This is the story of the last journey of a once glamorous space freighter, but it's rather unlike any sci-fi I've read.
While quite different in tone, I think that the Wreck shares a theme with Venture Brothers. They're both meditations on failure. The River of Stars has a rather eclectic crew that run the gamut when it comes to strengths and weaknesses. Even with, or perhaps because of, all of their faults, you'll probably find parts of yourself in a few characters and that might just scare you. This isn't to say that the book is ridiculously grim; there's a fair number of happy moments and no small number of elaborate puns. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the book as much as I did were I still a teen, although it would have been useful. But at 30 seeing real people struggle with interesting challenges at a human scale feels just about right.
One stylistic note, the book has a more active narrator than I'm used to in modern fiction. Rather than going with viewpoint characters, the perspective may shift during a scene and the reader is often provided with information that none of the participants in a conversation know. I think that's a risky approach but on the whole it pays off here. The authorial voice gives enough of a psychological profile of the passenger and crew to give us fairly deep insight into the characters. Some of this probably constitutes telling rather than showing, but characters' actions are consistent with how they're described which isn't always a sure thing.
On the whole, The Wreck gave me what I want from literary novels: developed characters facing interesting problems. Genre fiction often has an easier time with the interesting problem side of things, but The Wreck manages to accomplish this while staying completely grounded. The diverse backgrounds of the passenger and crew may not exist in our world, but the problem in group dynamics that arises is entirely recognizable. I'd recommend reading it and sticking with it at least through the emergence of the main humans versus the environment storyline.
[Update: Source: A gift from Moti, thanks Moti!]
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