Review: Get Lost: The Polyanna Cycle Begins (Get Lost Saga Book 4), by Noah Chinn
Review: Get Lost: The Polyanna Cycle Begins (Get Lost Saga Book 4), by Noah Chinn
Get Lost
Noah Chinn
ISBN 9781990411311
341 pages
Release: January 2, 2027
Publisher: Noah Chinn Books
Noah continues his highly readable Get Lost Saga with a new cycle which raises some interesting questions about AI cloning, and iterations of a personality. He manages to do all that while carrying a rocketing (pardon the pun) good tale.
Who is Noah Chinn?
From Noah’s official bio: He bicycled across Canada to ask people about the future, moved to Japan to live in the future, moved to England to start a future with his wife, then back to Canada to write about the future. Because the future is always worth fighting for.
His Get Lost Saga has been called "the far-future Hopepunk series for our times" by The Ottawa Review of Books, and is a refreshing blend of classic and modern science fiction, balancing drama and humour to create stories that are both comforting and challenging. Amazing Stories describes the series as "an old-fashioned space opera... but also so full of original touches, cynical humour and quirky detail that everything feels fresh and original. The best of both worlds."
He, his wife, and their pet ferret now live in Vancouver.
He wears a hat.
The marketing blurb:
Ambushed, abandoned, and left for dead, Helena Lambinon is lucky to be alive. But that's about the only thing Hel has going for her. She has no ship, no credits, and no one she can trust.
Her partner, Violet, is lost somewhere in the black. To find her, Hel needs a ship. One with a captain she can get close to and nudge in the right direction. One that intends to visit the kind of out-of-the-way places Violet might hide in, like the hundreds of red dwarf systems in the region.
Dova Gevared has a whole ship, half a crew, and no clue about reality. In a galaxy that sees everything in shades of grey, Dova goes out of her way to wear white.
Everyone sees her as naïve, but just because Dova has big plans for the future doesn't mean she can't be practical about her first mission—to survey the local secondary star systems that have been ignored for centuries. She just needs one or two more people on her crew.
When Hel learns the unusually named Polyanna is hiring, part of her thinks the job is exactly what she's looking for. And part of her is afraid its captain will get everyone killed in all the wrong ways, for all the right reasons.
A remarkable talent for storytelling
Noah is one of those writers capable building a believable universe that engages a reader, particularly a reader steeped in the traditions of Firefly and Star Trek. There are moral imperatives and dilemmas, written with a deft hand that refrains from the heavy stroke. There are vivid characters and sidekicks, my favourite being the petbot ferret known as Trouble, who offers comic relief when the story might otherwise become too cumbersome with weight.
The captain is in over her head, a naïve rich kid off to explore the universe and live out her video dreams. Hel, who we know from previous Get Lost novels, and now in the position of First Mate aboard the Polyanna, finds herself deeper and deeper in the role of mentor while trying to find the original lost, and possibly endangered, Violet, a biological consciousness integrated into a crashed ship. Throw into the mix a small but weird crew, a planet which might have the wreckage Violet’s ship, and a political oligarch bent on doing what oligarchs do: own and control everything.
Get Lost is a welcome reading relief in our real world of increasing uncertainty, and post-apocalyptic novels heavy with dire warnings. Honestly, if you want to escape for a few hours, I highly recommend picking up this next instalment of the Lost Saga series. You won’t be disappointed.
Where to Find Noah Chinn
Noah can be found through many of the socials, and primarily through his website. It's worth a visit there to see all the amazing, weird, and wonderful things with which he's engaged.