Ren Hutchings - Under Fortunate Stars

Ren Hutchings first novel Under Fortunate Stars has a fascinating premise. A state of the art spacecraft, owned by a bureaucratic galaxy wide corporation, on a diplomatic mission is sucked into a rift in space and finds itself out of touch with the rest of humanity. They quickly encounter another, much older spacecraft, crewed by a ragtag bunch of misfits from the past. These humans turn out to be the founders, the people whose intervention saved humanity by ending a devastating alien war. 

The presence of both craft in this space rift is inexplicable, and it becomes clear that unless the two ships return to their own times, history will be altered and the future may be completely changed as the war will not stop. 

Its a clever premise, but unfortunately it is undone by an overlong and too complicated story. Hidden in Under Fortunate Stars is a great novel, and a good editor should have cut a hundred pages to bring the story out. Instead we are given far too much exposition, background history and overlong technobabble. It makes the book to slow and boring and does nothing to fill out the characters. Unfortunately most of the main characters are one dimensional with people introduced then forgotten. I was left wondering what had happened to some of the main people on the historic ship that had jumped forward - they seem to play no role other than to make up numbers. The author lets the story unfold by telling the characters back story with chapters devoted to their own history. But the time jumping gets confused with the timetravel and its a little messy in places.

This is an ok novel that should have been great, so I find it hard to recommend.