Customer Reviews

Beyond Those Distant Stars

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"Beyond Those Distant Stars" is science fiction that plays well to a female audience. The heroine, Stella McMasters is a cyborg. After an accident at a radiation facility, her remaining essence is transplanted into a mechanical body. Through a futuristic Affirmative Action program, Stella is promoted to commander of a spacecraft due to her synthetic status. Her robotic body is a source of extraordinary physical prowess, but it leaves her feeling inadequate around members of the opposite sex.

She immediately feels a strong physical desire for Jason, the ship's captain. While fulfilling his piloting duties, Jason's brain is temporarily removed from his body. Still, he develops a relationship with Stella through the ship's communication system. After seeing Jason's naked body in its suspended state, Stella indulges in several R-rated fantasies. Yet she feels Jason, upon returning to his body, will be repulsed by her infertile state.

Their love story plays against the backdrop of an intergalactic war. The enemy is led by a God-like entity called the All-Mother. After boarding an enemy vessel, Stella is drawn into a mind meld with one of the All-Mother's alien sons. She gains an innate knowledge on how to operate the foreign ship as well as a direct mental link with the All-Mother herself. These extraordinary abilities, along with her cyborg status, arouse the suspicions of her superiors. Her motives are questioned and her loyalty is suspect. Many believe she is a traitor.

Vice is running rampant throughout the empire. Humanity is ruled by a child emperor, who is being drugged by his supposed protector. Insubordination in the chain of command is a common occurrence. Few can be trusted to maintain order, let alone win the war. Enter Stella and her extraordinary claims. General Gage, a fellow female in a position of authority, is the commander of the Loran Base, where Stella takes the alien ship. Gage believes Stella's story and does everything in her power to help her arrive at a culminating one-on-one battle with the All-Mother.

Rosenman fills each page with a source of tension that unfurls the plot at a rapid pace. The reader feels at one with Stella as she single-handedly turns the tide of an entire war. Her feeling of otherness, brought about by her new body, allows her to establish a unique connection with the All-Mother. Her passion for Jason is put to the test and she must choose between her personal longings and the good of humanity.

Overall, Stella McMasters makes geek chic for a feminine audience.

Radiation Protection Supervisor Stella McMasters answers the meltdown siren thinking that the work crew knows a lot more than she does about reactors. Still the retired naval officer performs her job, but disaster strikes. Stella almost dies but is saved by an experimental merging of seventy percent synthetic material so that she is the first human-cyber Commander.

Physically she is back, greater than ever, with superhuman strength and reflexes, but mentally she doubts any man would cherish an individual more machine than woman. Stella has returned to her military roots with a mission to join up with General Loran in the fight against the Scaleys who turn humans into slaves to the All-Mother, a powerful essence that uses mind control and wants Stella. As Stella struggles to withstand the lure of the enemy she also feels feminine for the first time since the operations. She wants her pilot, but he may be mad from separating his essence from his body. Still even if it is just his voice she feels so much like a desired woman.

Though this may sound like a female Cyborg Cop in outer space, Stella insures that the tale is quite different. The tale plays out on two interlocking story lines. Fans of military science fiction will appreciate the survival war the humans are in against a powerful alien foe. That subplot serves more as a background for the audience to follow a wonderful protagonist trying to regain what she lost and to apply her new abilities. Her doubts on several levels as to being human female add a psychological underpinning to a strong cross species war BEYOND THOSE DISTANT STARS.

Harriet Klausner

Beyond Those Distant Stars
by John B. Rosenman
Mundania Press
978-1-59426-328-6/978-1-59426-329-3
Science Fiction
344 pages
Trade paperback/eBook


Stella McMasters is a retread, a retired naval officer who, thanks to a nuclear accident, has been turned into a cyborg and given a space command she thought she'd never attain. And her luck doesn't change. An unlikely encounter with the aliens who are threatening the human empire thrusts her onto the galactic stage in a big way. McMasters has to overcome all kinds of difficulties, both personal and professional, as she attempts to use newfound knowledge to save her species.

Beyond Those Distant Stars explores hate of that which is different in a science-fiction future. Not just hatred of aliens, but of the part-machine heroine, of families of perceived traitors and even of those of different castes. Published by Mundania Press, this book reminds me of the space operas of the 1940's and 1950's (which I grew up reading) and, specifically, of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Starship Troopers is a novel by one of science fiction's greats. It's a tale in which a recruit goes through the toughest boot camp imaginable and into battle against a terrifying and nonhuman enemy. I mention this book because John B. Rosenman is a true professional and deserves to be compared to Heinlein. His writing not only invokes memories of Heinlein, Rosenman also makes the unpopular choice (as did Heinlein and others, like Isaac Asimov) to insert a real message into his story. In fact, the message is open enough in the final pages of Beyond Those Distant Stars that the author will probably be criticized for it.

You're in good company, John.

Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye 2009