THE LUCKY STARMAN

Former soldier Leif Grettison returns from a deep-space mission to find Earth in a very different state than he left it in Alexander’s SF novel.

The author continues the chronicles of Leif Grettison, an American combat veteran who repeatedly finds himself at critical turning points in humanity’s future. In the exceptionally bleak opening of this installment in the Leif the Lucky series, Leif, now in a relationship with the fearsome and beautiful Yang Yong, a former enemy Chinese fighter pilot who once tried to kill him in battle, returns to our solar system after a 153-year absence, waking from interstellar hibernation with a small crew. But radio-wave chatter is ominously silent upon their approach to Earth. The worst-case scenario has come true: While Leif was away, total war—nuclear and cyber—erupted between the superpowers. Their planetside expedition party is whittled down through misadventure until only Leif is left, marooned in the American Midwest, now a snowy, hardscrabble collection of isolated farms and towns at a mid-19th-century level of development, where survivors dread and reject high technology. Leif’s fighting skills, marksmanship, and moral rectitude earn him an appointment as the area’s “starman,” effectively a frontier sheriff. He finds himself torn between the rough-hewn community that needs him and his impossible hopes of finding Yang Yong in the wastelands, dreading the seemingly inevitable outbreak of another devastating war. Much doomsday prepper/apocalyptic SF has gone down this path before, but followers of Alexander’s well-established characters and fans of his hard-hitting prose (“I wanted to line up all the sanctimonious, patriotic, and blind leaders who had foisted this evil on humanity and break each one of their necks. I wanted to give them weapons and see them try to stop me from killing them,” Leif laments in his characteristically bitter first-person narration) make this moody journey a stirring experience, and the final act, with its nods to the Civil War, should especially please readers of historical combat fiction.

A familiar post-apocalypse premise freshened by Alexander’s reluctant, ethical hero.