Gareth Powell’s Jitterbug takes Powell’s talents for Space Opera and sets them into a Baxterian-like story of Big Dumb Objects, a starship crew, and the fate of humanity.  The fate of humanity and the universe is nothing new for Gareth Powell. He’s written plenty of large scale science fiction, be it Future’s Edge, with a destroyed Earth and alien artifacts, or Stars and Bones, with humanity on arks, or the Embers of Wars novels, full of Big Dumb Objects. But always, going back earlier to his Ack-Ack Macaque novels, it’s in the end about the characters, not all of them human, that really is the center of the story. In Jitterbug, however, Powell keeps his character focused style of novel and story, and enlarges the outside scale even more this time.