Other than that, Pink is an ordinary, or rather an exceptional, member of the crew. The trans thing is very much a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it is there. It is her job to patch Eva up after each mission. Talking of the crew, the most sensible among them is Dr. As the story unfolds, she has to learn to treat her crew as family, rather than people to manipulate into helping her get what she wants. But she is well aware that a romance with a member of her crew is terrible for discipline and morale.

Which might be how she came to turn her pretty nose up at the advances of a fantastically wealthy alien emperor and cause him to vow to hunt her down and add her to his harem by force rather than by seduction.Įva, meanwhile, is enamoured of Vakar, her engineer, who is a type of alien that communicates by smell. At the start of the book, Eva is very much self-absorbed and in business purely for the fun of it. In addition, Valdes has a story arc in mind for her heroine. Given that the people who built this stuff also built the perfectly functioning but wholly mysterious stargate system on which the entire galaxy depends for commerce, this is a big money caper. To start with, the book features that staple of space opera, the mysterious artefact from a long-lost high-tech civilization that no one can now understand. Therefore there must be more, and of course there is. If that’s all that there was to this book, I don’t think it would have got on the short list. Eva and her friends get sent on shady missions, which go horribly wrong, and they have to shoot their way out of trouble. A very much bigger criminal empire has kidnapped her sister and wants both her and Dad to work for them to earn Mari’s release. But, of course, her old life won’t let her go. Having quit her father’s criminal business and tried to find work that weighs less heavily on the conscience, she has put together her own ship with the expected group of talented misfits. The book follows the adventures of one Captain Eva Innocente, notorious smuggler and all-round badass. Now admittedly that’s not the sort of sophisticated literary novel that usually attracts the Clarke judges, but how could I go wrong? It promised space opera and psychic cats. But I was going off covers and blurbs, so the book that caught my eye was Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes. I did not manage to pick the winner, which was The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay. I hadn’t read all of them, and decided to take a look. The lovely people at Mr B’s in Bath had a display up of Clarke Award finalists.

Chilling effect a novel valerie valdes