Katharine Kerr is one of the most versatile writers of speculative fiction. Although many readers know her best for her long-running “Deverry” fantasy series, she also writes superb urban fantasy and hard science fiction, with such works as Polar City Blues and Freeze Frames. Now she returns to a far future when interstellar civilization depends on travel through hyperspace stargate shunts. Kerr’s universe is richly detailed, enormous in scope of space and history, replete with ancient grudges between sapient races, current politics, and plots-within-plots. And a mystery: the shunts are supposed to be permanent, anchored at each end to nearby planets, but something—or some ONE—has accomplished the impossible and destroyed a shunt. Which vital route will be the next target?

We are drawn into the story through Dan, an immensely talented starship pilot capable of linking with a ship’s AI to navigate the shunts. Like other pilots, he uses the drug Haze to blunt his craving for the transcendent experience of hyperspace when he’s not working. But Haze is highly addictive, and Dan’s use of it has gotten him cashiered out of Fleet, destitute, and turning tricks on Nowhere Street on a backwater planet to feed his habit. When Fleet offers him a way back to his old job, under the care of his former lover, Devit, and enough Haze to keep him functional, Dan doesn’t have a choice. There’s a reason he’s refused treatment for Haze addiction, a secret he guards with his life. Disguised as merchant traders, he and his new crew begin investigating the disappearance of the shunt. And that’s when things start to go seriously wrong.

Kerr’s use of Dan as an initial viewpoint character who introduces us to this world is brilliant. He’s at turns fallible, aggravating, and heart-breakingly attractive. The offspring of a noted film beauty, he’s been genetically modified to be sexually irresistible to both men and women, and to unconsciously respond to their advances. Devit has been the only person in his life to care about him as a person, but at a terrible cost. In this society, both bisexuality and polyamory are widely accepted, but relationships like theirs are fraught with challenges. Anyone who’s ever loved a person with substance abuse issues knows how painful and impossibly difficult it can be. As Devit grows closer to legendary cyberjock Jorja, their problems and the choices both must face become more urgent.

As the mystery unfolds, with a nuanced pacing of plot reversals and surprises, layers of both human and alien cultures emerge. One of the more fascinating of these is the relationship—sometimes symbiotic, often sullenly adversarial—between human pilots or cyberjocks and the AIs that run ships, stations, archives, and more. Scholars find themselves at cross-purposes with the military that is supposed to protect them. Old feuds between species simmer just below the surface. The revelation at the end is highly satisfactory, meticulously plotted, and a fresh surprise.
It's hard to list the strengths of this remarkable novel because there are so many. They include exceptional world-building, social systems and relationships, hardware and AIs, and most of all, the characters. People find themselves trapped with no healthy way forward, like Dan and Devit. They try new strategies and alliances, not always successful. As they confront new situations or old ones come back to haunt them, they struggle to move beyond the past. Wounded, recovering, and scarred, their lives can never be the same. In other words, Kerr’s fully rounded characters change and grow in ways that drive the story forward.

Award-worthy and highly recommended for lovers of space science fiction.

Oof. While some of the worldbuilding in this novel was interesting (for example, how the pilots were able to fly), this will not be the feedback I hoped to give when I requested a free ARC from NetGalley to voluntarily review.

For starters, there were some serious editing issues, more than just the typos you might expect from an uncorrected proof; tenses switched back and forth between paragraphs, for example. That problem, though, paled in comparison to how poorly I felt this book handled subjects such as addiction, sex work, ableism, polyamory and queerness. The characters often felt interchangeable, and their emotions were difficult to read unless explicitly stated. This was only worsened by the constant unmarked POV changes, which made it difficult to track who was doing what.

A big miss for me, unfortunately; I’d hoped this was a book I’d be able to love.

An incredible adventure with broken characters and enough plot twist dribbled out slowly to keep you reading all night long! I was a bit hesitant when I started this book. Kerr has chosen a unique combination of third person, present tense and a sort of stream of consciousness flow between each character fluidly. It is a little disorienting at first because where most authors might use a chapter break to switch character points of view, Kerr often does it in a paragraph. The result, once you get used to it, is a constant flow of story momentum with no unnecessary breaks or pauses. I found myself enjoying this style more and more as I continued to read Haze.

The story itself is beautifully executed in a detailed, carefully built world. The world's take on relationships and sexuality was a refreshing change and it was intriguing to watch the way this interacted with the character relationships in the novel. As I said before, Haze is an incredible adventure with broken characters. A pilot very addicted to the book's namesake drug, Haze. A man in love with him for years desperately trying to rescue him while navigating the new feelings he develops for a new woman introduced to their crew. Artificial intelligences who've learned to bend the rules that bind them to the very limit. Haze is worth it just to watch all of these relationships and interactions take place. But Kerr also gives us a semi-dystopian hard sci-fi world where the possible shutdown of shunts, portals into an otherness that allow quick travel between systems, has suddenly become a very real possibility that threatens to isolate entire systems from the greater collective. The characters embark on a covert journey to unravel who or what is behind this threat. Unfortunately, it's not really possible to explain any further without risking spoilers.

Dan Brennan is – or was – one of the best pilots the Fleet has ever had. Alas, hugely unfair personal politics saw Dan booted out, and we join him living on the streets, heavily addicted to a drug called ‘haze’. Fortunately, we also join him at the point of some old friends needing an exceptional pilot, as they undertake a covert mission that may save the future of humankind’s space travel – and thus the species itself.

How to talk about this book? It’s so very messy, honestly. If it was by a new author, I’d be saying “decent debut – some good ideas – shows promise”. That it’s actually by someone with the reputation and back catalogue of Katharine Kerr leads to more of a “What the heck?!” kind of comment.

The story is very character-driven, so it’s unfortunate that we don’t seem to get to know the characters all that well. The narrative bounces between several in each chapter. Even allowing for the formatting issues (i.e. lack of section breaks) being only part of the ARC (advanced reader copy), it’s still a mental whirlwind slamming between different points of view every few paragraphs.

A great deal of the subplotting seems to revolve around romantic entanglements, but mostly these just felt very flat. In particular, Dan and Devit are meant to be hopelessly… well, in love might be over-egging it, but their interactions are mostly flat and non-emotional.

I do also think there is far, far too much effort to be as ‘inclusive’ as possible – not that I have a problem with that, but honestly, starting with a note that says “Please don’t assume the characters are white, the default won’t be” is (a) too much, and (b) really not working when the main character is held up for his amazing beauty, incomparable skills, etc etc – and repeatedly called out for being ‘Pale’. Just… no?

I’m not even going to touch the sexual politics. There is some… interesting (if, honestly, a little lazy and hugely poorly named)… worldbuilding around genetic tinkering in humanity’s past. The results are ‘throwbacks’ and ‘inbreds’ – what the heck?! o.O And, as a result, practically gifted superpowers. When it’s convenient.

Ooh: giant bugbear – the representation of the AI minds that were so naïve and just not convincing in the slightest, and regularly ‘squealed’ when threatened with deletion. Just, no.

I honestly can’t get past a lot of ‘ooof’ statements, and how messy this all felt. But, to end on a positive, I will say that the story kept me reading and it wasn’t a struggle, per se, to get through the book. I’m not sure there was a whole book’s worth of plot, but what was there was vaguely interesting. But mostly I’m just baffled that this came from the same pen as Deverry, and sadly feel it’s more damaging to an otherwise high reputation. Go read Snare instead.

⭐ 1 Star – ARC Review of Haze by Katharine Kerr

This is a book full of ambition, packed with intriguing sci-fi concepts that should have worked for me. Queer characters, polyamory, genetic engineering, space pilots navigating warp gates while euphoric on drugs—on paper, this sounded like something I’d love. Unfortunately, the execution made it a difficult and often frustrating read.

This review isn’t about bashing the author. It’s about helping readers with similar tastes make an informed decision—and maybe helping readers with different tastes discover something they might actually enjoy.

🧪 What Hooked Me (and What Didn't Deliver)
I was drawn to this story for its bold premise:

A bisexual protagonist grappling with addiction and sexual compulsion due to genetic modifications

A queer relationship between two emotionally complicated men

Polyamorous worldbuilding

Mysterious AIs, political conspiracies, and warp travel through "shunt" space

It sounded like the kind of messy, high-concept queer sci-fi I usually devour. But from the start, the writing style kept me at a distance. The third-person present-tense narration is emotionally flat, with minimal internal perspective. Dialogue stretches on for pages without attribution or tone, and characters frequently blur together due to similar voices and phrasing.

🌀 Structure & POV Challenges
This is a multi-POV book—but there are no scene breaks, chapter headings, or visual indicators when we shift between characters. In one chapter alone, I counted over a dozen POV transitions. Because the narrative voice remains emotionally neutral throughout, the story feels disjointed and impersonal. I constantly had to reread just to figure out who I was following.

💔 Relationship Disappointments & Queer Rep
The emotional core of the book is supposed to be the relationship between Dan and Devit—but it reads more like a logistical arrangement than a romance. There’s little chemistry, no real intimacy, and the narrative devotes far more erotic energy to heterosexual interactions. Despite a supposedly poly-normative society, nearly every hookup is followed by jealousy, miscommunication, or off-page drama.

It’s not that I expect perfect relationships—but I do want queer characters to be treated with the same emotional weight as anyone else. Instead, the only “happy” ending is given to a male/female pairing, while Dan—the messy, bisexual, emotionally unwell lead—is quietly pushed aside.

⚠️ Trigger Warnings (potentially distressing content):
Addiction & drug dependence (on-page use, central to plot)

Sexual coercion / dubious consent tied to genetic modification

Ablest depictions of autism (including eugenics-like breeding programs)

Slut shaming & internalized shame (directed toward queer MC)

Emotional manipulation in relationships

Infidelity / non-consensual polyamory (partners don't communicate or establish open boundaries)

Rape minimization ("It would be [rape] if the person asking was repellent or brutal")

Psychological trauma & emotional neglect

🔍 Tropes & Elements Included:
Bisexual Protagonist

Queer Sci-Fi

Found Family Vibes (mostly in concept)

Space Pilots + Drug Interface

Polyamory-Normative Society (in theory)

Genetic Engineering / Eugenics

Emotionally Messy Main Character

Queer Pain (with minimal payoff)

Lovers-to-Not-Quite-Enemies

Political Intrigue

Abandoned AIs

Tragic Gay → Straight Love Triangle

✅ What Did Work
The warp interface concept: Pilots using drugs to navigate wormholes is fascinating and original

The AI and interstellar conspiracy subplot had real potential

Kerr clearly had a complex world in mind—if you're a reader who thrives on dense lore and distant prose, this might work better for you

📚 Final Thoughts
Haze feels like a book trying very hard to be both edgy and inclusive—but falling short on both fronts. The structural choices—while bold—made the narrative hard to follow. The emotional distance made it hard to care. And the handling of addiction, consent, and neurodivergence made it hard to trust.

It’s absolutely possible that readers with different expectations or stylistic preferences may enjoy this more. But if you’re here for grounded queer emotion, healthy (or even intentionally messy-but-acknowledged) polyamory, or deep POV storytelling—this one may leave you cold.

DNF @ 40%

I was intrigued by the premise of this story but the writing just didn’t deliver.

It is meant to follow a pilot that got kicked out of the space fleet because he was an addict. He gets picked up by some of his old crew for a secret mission investigating why the ‘portals’, which link galaxies together, are shutting.

I say “is meant to” because the pilot is always drug addled so is maybe there for a page per chapter. He is meant to be the key to it all but I can’t work out how because he is never there.

The chapters in this book are looooooooong, with no rhyme or reason to why there is a break. No cliff hanger, no POV change, no topic change.

Talking of POV, this is a multi POV book, however, there is no break or chapter change to indicate we have changed POV which was very confusing.

All in all I wouldn’t recommend this as a read.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Highlights of this book include (but are not limited to):

Your genes make you slut
It’s not rape if your rapist is hot
Exploiting drug addicts for profit is cool
If you’re a messy person, your true love is better off with someone else
Happy endings are only for male/female pairings

This book wants to be more aware than it is. At the beginning the author asks us to envision her characters as having dark skin, unless otherwise stated, and many characters have various shades of skin … and that’s fine. It’s a little clunky, but fine. However, the rape joke didn’t work for me at all.

It turns out that Dan, due to and because of genetic tinkering in his past, is a whore. Generations ago, to curb violence upon ships, humanity tinkered with the genes of a certain group and made a group of people genetically predisposed to arousal and compliance; people who find it hard to say no because their bodies and hormones are almost always active. “Recreational Personnel.” It’s why Dan finds it hard to refuse when someone flirts with him, wants to fuck him. It’s in his genes. (Which … I really wasn’t fond of.) But when two members of his crew are discussing this, Davit, Dan’s lover and babysitter, says that’s pretty close to rape.

The doctor on the ship says: “It would be, yes, if the person asking was repellent or brutal.”

So it’s only rape if the rapist is ugly? Or causes pain? I’m sorry, but that’s disgusting. Sexual assault is still assault even if the person raping you is drop dead gorgeous; even if the person raping you uses kind words and doesn’t leave bruises behind. It’s gross, it tasteless. Dan is always either being shamed for having sex with people -- past or present -- or shamed for thinking about sex, or shamed for vaguely sexual comments. Honestly, it’s tiring, and it left me feeling very sour about this book.

Then there’s the fact that Dan’s addiction proves useful, which means that now every other pilot is going to be forced to be, encouraged to be, trained to be an addict. And this is seen as a good thing. After all, they’re saving lives! So what matter if they’re addicted; they’re doing their jobs! So what matter if their lives are hell. Hooray for drugs!

Then Devit, the man Dan loves, falls in love with a woman — Jorja — and accepts that, being a member of the Fleet, he and Dan can’t be together. Oh well. Devit gets the woman he loves and Dan hooks up with some other guy he’s fucked before — a guy Devit was upset at him for fucking — so it’s all good? Dan is heartbroken, but gets laid; David and Jorja (who hates Dan) get a happy ending,

POV shifts from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes, making it hard to know exactly which him, her, she or he is having this thought or that thought. The writing itself is competent, but the pace could be smoother. I never had a sense of the flow of the story because there was so much plotting going on, and almost no mention or indication of how the crew was taking things. There was no weight to anything and no importance. And, at times, it felt scattered.

Character A is having a moment in a place in this paragraph, but the paragraph right after has characters B and C in a conversation, and the following paragraph has character D talking with character E.None of this is helped by the fact that they all sound the same, talk with the same voice, use the same slang and have the same two dimensional feel to them.

There are, however, two parts of this book that I did like. One, the plot itself with Dan chasing down a mystical pilot who, like him, could see stargates while riding the light. Where this pilot was, what happened to him and the ships he was escorting, and how it all tied into current fanatics and xenophobic religious racists was well constructed. The second was the way Dan — and pilots like him — made ships fly. The connecting with AI, the euphoric feelings, the drugs that pilots became addicted to … it was well done and, in theory, interesting.

I just wish there’d been a single character who had any emotions, reactions, or personality. And less slut shaming, less punishment for being sexually active and gay.

2⭐️
Oof.

What initially drew me to this book was (a) a LGBTQIA+ (b) sci-fi novel that (c) deals with or touches on addiction.

I'm sad to say, this book may have them, but I was bored to tears about 25% of the way through.I think the idea had a lot of potential, but the execution was just flubbed from the start.

The narrative seems - and I use that purposefully - to center around Dan Brennan, a disgraced pilot dealing with his addiction to Haze. He's given an opportunity to redeem himself, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I had not the faintest idea what that "endeavor" was that he is hired for.

I liked the secondary characters and found them far more interesting than the protagonist, but when you're flitting back and forth between the POVs or focuses, it'd be nice if there was a separation or way to differentiate that you are moving from one character to the other.

Maybe because I'm not the biggest sci-fi reader a lot of the tehno-mumbo-jumbo just goes way over my head. I would have appreciated if there were a bit more relatabulity when describing how the technology works, what are these institutions repeatedly being mentioned, why are these systems in place, etc. Just some simple terminology would have helped at least give me a visual of what I was dealing with.

Also, the chapters were wayyyyy too long for my liking.

Sadly, I can't recommend this book to anyone. I just don't think the writing is there to back up what this story could have been.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this novel!

In Haze, Katharine Kerr—long celebrated for her immersive Deverry fantasy series—returns to science fiction with bracing urgency and emotional depth. Set three thousand years into the future, this character-driven space opera weaves together political intrigue, psychological trauma, and existential mystery against the backdrop of a multi-alien federation clinging to the failing infrastructure of hyperspace travel.

At the heart of the novel is Dan, a washed-up star pilot fighting a losing battle with addiction and his own fragmented past. Drafted back into service by a shadowy Fleet Special Ops unit, Dan becomes the linchpin in a mission that may determine the fate of interstellar civilization. His addiction to the titular drug, Haze, is not merely a plot device but a haunting metaphor for the fractures in both psyche and society. Kerr handles it not with glamor or gratuitous tragedy, but with grit and painful honesty.

The ensemble cast—a queer, racially diverse, and interspecies squad of misfits—is refreshing without feeling tokenistic. Kerr’s commitment to a post-patriarchal future, where bisexuality and polyamory are norms rather than novelties, adds emotional texture to relationships that, in lesser hands, might feel one-dimensional.

Stylistically, Haze blends the meticulous world-building of Kim Stanley Robinson with the tight, character-driven pacing of Lois McMaster Bujold. Kerr excels at slow-burn suspense, gradually unraveling layers of mystery surrounding an ancient artifact and a potentially catastrophic collapse of the hyperspace “shunt” system. Yet for all its big ideas—AI ethics, religious fanaticism, post-human evolution—Haze never loses sight of the deeply human.

If the novel falters, it’s in its occasional overreliance on exposition and jargon-heavy Fleet protocols. At times, the book’s scope threatens to eclipse its emotional stakes. But these moments are fleeting and never fully obscure the poignant interiority at the story’s core.

Ultimately, Haze is a sharp, smart, and sobering read that dares to blend dystopian despair with genuine hope. Kerr reminds us that even in the vastness of space, the most dangerous territory remains the terrain of the self.

Summary Scorecard:

Plot & Pacing: ★★★★☆
Characterization: ★★★★★
World-Building: ★★★★☆
Writing Style: ★★★★☆
Emotional Impact: ★★★★☆

Highly recommended for fans of cerebral science fiction that doesn’t flinch from asking what it means to survive—and to matter.

Haze is a smart, tightly written sci-fi thriller that blends political intrigue, surveillance-state commentary, and first contact tension. The story follows a military intelligence officer sent to investigate a mysterious, quarantined planet—but what starts as a reconnaissance mission quickly unravels into a layered puzzle of secrets, memory manipulation, and hidden agendas.

Kerr’s prose is efficient and confident, her world-building quietly expansive without overwhelming the reader. The narrative flips between past and present, keeping the pace brisk while deepening the mystery. If you like cerebral sci-fi with sociopolitical bite—think Le Carré meets The Expanse—this one’s worth a look.

My feelings on Haze are very complicated, so I'm getting a bit in depth on this one. I'd say it has a lot of concepts I like, some executions that don't work well for me, and some elements I greatly disliked.

However, many a time I've picked up a book from a negative review if a reviewer made it clear what they didn't like, because I could tell that I WOULD like it. My hope with this review is just that: that the people who have tastes similar to mine will not pick it up and avoid being frustrated, and that people who have other personal preferences will pick it up and get to enjoy what it has to offer.

So, in theory this book has everything I like in it: a messy bisexual protagonist who is addicted to drugs and can't get off the drugs not just due to addiction but because all pilots who access space warps actually need to take this drug to be able to do their job. He's sexually turned on by getting to do (essentially) warp drive maneuvers while piloting, and genetically engineered in ways that deeply mess him up <spoiler>ie to have a great deal of difficulty NOT on his sexual impulses whenever they happen</spoiler>. Add into that a devoted male lover who is handling his addiction the best he can, mysterious AIs getting abandoned, visual things only he can see while in warp (shunt), a political conspiracy, and more, and it should be everything I want. This was even more so from the cover promising a diverse cast with normative bisexuality and polyamory. Conceptually, this is entirely up my alley, and there's a part of me that appreciates very much that Kerr went for this and made a work that includes all these things.

However, for all these things, the execution was done in a way that kept me at arm's length from my ability to enjoy it.

First up: the narrative writing choices are odd. Sometimes it feels like Kerr wrote out a full outline in flow form, because it's in 3rd person present tense with very little emotional interiority, i,.e., not letting us see what the characters are feeling. When dialogue happens, it is often pages of back to back dialogue exchanges with no emotional markers and few markers of who's talking -- when it gets a few pages in, I often have to go back a few pages and count to see who's saying what, because the voices are a bit similar (more on that in a moment).

The lack of emotional markers is arguably worse -- if you're promising me messy characters having messy situations, not getting a read on their tone when they talk to each other was isolating to me as a reader (though other readers may disagree). It doesn't need to be constant, of course, but having any in there at all would help bring me into their inner lives. Example off the dome (not actual dialogue) "Are you going to meet up with (x) on shore leave?" "Sure, I was thinking of it. Is that a problem?" "No problem. Do what you like." Ok. Are they actually being chill here? Are they being anything but chill? Especially if the story doesn't bring it up later it feels like we have to read it as chill but we won't know if it will be brought up later at the time we read it. Without knowing the overtones of what they're saying, we have to read into it -- which I'm fine with when done deliberately as something to make a point, but because it was so constant, I spent a lot of time feeling as if I wasn't able to 'hear' the dialogue, only see the words with no tone implied in them. Again, for some readers, this might be really enjoyable, but the execution wasn't what I was hoping for.

When I mentioned that their voices weren't terribly differentiated, it actually ties into a narrative choice Kerr makes* that is theoretically very cool but I found didn't work for me, which is that instead of having section breaks between POV exchanges, there's either a sudden switch or this sort of narrative handover point in the text. For example, Captain Evans will get information about the docks they're pulling in at in dialogue, and the resulting description of the docks apparently from her POV will be given, and then we'll see Devit on the docks and it becomes clear the 3rd person POV is now his. And because of these handover points, it's not clear in retrospect whether the docks bit was actually her POV as we thought or if it was actually Devit's. It's a bit like a camera following one character with a pan over a scene and then the pan lands on another character and continues with them.

* at least, I think this is a choice she makes. It's possible the ARC simply removed all section breaks. But regardless, in the version I read, there was no break between any paragraph where pov fully shifted.

Again, theoretically I think this is really, really cool. But again, in execution, I struggled to actually read it because it happens so often. I counted up the number of them in a random chapter -- 13 switches like this occur in chapter 9. By doing it so often, I found it confusing, and was constantly rereading back a paragraph or two to try to figure out when I started 'following' a specific character. In addition, in order to make them work, every piece of narrative needs to be held at a distance so there's no character voice being included in the narrative writing. In general, I prefer 3rd person subjective POVs, where the narrative camera is in alignment with that character's feelings and opinions. In order to do narrative switches like this and do it so often, the camera stays objective, so that each of those moments can flow into each other without a clear sudden shift in tone.

Between that, the lack of the aforementioned interiority, and the lack of any dialogue markers, I feel really isolated from the emotional beats of the story, kept at arm's length when I didn't want to be. Again, it often felt like reading an outline rather than a final version, more bones than meat to chew on, at least to me.

Finally, I want to touch on the subject of diversity. Definitely, there are queer characters, polyamorous characters, and non-default whiteness, which is great, again. For me, and as my followers know, I'm primarily a queer reviewer, the queer rep was disappointing. The thing is: I love bisexual characters regardless of the makeup of their relationships (a bi woman with a man is still bi, and that relationship is fundamentally queer because of their bisexuality) and I adore reading polyamory (all our ships can happen! And there's more room for romantic confusion or beats if more relationship options are on the table!). I want to establish that up front.

However, the problem I had here was twofold. First, the pre-established relationship was queer (between two male leads), but their relationship was written very dry; there was no sexual chemistry in their interactions and basically no romantic moments, while their interactions with female characters were dripping with sexuality (often describing nipples swelling, erections, etc). Beyond that, despite a mention of four-directional marriages being common to establish a default-polyamory, the characters were constantly jealous of each other's hooking up with other people, which is reasonable because at no point do they communicate with their partners about wanting to before they've actually hooked up. Obviously there's open relationships that rely on not talking about it, but they communicate in advance to decide not to talk about it. I wouldn't even mind per se if this was deliberate to portray the messiness and strains on their relationship, but it is kind of portrayed as normative jealousy (one of the first scenes in a book is a jealous boyfriend attacking one of our male leads for flirting with his girlfriend, and the jealousy also continues between these two leads; we don't have any examples of these open relationship hookups where they talk to each other or are happy for each other about them -- and no wonder, since they don't find out until after when they're hurt about it). Whenever the jealousy is resolved, it's offscreen. They don't communicate. And the way this relationship ends up feels, well... I'm not spoiling it, and I can see ways a second book can fix it, but I did not enjoy it. This does come down a bit to taste; I don't know that I'd say this is problematic, but it felt like some relationships were receiving more sexual and romantic approval than others, and whether on purpose or not, this aligned with a traditional male-and-female relationship. On the one hand, individual relationships certainly can go this way, and many people don't handle open relationships as well as they expect to (and I am sure a polyamory-normative life wouldn't change that fact in all cases). On the other, with no other onscreen examples of the situations that worked, we're left with only this situation as-is, and the outcome of it.

There was also a scene that almost made me stop reading, because it was so anti-neurodivergent and ablest. The plot as a whole has a heavy subplot about eugenics (in this case building certain humans, called "Throwbacks," with genetic functions). Most of them are DNA taken from old earth animals, but at one point it's revealed the Throwbacks with good math skills were bred from... well, old earth people who have autism. They use the word (though slightly sci-fi-ized, in the same way "border collie" became borracolls, it was autiz or something like that, and was specifically described as people who have"amazing skills with numbers and math, even though they couldn't do much else." 1. I think we can all agree here that it's ablest to say autistic people can't do anything but math, holy wow, this is an incredibly outdated and horrible stereotype. 2. Actually, only a limited number of people with autism have superior mathematical abilities, and mathematical difficulties are actually more common than in neurotypical people and it's clear Kerr threw this detail in based on her own common knowledge (often incorrect for us all) with no research. 3. Autism is a spectrum, with a wide variety of challenges, behaviors (beneficial and disadvantageous), severity, etc, but primarily regarding communication, learning, and social behaviors. 4. There is no good-at-math gene. 5. While I doubt this was deliberate, it equates autistic people to animals, given the rest of the Throwbacks have animal genes. (This could be the characters misunderstanding, but there was clearly a whole, ah, breeding program for it at one point, so that means all those scientists did as well, if so.)

I only continued past that because at 70% in, I wanted to see it through to be able to comment on the whole ARC. But your mileage may vary, and I felt it was important to talk about that moment and my reaction to it. It did only happen once, but it really impacted me hard.

In short: It wasn't for me. But, this is probably really good for someone who loves a more objective narrative voice that plays with form, and is looking for a distant camera observing messy characters without putting you in the mess itself, and who wants the rest of what this has to offer, this might be exactly what you're craving.

Thank you to Arc Manor and to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I had a lot to say, but I will try to keep it short and sweet here. This was the first book from this author I have read. So my experience may be different if you are a veteran reader of this author.

The story itself has good progression. It seems to have several leads that all come together at the end, but it also feels like something is missing. To me, it seems that this is just the first part of a series, if not, there are a lot of holes that need to be filled. The description was not wrong when it mentions heavily researched and space opera. The is what we got.

Now the problems that I had. The characters don't seem to have great interpersonal relationships. They are supposed to be a team, but there isn't a whole lot of bonding. This could be due to the fact that every other paragraph seems to be a perspective shift. They are often, they are abrupt, and it caused me to have to reread many sections to realize what was happening, and who we were following.

The MC, Dan, seemed to be pushed aside for others in the second half. I felt that Dan just ended up doing the same thing over and over. Riding the Haze. It didn't leave much time to see him really grow, especially if he is supposed to develop romantic relationships...

My biggest issue was the LGBT tag. It is the main reason I read this book, but it seemed severely lacking. We got just enough to check the box, and left me wholly unsatisfied, especially at the end. Without going into spoilers, it is my belief that the book needs to decide if it wants to go hard into the LGBT category, or drop it all together. What I got, works as a Sci-fi novel. I don't believe it works well in the LGBT genre.

One last thing I just want to touch on. I'm not sure if it was intentionally written this way, or if it is just the way it was converted to an .epub file. The formatting was hard to follow. Each new paragraph seemed to only be indented by a space or two, which at a glance, made each page just look like a wall of text. Coupled with the constant scene changes with no scene breaks, made reading difficult at times. I got used to it after a while, but just figured it should be mentioned.

Thank you for letting me read this book. I hope my feedback can be well received.

Haze is a very readable space opera novel, featuring a reasonably complex setting, interesting use of AI, complex character relationships, and a storyline that kept me hooked. Featuring a disgraced naval pilot, addicted to the eponymous Haze drug, he and compatriots search for the answers to disappearing ships and potentially risks to interstellar travel entirely. While the stakes are high, they are also a bit muddled, so the quest that gets resolved didn’t seem to be the quest that started the book. While I would certainly read a sequel, downsides did include somewhat wooden characters, a simplistic space environment, and frequent viewpoint changes that weren’t always telegraphed clearly. Still, fun overall.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ear. Good to see Katherine Kerr writing SF again.