ZERO G

A boy on a future deep-space voyage awakens from suspended animation prematurely and becomes the only human able to take action when marauders invade the ship.

This middle-grade novel by prolific SF/thriller author Wells introduces readers to Su-Shu “Zero” Huang. He is the 12-year-old son of a prominent engineer who worked on the Pathfinder, a skyscraper-sized ship carrying earthlings intending to build a new civilization on a habitable planet 20 light-years away. Zero and his family are among the 20,000 voyagers in stasis for the 105-year journey at one-fifth light-speed to a distant star. But after only 28 days, Zero’s pod malfunctions and revives him—just as the Pathfinder is two days away from a perilous maneuver heading over the edge of the solar system. An adult pilot who should have been on duty is missing, so Zero finds himself completely alone except for Sancho, an artificial intelligence program that assists in maintaining the ship. Sancho tries to help Zero cope with the unexpected development but is limited by its incorporeal nature and machine logic. Then another vessel docks with the Pathfinder, and Zero deduces that he and his helpless fellow humans have become potential victims of space pirates. The audience may recognize the much imitated template of the movie Die Hard (or, if readers want to be literary about it, Roderick Thorp’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever, which inspired the Bruce Willis film), though a Home Alone parallel is equally apt. Antics in this series opener stay in the PG realm, and the plucky youngster uses improvised weapons and fancy moves against his enemies, who oscillate between the scary and the silly (a recurring panic by the bad guys—who really ought to know better—that their nemesis is really an alien definitely leans to the childish). A smattering of Asian names carries a multicultural flavor. Fans may find an echo here of the matriarch-dominated sky pirates from the classic Studio Ghibli cartoon Castle in the Sky. If things stay a little markedly in orbit around juvenile-level dialogue and situations (but no more than Robert Heinlein and Robert Silverberg did in their younger-skewing material), the action is still constant and fairly riveting. Sancho, smartly, is never allowed to become either a convenient, all-purpose solution to the hero’s dilemmas or an R2-D2 stand-in.

A somewhat derivative plot deftly gains altitude, atmosphere, and velocity via vibrant storytelling.