Book Review: Substrate Phantoms by Jessica Reisman
Mysterious doings on Termagenti station, and the story of a tortured survivor of an exploration gone wrong, both external and internal, are at the heart of Substrate Phantoms, a debut space opera novel from Jessica Reisman. Substrate Phantoms features a strong character-based focus for the novel, playing firmly in the more literary side of the genre as it explores a story of what only slowly and painstakingly is revealed to be one of a first contact with the Other. The novel primarily follows a pair of characters whose stories touch and eventually converge. Jhinsei was part of a tube team, one of the groups on Termangenti Station sent as troubleshooters for various systems on the complex and sometimes badly functioning orbital habitat. In the prologue of the novel, he and his team check out a problem in the station in an area near where a mysterious derelict spacecraft has long been stashed. Things went…bad on that mission, to the point where Jhinsei, the most junior member of the team, was the only survivor. Eighteen months later, now in a safer dead end job, the consequences of that expedition and what really happened to Jhinsei start to emerge. Jhinsei has started to hear and see things, including the voices of the dead members of his team. And other things have started to happen in his presence as well. These strange events around him bring Jhinsei and what happened to the attention of some very powerful people on the station. This will put Jhinsei on the run from those he cares about, and ultimately the station itself.
