Review - Galaxy Cruise: The Maiden Voyage By Your Old Pal Marcus Alexander Hart
Preamble
An ad for the Galaxy Cruise books has popped up on my Facebook feed more than once over the past little while. And then the author, my (and your) old pal, Marcus Alexander Hart, popped up in on a Facebook group I’ve been in for a while, Funny Indie Authors. He mentioned his book, I had a look, and burned through it rather quickly.
A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.
Take from that what you will.
Review – 5/5
Sci-fi comedy has been a thing for a while. Growing up, the likes of Red Dwarf and Galaxy Quest were popular, though I only experienced the first one a little bit and the second one never. I adored Spaceballs, going through a phase where I kept renting it on VHS over and over again when I was eleven or twelve. But my first taste of this very particular genre came in the guise of an old PC game called Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. We (read: me and my brother, and to a lesser degree my sisters) had it, along with King’s Quest and a host of the old brutally and unfairly difficult old text parser-based Sierra Games on ye olde Tandy 1000, which had no hard drive and we liked it that way. Space Quest starred a loser space janitor named Roger Wilco (yes, a reference to walkie talkie… stuff) who managed to survive his space station getting blown up by aliens by dint of sheer luck alone. Then he goes on to save the universe in the same manner.
If I’m being honest, most of the humour went over my five-year-old head. Most of it, though there was a scene, after the nigh-impossible speeder run that made me want to throw the floppy disks out, that sticks with me to this day. You wind up in a bar in the desert of an alien planet, wandering into some sort of parody of the Star Wars cantina scene and there’s a crappy space band populated with aliens with cheesy one-liners, replete with the pop culture references that filled the rest of the game. And there was more than one game – several sequels, even. They leaned into the cheeseball humour element harder as time went on, though they never really got rid of the action-adventure elements entirely.
But I digress.
If you know Space Quest, you have a general idea of what Galaxy Cruise: The Maiden Voyage is going to be like, at least in terms of vibe. It stars a loser hero with zilch in terms of self-confidence who gets hit on by a rich alien heiress in the first few pages, only to be offered command of a massive space-based cruise ship. She basically throws herself at him with a bit of the old wink wink, nudge nudge, time for the old in and out, he wets his pants because she’s a hideous alien, some near death happens, he magically saves the day by accident, then he gets thrown into the next situation where he puts his foot in his mouth as a speciesist, or tells his crew to do something that’s dumb as hell, or something else. And comes out smelling like roses.
The jokes are a mile a minute and they usually involve some pop-culture reference. The cruise ship is called the WTF Americano Grande, for instance. But it’s not one note - it’s a rich tapestry of ridiculous situations as well. The hospitality chief, a cat lady (literal cat alien humanoid) has to deal with the insufferable old rich folk who complain about everything and threaten to report everything to the manager. The aliens use plenty of American English idioms for reasons that are as contrived as they are absurd.
But there is a plot here, a reason to care for our extremely socially awkward hero, Leo MacGavin. He needs to save his planet, the last bastion of humans who everyone thinks are called Americans and are treated as pets or worse by the rest of the aliens. He is on a mission to prevent his planet from getting turned into a sewage dump – the alien who threatens him basically shows him a poo emoji engulfing the place. To save it, he must be a decent captain of a cruise ship in space. No, really, that’s basically the driving force, which is appropriately silly for the book.
The characters are likeable, too. There’s the cat lady hospitality chief, a punk rock lesbian mechanic tree woman, an arsehole gruff lieutenant who gives Leo the gears but for whom he develops a grudging respect, there’s the hideous alien President of the cruise liner who is all wide-eyed batty eyelashes and a one-lady hype train for whom Leo develops those oh-so-sexy feelings, a dastardly villain who is little more than a puffed up rich kid mama’s boy… and Leo is the only one of these who is human. I was well impressed with the cast, how, in spite of the comedy setting, they were compelling.
That, to me, is a real test of someone’s comedic chops. To make something that’s not just a farce. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pure space adventure – we’re not talking the new Hermann Hesse or next Great American Novel here. But it’s fun and compelling and makes for an easy breezy chortly read. It’s also filled with euphemisms with one letter differences between the curse word and the ‘space swear.’ It’s explained in the story as part of the whole contrived reason why English idioms are part of standard alien language, which was, again, pretty funny.
Beam this one up (your arze).
You can check it out on Marcus’s website here.