Dark Orbit does what good science fiction should do: it tells readers of a distant future in which we see our present.
Hugo and Nebula Award nominee Carolyn Ives Gilman (Ison of the Isles) opens her novel among the Twenty Planets on which humanity lives. Much of space has been explored and colonized, and people are faced with the struggle of finding work and room in their increasingly crowded and governed existence. When an old starship unexpectedly sends a beacon about a new habitable planet, people clamor to be part of the first contact team.
Sara Callicot did not think she would be a part of this group. As an exoethnologist, she negotiates between humans and native inhabitants; however, her fondness for subverting authority, disobeying rules and not doing paperwork (causing her last job to go horribly awry) has left her without the prospect of employment. When an old acquaintance offers her a place aboard the ship going to explore the new planet, she can't refuse the opportunity. While she is trained in making first contact with new populations and life forms, her role abroad the ship is to spy on one of the crew members, Thora Lassiter, an unpredictable woman from an influential family with ties to the trip.
Gilman's characters are delightfully imagined. The cultural wellspring from which Gilman drafts the future of humanity is deep and lush. She delves into thought-provoking speculative science one expects alongside philosophy as ancient as Plato's cave. Dark Orbit is a stimulating and absorbing story. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company