Blog Tour: Fearless – Allen Stroud*

AD 2118. Humanity has colonised the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa. Captain Elisa Shann commands Khidr, a search and rescue ship with a crew of twenty-five, tasked to assist the vast commercial freighters that supply the different solar system colonies.

Shann has no legs and has taken to life in zero-g partly as a result. She is a talented tactician who has a tendency to take too much on her own shoulders.

Now, while on a regular six-month patrol through the solar system, Khidr picks up a distress call from the freighter Hercules…

Allen Stroud is a lecturer at Coventry University, where he teaches BA (Hons) Media and Communications. Stroud completed a Ph. D. at the University of Winchester entitled An Investigation and Application of Writing Structures and World Development Techniques in Science Fiction and Fantasy. This thesis covered his work on the computer games, Elite Dangerous (2014) and Chaos Reborn (2016).

For Elite: Dangerous, Stroud wrote six guidebooks that inform the game’s fictional narrative and also served to help other writers with their novelisations set in the game world. He was a founding host of Lave Radio, an Elite: Dangerous fan podcast that started in February 2013 and runs the annual convention Lavecon. His novel set in the Elite: Dangerous game world, called Elite: Lave Revolution was successfully funded on Kickstarter and published in late 2014, with a second edition published in 2015. Stroud then supported Spidermind Games in developing the Elite Dangerous Roleplaying Game.

Stroud worked on Chaos Reborn with Snapshot Games and is working on Phoenix Point, due for release in 2019. Stroud was the 2017 and 2018 chair of Fantasycon, the annual convention of the British Fantasy Society, which hosts the British Fantasy Awards. In June 2019, he became Chair of the British Science Fiction Association, taking over from Donna Bond.

Stroud continues to write academic papers, reviews, articles and fiction in science fiction, fantasy and horror. He lives in a messy house with two cats and his partner, Karen.

My thoughts:

This was a good, enjoyable sci-fi, with lots of action and strong characters. I was behind Shann, the captain, from the start. She’s the central figure that the events revolve around, I also like Johannson, another key figure in the unfolding drama.

There’s battles, strange new tech, conspiracies abound and the crew have to scrabble to stay alive, fighting an unknown enemy without knowing why they’ve come under attack.

I’ve passed my copy onto the two sci-fi fans in my family (my husband and my dad) to read next. I think they will really enjoy it too.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.