Publisher's Weekly Review
Alayna Wong-Grant, lone astrophysicist at a telescopic array on the dark side of the Moon, spots an object moving in a cometary orbit but with unnatural properties, including high reflectivity and traces of silver. Capt. Chris Tavoian, a Moon-based military pilot and Alayna's pen pal, volunteers for a hazardous mission to pilot a short-range spacecraft to the object. The object initially gets the unlikely official classification of asteroid, but as it gets closer to the sun-and speeds up, hence being named Solar Express-Alayna and Chris realize it is something much stranger. They need to join forces to figure out its secrets and keep Chris alive on his mission. Modesitt, better known for his epic fantasy (the Saga of Recluce), approaches the story slowly and methodically, revealing only tiny pieces at a time. The Solar Express itself is less interesting than Alayna and Chris's letters to each other and their back-and-forth over the object, but there's sufficient mystery and plenty of solid science. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Prolific author Modesitt returns to science fiction with a tale of space exploration. On a version of Earth about a century from now, Dr. Alayna Wong-Grant, a researcher at a remote radio telescope site, discerns a distant object in the sky. Although she initially believes it to be a comet, as it approaches, she finds it's a massive asteroid, made of nickel and iron. On Earth, resources have dwindled to nearly nothing, and nations jostle for their share of what remains. Capturing and refining this asteroid would ensure the dominance of whoever reaches it first, and the North American Union selects Capt. Christopher Tavoian, Alayna's friend, for a solo space mission. But as the asteroid races toward our sun, Alayna discovers it's no naturally occurring phenomenonwhatever's coming was definitely created by someone, somewhere. Much of the novel unfolds in an almost epistolary style, relaying messages between Alayna on the ground and Tavoian in space, while the alien artifact draws ever closer and begins to affect life on Earth in unexpected ways. Even by the standards of hard science-fiction novels, which cherish the technical aspects of their worlds, every page of this book is heaving with needless details. From the opening paragraph, which recounts a radio telescope's full capabilities as well as its construction history, to the uninspired and unneeded epilogue, nothing about the world or how it works has been left to the reader's imagination. Even the spaces between chapters are taken over with fabricated news articles which impede the flow of the story far more than they add to it. For all the realistic detail, the people come across as inauthentic, barely human. Despite subplots centering on their families, characters' inner thoughts go largely unexplored, leaving them to express feelings through a baffling semaphore of facial expressions, such as "she smiled wryly, but fondly" or "she frowned for a moment, then smiled, if ironically." For fans only. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.