Just Add Water by John Dodd

I would like to thank the author for an advance copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Publisher – Luna Press Publishing

Published – 20/2

Price –£6.99 on offer paperback at publisher’s site and £3.79 Kindle eBook

Humanity has reached out to the stars, an exodus of dehydrated packets waiting to be sent down to any habitable planet with water on it, to start life anew. They are watched over by an AI, programmed to find them safe haven..

Chief Engineer Mara Loganova is reconstituted early to repair a fault the AI can't fix, only to find the ship engaged in a war against a populated world, using weapons it didn't leave Earth with. 

With the AI breaking all of its programmed rules, it becomes frighteningly clear what the ship's new purpose is, and the true battle for the future begins... 

We’ve all that that terrible feeling of waking up and getting into work and finding out that all hell has broken loose. It may be office politics, IT systems or that suddenly everyone in the office must work from home for a while – it often feels like the end of the world but in John Dodd’s Just Add Water we get an entertaining puzzle-box of a story using that feeling of sinking dread to really underline that the end of the world(s) is happening under the characters’ feet.

The Just Add Water fleet is a simple way to escape an Earth that was on its last legs with war and environmental disasters. Colonists were taken on a vast hi-tech spaceship and then effectively reduced to just component pieces as water was removed. This makes it a lot easier to travel at high speed to other planets for colonisation. When they finally reach their destination then everyone will be restored for a new adventure. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong and AL the ship’s AI has unlocked a Chief Engineer Mara Loganova for assistance on repairs. Mara though is shocked to see that the planet the ship is approaching is undergoing nuclear war and then horrified to discover that the war is being initiated by AL and the ship’s army of drones. With AL claiming everything is in line with mysterious rules that Mara has never heard of Mara has to work out how she alone can get to the bottom of what is going on.

Just Add Water is a tantalising well crafted science fiction mystery. It plunges Mara and the reader into both chaos and uncertainty from the first chapter and we both have to explore what is going on at the same time. Dodd does a great job of carefully dishing out information on the world and the characters that we meet yet avoids too many lengthy exposition scenes to keep the pace up in this novella. The central idea of what could make a colony ship go so wrong is intriguing and to add this we have a lot of tension between the curious humans that get awaken and their weaponised AL. Its human versus machine all alone on a spaceship where most people are just dust.

In Mara we have both our central character and narrator explaining what is going on, which makes us never feel that we are too many steps behind Mara finding out what is going on. I was very happy to have a competent engineer as the lead who is calmly appraising the situation and trying to fix it. The explanation for all these and the depth of what is going on is staggering and yet the reason is very much human pettiness. The finale is very very well delivered and then just in the time-honoured tradition of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits we get a further challenge to resolve and a moral question that lifts the story out of just a pure mystery and into a rather unsettling question of what would you do instead?

A really impressive novella that fans of science fiction stories that enjoy puzzles, morality and action should really enjoy. I was very impressed with the delivery of this story, its worldbuilding concept and that it took me in some unexpected directions. John Dodd I will be looking out for in the future. Well worth a look.