface of a single, carbon-based multicellular organism.”
“Alive,” Faye whispered.

Review:
Starship Alchemon was a ton of fun. From beginning to end, I enjoyed myself. The story took time to play out, and even at the end I was surprised at what was going on. It is always more entertaining when I can't guess everything before it happens.

First off, the worldbuilding is well done. It took a little bit of time to put all the pieces together in the beginning, but that was okay. I was a bit worried about the list at the beginning of the book with all the various parts to the spaceship, but that turned out to mostly be a non-issue. Initialisms just aren't by forte and I'm glad I didn't have to keep going back and forth every time one came up. The elements of sci-fi that Hinz chose to include really worked well in the story.

There were also a lot of characters, and I liked them all. Each character had something about them that contributed to the story as a whole. Which is a lot easier to do when every one of the characters is stuck on the same spaceship traveling through space. It also helps when it is a small crew. Yet it was still really well done.

The characters:
- There is the strong psychic who is fighting off recurring nightmares, and may be tormenting the crew because of it.
- There is the captain who is in way over their head, but has to make the best of it if they're going to survive at all.
- There is the guy in charge of all the science experiments, who doesn't care about the fact they're in danger so long as they get to continue their experiments.
- Then, there is the guy who has started displaying signs of going crazy.
- Plus more very good characters who didn't have as much impact.

Plus there is the lifeform that they retrieved from the planet. They don't know what it is. They don't know what it is doing. They don't know how to stop it from doing what they know it is doing. They don't know how the thing is doing it. And it is terrifying. It is messing with the ship, the thing they need to live. They can't fight back. It seems to have a goal, and even a personality, but they cannot communicate. There is no outside help. Everyone seems to be affected by it. Everything about this mysterious lifeform is terrifying. There is just this sense of crushing doom that works very well.

This is a book where things go from bad to worse. I really enjoyed reading it. I'm a bit surprised that I couldn't work out the end before it came. I like being surprised in a good way. The buildup to the ending was incredible. It didn't feel like it came from nowhere, it was very organic. It drew from the facts presented from the very beginning to create one wonderful ending. The whole book reminded me of one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes, which I never, ever thought to see in a book, so this was even more astounding for it.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Christopher Hinz, Angry Robot, and Netgalley for providing the opportunity to review this copy. ( )