English language
Published Sept. 7, 2017 by Orion Publishing Group, Limited.
A vast conflict, one that has encompassed hundreds of worlds and solar systems, appears to be finally at an end. A conscripted soldier is beginning to consider her life after the war and the family she has left behind. But for Scur and for humanity peace is not to be. On the brink of the ceasefire, Scur is captured by a renegade war criminal, and left for dead in the ruins of a bunker. She revives aboard a prisoner transport vessel. Something has gone terribly wrong with the ship. Passengers, combatants from both sides of the war, are waking up from hibernation far too soon. Their memories, embedded in bullets, are the only links to a world which is no longer recognizable. And Scur will be reacquainted with her old enemy, but with much higher stakes than just her own life.
Slow Bullets messed with me. The idea of involuntarily being thrust a thousand years into the future above a lost world, realizing that everyone I knew was long lost, that everything I knew was slowly being lost, was unsettling. This book kept me awake at night, contemplating what it meant to be alive but with everything I knew and understood to be lost.
This was a fun, fast read, but also a little underwhelming. Employing some unique, fresh ideas, with little cruft, this story held my attention as I barreled through it. But it also felt more like a novella than a novel, more like an appetizer than a main course. I wanted to know more than I was told ... or if the intent was to present a sort of meditation on grief, letting go, the value of memory and the choices we make -- then I would have liked some meatier writing, meditation, whatever, on these themes.
