Stellar Instinct by Jonathan Nevair – 5 Star Review

A secret agent. A gaming mastermind. Two players in a dangerous competition blurring the boundaries of entertainment and reality.

Jonathan reached out to me to offer an eARC of Stellar Instinct for review and I gladly accepted. Thanks again, Jonathan, for the opportunity to enjoy and review your work early! As always, my thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

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About the Book

Stellar Instinct
A Spy-fi Space Thriller
by Jonathan Nevair

Publishing 1 December 2022
Cantinool Books

Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Page Count: 341
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A secret agent. A gaming mastermind. Two players in a dangerous competition blurring the boundaries of entertainment and reality.

Mysterious signals pulse from an icy planet in a remote star system. GAM-OPs wants answers. Enter Lilline Renault, secret agent extraordinaire. To ordinary citizens she’s Keely Larkin, an adventure company guide with a flair for the daring and a penchant for writing trite poetry. Lilline’s at the top of the spy game, but publishing her literary work is proving harder than saving the galaxy.

When the mission uncovers a dastardly plan threatening billions of lives, Lilline leaps into action. Verses flow as she rockets through space, dons cunning disguises, and infiltrates enemy territory with an arsenal of secret gadgets. But to prevent the whims of a self-obsessed entrepreneur from turning the galaxy into a deadly playground means beating him at his own game. Lilline will need her best weapon to stand a fighting chance: her instinct.

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My Review

My Rating: 5 Stars
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Jonathan reached out to me to offer an eARC of Stellar Instinct for review and I gladly accepted. Thanks again, Jonathan, for the opportunity to enjoy and review your work early! As always, my thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

A lot of what I love about Stellar Instinct is what I loved about the Wind Tide books, and that’s the characters. This is a very character-driven book full of a large cast of diverse people, and we get to know each of them so intimately. Stellar Instinct is a high-stakes secret agent thriller plot in space and I think this book is going to stand out in a sea of secret agent stories and space opera adventures because of these very unique characters that really end up feeling like your neighbours and friends by the end.

Lilline is our protagonist. She’s a skilled secret agent with a lot of experience under her belt and a retired secret agent grandmother to visit and talk shop with. She’s a devout but misunderstood poet in her spare time and she seems to both hate and appreciates the irony that her critique group will never appreciate the personal experience she conceals in her poems because they don’t know who she really is or what she really does. She’s witty, clever, and genuinely caring, all character traits you’d expect from her flavour of protagonist, but she’s also a bit of a realist with a full scope of emotions and she definitely gives the impression that she lost her rose-coloured glasses on purpose.

I really enjoyed all of Lilline’s poetry. There are passages where she’s presenting to other poets for feedback, but more often than not the poetry comes by way of inner monologue as she crafts something in the moment. This seems to be her way of keeping a diary, but it also seems like she hopes that something she writes, some piece of art built on secret experience, will live on after her. Since poetry is such a defining characteristic for Lilline, and she’s our narrator, a lot of the rest of the book is loosely poetic as well. She thinks poetically, so the narrative is poetic. It’s different in this genre, it’s beautiful, and I want more!

Lilline’s granny Kissy is a perfect example of “I didn’t know I needed this in my life.” She’s sassy, she’s strong, she’s the tiniest bit Lwaxana Troi, and the staff at her retirement home are afraid of her (for good reason.) Also (formerly) a secret agent and also a lover of poetry, it would have been clear even without Lilline saying so that Kissy was the single most important influence in Lilline’s development as a person. She’s the sort of person who refuses to grow old, become helpless, or become irrelevant, and she’s about as “retired” as Edna Mode. Give her the slightest hint of action and she was back on the clock five minutes ago!

The plot does revolve around a futuristic gaming industry and because of that and the whole secret agent thing, I got a strong cyberpunk vibe while reading this book. That’s not to say that it mostly takes place inside some sort of simulation or that the “reality” settings are dystopian wastelands, but it feels like that’s where this universe is heading as the book starts. But on that note, let’s talk settings. As per usual, Nevair has painted us a universe full of unique, intriguing worlds, and I hope that there’s more to come in this universe so that I can explore it more. This book is very character-driven and very fast-paced so it doesn’t have time to take entire chapters to describe planets, but I wouldn’t want it to. We get enough, and what we do get is not only perfectly timed but also an absolute pleasure to read. I had no trouble at all picturing each setting, and every setting has its own charm and intrigue (or angst, or foreboding.) Setting covers more than locations, though, and this book is rich with other details that reminds us we’re not in Kansas anymore. There’s a lot of advanced technology throughout this book that straddles the line between logical progression of our own technology and “I suspect a hint of magic,” but none of it ever takes over and becomes a character in its own right like in some hard sci-fi plots. This universe is full of much more advanced tech than what we have, and it drives the plot to some extent, but this is still a book about the people using it.

Something else I loved about the Wind Tide books that Nevair has carried on here in Stellar Instinct is specifically gender and orientation diversity. There are characters in this book using neutral pronouns, for example, and not only is it completely natural and normal for the other characters interacting with those characters, but there an impression that some of these characters may come from worlds and cultures where he/him and she/her pronoun users would be in the minority, if they exist at all. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s so refreshing to see science fiction writers treating this type of diversity as just a fact of life and not the thing that makes those characters “alien.”

There are a few short chapters throughout this book that switch from Lilline’s first person narrative to a second person point of view. Second person is a difficult POV to write well and even when it’s done well, it’s not everybody’s favourite thing to read. Personally, I liked it, it added so much mystery to the book, but I can certainly see some readers having different feelings about it. It is jarring (I think it’s supposed to be) and it’s not immediately clear why we’re getting these very different chunks of storytelling. I wasn’t sure if this was past, present, or future to the timeline of Lilline’s narrative for most of the book (it does eventually become clear) and I wasn’t sure which character “You” was meant to be. For me, as I said, that added the perfect element of mystery. I had a starting theory, I was wrong, and that’s great! For readers who are otherwise invested in the book but don’t like these second person bits and are tempted to skip them, I would urge you to read them anyway. They seem separate from the plot at first, but this other POV does become vital later on, and if you’re skipping these parts not only will you miss the point where it all comes together but you won’t have the tidbits dropped in the previous second person passages that add up to that point. Some parts of this book actually reminded me of Paolini’s “To Sleep in a Sea of Stars” in that it gave me the same complex feelings as a reader while the characters brushed up against similar thematic elements from time to time, and a lot of that comes from what’s revealed in the second person POV segments.

If you are new to Jonathan’s works or to the genre in general, Stellar Instinct is definitely a good place to start. This is a new universe and cast, there are no previous books to catch up on, and being so character-driven it is a very accessible point of entry to the genre. As I mentioned before, tech is a plot driver but it isn’t a main character. It gave me the vibes of something so niche as cyberpunk, but the world feels like a precursor to a cyberpunk setting. For as much as this is a science fiction novel, it’s also very much a secret agent thriller. This book is going to be equally enjoyable by someone who has absorbed Star Trek into their personality as it is by someone who would rather watch The Kingsmen.

About the Author

Jonathan Nevair is a science fiction writer and, as Dr. Jonathan Wallis, an art historian and Professor of Art History at Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia. After two decades of academic teaching and publishing, he finally got up the nerve to write fiction. Jonathan grew up on Long Island, NY but now resides in southeast Pennsylvania with his wife and rambunctious mountain feist, Cricket.

You can find him online at https://www.jonathannevair.com and on twitter at @JNevair.

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