"Escape Velocity" by Victor Manibo is part murder mystery, part dystopian sci-fi. At a school reunion on a luxury space station, an old group of friends meets up after many years. They are overshadowed by their past. Ava has discovered some information about her friends that makes her wonder if they were responsible for her abusive twin brother's murder years ago. A side plot about who will be allowed to live on Mars now that Earth is becoming uninhabitable according to "MERIT" points adds more tension, along with crew members plotting revenge. An intriguing sci-fi mystery. Worth purchasing for your library if your sci-fi or dystopian fiction is popular.

What a ride!! So different from what I expected walking into it. Loved the dynamic characters and their relationships. Enjoyed the atmosphere. Pulling a whole star because the story didn't pick up till after 60%-ish and I was starting to get bored before the plottwist happend.

The world-building in this book is so accomplished, that it could have been a wonderful escapist sci-fi novel. Knives Out in space sounded just like the type of fun I love. The problem is that it had to have a “Message” (with a capital M), and that drained all my enjoyment of the story. The passages describing the Space Habitat Altaire in all its decadent glory, the future world in which it’s set, with its culture and society, were fascinating. The points system that allows humans to move to Mars and the technology that makes everything possible, were very creative and well thought out. The characters, though, were all unlikable. There wasn’t a single one of them that I could root for, neither the ultra-rich spoiled jerks nor “the help” who caters to them. This made the resolution of a cold murder not very interesting, as I was not invested in the victim, the suspects or the culprit. Then, there was the second part of the story, which had to be a grandstanding political statement that made me lose all interest. The author goes out of his way to make the cast as woke as possible and there isn’t a single box he doesn’t tick, which feels forced. Then, that ending just let me down. Maybe readers who enjoy progressive political engagement with their fiction will like it better, but as someone who just wants to be entertained, it didn’t work for me.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#Kensington Books | Erewhon Books.

3.5 stars.... We're getting to the end of the 21st century, and as predicted, humans have made Earth almost inhabitable, with the brunt of the impact felt by poorer (mostly Equatorial) nations. The 1% hang out in luxury space station resorts while being waited on hand and foot by the working class. Long story short: capitalism is evil (not arguing that fact). BUT!! Capitalists are also our saviors because they've built a new colony on Mars! The caveat: you have to earn MERIT points to get to go to Mars. What gives you MERIT points? You guessed it - being rich, smart, educated, straight (gotta populate the new world), having the right job and experiences, etc. So capitalists have created the problem and are fixing it, but only for themselves. This is not a thinly veiled allegory here, folks.

So what's not to like? Well, there is a second plot that seems superfluous other than to provide some (but enough) backstory for the main characters. I'm not sure who we are supposed to root for, which perhaps is the author's intention. I think there was an attempt to humanize the MCs (all 1%ers), but it didn't work. So I guess overall, love the theme, not crazy about (but didn't NOT like) the execution.

I am a little obsessed with space novels right now. Manibo spices his speculative fiction with a mystery, class war, and several other social justice issues. I’ve read that this book is being compared to the Titanic’s tragic tale— very upstairs vs downstairs groups of people with the “indigent servants” from all over the world staff manning the luxury space ship versus the elite high school class reunion.

The murder mystery from their senior year and the mystery of the man floating around space in the first chapter sort of collide by the end of the novel in about abrupt way. I feel like that could have been finessed a little better.

Additionally, besides the crew members trying to get back to their families… why would they want to go back to the burn planet of Earth? I wish Manibo would have explained or written more about the “uprising” on Earth as a carrot to get back to and fight to the death to defend. Shrug. Just a thought!

I enjoyed the action and enjoyed it to the end. I can totally see this being turned into a movie!

Hitting shelves May 21st!
Thank you NetGalley and Erewhon Books for this #arc

A twist on rich people behaving badly, this is set during a high-brow school reunion on….a suborbital resort in space. The elite alumni meet to wheel and deal, indulge in their many vices, and dig up dirt on each other. This started out a solid four stars but about half way through it seemed to somewhat dissolve and the characters and story feel apart. Thanks to NetGalley for a chance to read and review this book!

This was an interesting one- not something I’ve read anything like before! A bit like Glass onion/The Menu but in space and even more morally ambiguous.
- I did enjoy the fact that all of the characters just got more and more terrible the further it continued. But they were never caricatures and everyone had their own motivation, which I liked even if it was a little hard to engage with the story sometimes because they were all *that* terrible.
- the future world presented is very bleak, but feels frighteningly possible! I felt that the worldbuilding was well done.
- I did struggle to connect to the story throughout most of the first half in particular. A lot of it was set up and it felt a little bit directionless at times- perhaps some of the reveals could have been done a bit earlier so there was a bit more substance rather than saving it all for an avalanche at the end? I did enjoy the ambiguity of the ending, but it was a little bit rushed. The author tried to do a lot here and it was generally handled well, but not all of it landed.
- I don’t really like rating books, but I’ll give it 3.5/5 stars and round it up. I’m certainly glad I picked it up as it was a nice change of pace from what I normally read, but I think the tagline of knives out/parasite in space was a bit misleading as this was not that! It had its flaws but I’ll look out for whatever else Manibo does in the future!

There was a lot to like about this book. Luxury space ship for privileged class, a mystery thread and plotting on board ship. The context was interesting in how political decisions were made as to who escaped dying Earth. The novel lost my interest in the middle and had some action at the end. I am not sure I connected with the characters. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

This was a fun mixture of sci-fi, locked room mystery and speculative fiction!
Four friends get caught up in a decades old murder when they attend a reunion on the Altaire, a luxury space resort. All four have separate motivations for attending the reunion, but they're all trying to accumulate points that will make it more likely that they will get to inhabit Mars in the near future. As they butt heads with each other, something else is brewing on the ship that they aren't aware of, and as everything comes to a head, you will be glued to the finale pages!

Ultra lux space resort, unsolved murder mystery from 20 years ago, a bunch of uber-priviliged one-percenters who ruled the world (and the people). What should have been a reunion weekend full with debauchery and excess turned out to be something unexpected. I was looking for a fast-paced reading with a cinematic feel and hoo boy this book popped up at the right moment. The nearly-destroyed Earth with its natural disasters due to climate change impacts presented a grim background, with different impact to different classes. The commentary on socioeconomic class and racism might feel too on the nose for some, but I appreciate the inclusion. This is the first time I read a full-length novel by a Filipino writer, which is cool and I need to check out many more.

Found the novel to be an interesting concept, focusing on a group of 4 old friends reuniting at a fancy space hotel for a school reunion. There seemed to be a lot of plot lines that didn't really mesh and I felt that I was jumping around loads without getting the chance to become invested in the characters. This is especially prevalent on the worker uprising story which became the most prominent in the finale. I did enjoy some of the worldbuilding and the commentary on class and colonization. I was a fan of Victor Manibo's debut novel, but found this one to be less enjoyable.

The Altaire is a suborbital resort that caters to the richest of the rich. Every year they host reunions for the alumni of the Rochford, a boarding school that is also reserved only for the scions of the most elite families on Earth. A group of these alumni gather for their 25th class reunion, but overshadowing the gathering is the memory of a student that was found murdered senior year. His sister Ava is determined to use this opportunity to discover what happened, and who really killed him. The other guests are all obsessed with racking up points so they can be approved for Mars resettlement, and meanwhile the staff of the hotel have their own plans.

I expected to love this story, and it has all the elements I love – scifi floating hotel, super diverse cast, class tensions. Sadly it didn’t deliver. I can tell the author has some great ideas and put a lot of work into this, but it needed a lot more polish. In several places the writing itself was clunky and switched between tenses in a way that pulled me out of the story in confusion. For instance, “the reason that the arrangement worked, and will continue to work, was because Sloane knew Julian.”

Despite the very big stakes, I didn’t feel much tension. We’re clearly supposed to sympathize with the staff, and yet we spend much more story time with the guests and seeing their backstories. I felt like I didn’t really know the staff; their sole personality traits were that they were poor, overworked, and resentful. We only really got a tiny bit of story on one of them, and if we’re supposed to root for them, we need more. In the end, the murder mystery part seemed irrelevant and like just a misdirection.

The ending was also really unsatisfying. I completely understand the motivations, but… what happens next? There’s no way that kind of thing would be successful on a global scale. You’d need way more. Also, the idea that this was organized and pulled off in five places, so easily with almost no hiccups is unbelievable. Also there was a moment we saw a defense satellite shoot missiles… but where? Why? There are several plot threads that are just dropped, no explanation.

At the end of the book, it feels like there was zero character development. Even the ostensibly good guys did bad things, with no resolution or payoff. We saw no outcomes, no change, no consequences.

I agree with the message I think the book is trying to convey, and I think the author has potential. I think they just need more polish or better editing to pull it all together, to show this story off to its very best.

Escape Velocity releases on May 21, and thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for an advance digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

I loved The Sleepless so it was no surprise I vibed here too. Closed room mysteries and class warfare combine to be a potent mix, and the pacing is great. I loved the melding of plotlines and timelines, and the writing style really serves the pace of the story.

You get what you deserve. At least at the high end resort in the sky. But not everyone agrees. Very different take on future Earth. Read to see what that means.

Thank you Erewhon Books for the eARC via NetGalley.

Escape Velocity has all the vibes of a conspiracy-among-the-wealthy-elite set in a slick science fiction future that seriously considers the ramifications of off-planet colonization where on-planet resource extraction has seemingly fully won. In the unimaginably luxurious reunion party of a one-percent-of-the-one-percent graduating class, the attendees each have their own reasons beyond mere celebration. At the same time, the staff have their own machinations at play. This complex narrative weaves well-fleshed characters into a spectacular ending.

The pace of the story is quick and compelling. It's easy to feel sympathy for each of the unimaginably wealthy attendees, as they justify to themselves their own wealth and happenstance. There is a pressure of needing to go to Mars for each attendee, vying for limited spots in accordance to a MERIT score which, of course, had always been designed to be biased towards them. The novel takes great care to undermine the narrative of each of the wealthy's achievements being attributable to their inherent superiority-- for every ridiculously accomplished executive or director or heiress, there is an equally skilled, intelligent, conspiratorial staff member assigned to them. This contrast gives added depth in that not only are we exploring the vying for hierarchy but also exploring how such hierarchies are artificially constructed.

I didn't find this to be the sort of story where you really "root for" anyone, except for maybe Ava, an elite woman whose abusive brother was found murdered in their childhood and where a lower-class girl took the blame officially-- unofficially, rumors have always been spread it was Ava. Other compelling characters include Laz, a Filipino graduate who awkwardly tries to bond with the other Filipinos on staff and Sloane, who lives a presentation of high-class precariously after multiple family members had been sent to prison for fraud in his youth. In truth, each wealthy elite character is masterfully used to display all of the various intrigues that makes the rich and famous such celebrities to gossip over in real life. There is scandalous sex, murder, political games, all of it is here in one neat package.

But make no mistake, the staff will come with the bill eventually. And what a bill has been racked up.

First of all, thanks to Netgalley and Kensington Books for an eARC of Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo. I appreciated the novel's unique mix of mystery, thriller, and sci-fi with a social and class critique thrown in. The highly intriguing world and overall message made up for some of the characters and plot lagging towards the end. I will definitely be on the lookout for what the author does next.

It was an interesting book. The plot was quite unique, and I did very much enjoy the mix between thriller and science-fiction. I loved Ava’s character, she brought something to the story that I really appreciated. However, the other characters were a bit odd for me, especially Sloane that I hated. And the book was weirdly sexual, I did not vibe with that.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for a honest review.

This was a great setup with an intriguing setting and mystery. However, the characters grew less likable as the story went on, and on the end I wasn't rooting for anyone. The ending was a disappointment.

before i give a review, i would like to thank netgalley and the publisher erewhon books for providing me an advanced copy.
now onto the actual review..
i love how genre defying this was, with a queer normative place that's outside our galaxy. the first half was an amazing science fiction story and the rest was a mystery. there should be more stories like this! i'm looking forward to see victor manibo's writing progress since he seems to be a somewhat debut author.
here are my complaints..
i thought the "star wars" reference when pio was introduced was totally awkward.. it made the story seem very modern that way. plus that whole bit about "why do we need that many" regarding how many people of color there were.

Earth is not doing well. The great hope for the future is colonizing Mars. Those with enough merit points will get to go - everyone has a chance or so the “haves” say. The reality is it a cut throat competition among the “haves” - others need not even try. Rochford Academy graduates are definitely”haves”. This story is set on a super luxury space station resort where a class of Rochford grads are celebrating their 25 year reunion. The grads have all gotten to interesting places in life but some have done better than others. Echos of old relationships, rivalries and hurts are still there. Ava is attending in hopes of discovering the truth about her broths death 25 years ago. While the grads are busy being self absorbed other things are happening - one really should notice the staff.
Thanks to NetGalley for an eGalley of this title.