I'm not an experienced reader of sci-fi, but I love Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak mystery series so when I stumbled across a free e-copy of Second Star I had to give it a try. You can download it free here: http://www.stabenow.com/e-books#star1 (I just checked today--12/4/2011--and it is still free, as are the first books in Stabenow's two mystery series which I highly recommend.)

Although I'm a great admirer of NASA and think we need to do more with space exploration, reading sci-fi tends to shut down my brain for some reason. Is it because I just don't know that much about space flight, the solar system, etc to know what's "real" and what's not? Could be. I'm also not a fan of magical realism so perhaps I just like my novels grounded in 'reality.' I do, curiously, like horror. Hmm. Anyway, I do want to explore the genre and intend to read more sci-fi in 2012.

I enjoyed the characters in Second Star and may eventually pick up the other two novels in the trilogy. There are definite similarities between some of the characters/ideas in Second Star and the Kate Shugak series, which I found appealing rather than distracting. The writing/flow of the novel is a bit uneven, but not enough to take away from the reading experience. This is, after all, Stabenow's first published novel and I do think it's a quality story. I may have just noticed some unevenness from being familiar with Stabenow's more recent, experienced writing.

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I bought this book because I'm going through withdrawal after having finished the twenty books in Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak series and because I was curious to see how Dana Stabenow, would handle Science Fiction.

On her website, Dana Stabenow says she wrote "Second Star"

"in response to the Challenger blowing up, a story about a space program that worked. Rage is a great motivator. "
The result is a book, in the tradition of Heinlein and Niven, that is in love with the dream of space exploration and believes that it can be brought about by courage, ingenuity, a strong will and an absolute refusal to accept bullshit.

"Second Star" follows Star Svendotter in the final weeks of her project to build a space habitat at Lagrange 5. Svendotter is an indomitable Alaskan woman who leads from the front and is willing to act as judge, jury and executioner when necessary. She is practical, demanding, manipulative when necessary, goal-focused and completely enthralled by getting the science to work. This is the opposite to the NASA management culture reported by the Rogers commission where Feynman concluded that

"For a successful technology reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
In other words, when management thinking goes up against physics, physics always wins. Star Svendotter embodies this idea and made me cheer her on.

"Second Star" is a good piece of science fiction that leans towards the hard science end of the genre and expects its readers to enjoy speculative science and to be familiar with Star Trek, Heinlein, and Asimov.

There are points in the story that suffer from just little too much info-dumping but it mostly flows along just fine. For a book that is now twenty five years old, it's pleasing to see that the ideas still feel relevant and current.

According to Dana Stabenow's website "Second Star" is available free as an ebook from the following places, so, if I've piqued your curiosity, you have to spend nothing but time and a little imagination to satisfy yourself

Second Star is now available as an absolutely free ebook! (Or as near to it as Amazon and B&N will let us get).

On Stabenow.com1, a FREE (and DRM-free) mobi and ePub
On Amazon2, for your Kindle.
On Barnes & Noble3, for your Nook.
On iTunes, for your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch. ( )

I listened for a little over an hour and just couldn't get into the book. Narrator Gavin sounds an awful lot like Kate Shugak and Stabenow's reference to Alaska is really evident: Chechako spacemen? So, I'll put the book away for awhile and maybe start the series again later. ( )

This is a good solid sci-fi read. There are lots of fun sections with descriptions of how things are and how the people act out in the space frontier building a habitat for humans. The usual life is enough in itself, but there are a couple of things going on in human relations, political intrigue, and more. Star is still alive at the end of it and I'll look for her in other books. ( )

I really wanted to like this book but I just couldn't. ( )