“On Earth, they depicted justice as blindfolded and impartial, but out here on the frontier, she was red in tooth and claw.”
It’s not every book that begins with the unanticipated dismantling of a planet. But that is what happens here, when people in South London watch through a telescope the disassembling of the planet Saturn.
Neptune and Uranus have already gone. Jupiter then follows.
The cause of this is an alien race who, for reasons initially unknown, they use the planetary material to form eight shards of a segmented hollow sphere measuring 340 million kilometres from tip to tip, and 85 million across at their widest points. These are in stationary orbit between the Earth and Mars, separating the Inner Solar System from what is left of the Outer System. All of this is explained in the first ten pages!
The story then leaps forward about a century. Humans, being the resourceful creatures that they are, have settled upon the inner surfaces of this sphere, now known as The Swirl. It is now that we meet Copernicus Brown, bounty hunter and owner of the spaceship Jitterbug and its crew. With Copernicus is Kiki, the young bundle of energy that is the co-pilot, Ulf is the Viking-like engineer and McKenzie is the nineteen-year-old new crewmember training with Ulf, Copernicus’s younger cousin, taken on as a favour to her mother. There’s also the spaceship itself, run by an AI who has taken to communicating to Copernicus and his team in the form of a parrot (because… Space Pirates, obviously!)
Following a tipoff from one of their recently recaptured criminals, the crew travel to a location hoping to find something valuable. There they actually find Amber Roth, sole survivor of a pirate attack.
The consequences of this is that the Jitterbug finds itself of interest to a number of powerful political factions, including Danielle Lazlo, Deputy Speaker of the Solar Assembly who govern the worlds inside the Swirl, and the rest of the novel is about how this is resolved. The situation is complicated further by the point that the aliens may be returning…
As an SF story with a strong ensemble feel, it should not be a surprise for me to say that Jitterbug reminded me of the TV series Firefly or of Chris Wooding’s Retribution Falls, in that it’s an interesting combination of old-world and new, of technology (human and alien!) and history. There’s a nice sense of humour spread throughout the novel, but there’s also a few situations where characters that you grow to care for are put in peril.
The chapters are generally short and written from the point of view of a range of characters – Jitterbug’s latest owner Copernicus Brown, reluctant stowaway Amber Roth, politician Danielle Lazlo and the AI that is Jitterbug itself, who has a nice sense of snark about it.
Many of the chapters end with a number of posts from the equivalent of an Internet notice board, that cleverly give you glimpses of the wider world outside the Jitterbug. (These reminded me a little of what Robert A Heinlein did in some of his later novels, or perhaps John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.)
It’s a little sweary, and there is some romance without being too explicit, but as you might expect from veteran writer Powell, the novel reads quickly and easily towards an appropriate ending. Whilst some elements felt a little rushed toward the end – in particular for me what could be a long-term romance seems to happen far too quickly to be creditable – it is pretty self-contained, with the plot resolved satisfactorily. Of course, should the book do well (I think it will!) there is the possibility of extending this into a series now that the characters and the situation have been created.
Jitterbug is pretty much what I hoped for in a Space Opera, and got: an exciting and solidly written character-driven science fiction story with an interesting setting that reads easily and well.
© 2026 Mark Yon
Hardback | Titan Books
JITTERBUG by Gareth L Powell
March 2026 | 320 pages
ISBN: 978 1835 414 514
