Thin But Fun, 'Off Rock' Is An Old-Fashioned Space Caper
Kieran Shea's novel follows a grizzled galactic miner who stumbles across a vein of gold on a nearly tapped-out asteroid. He just has to get the gold off-rock without attracting anyone's attention.
Science fiction has always been such a mutt genre. It's the place where you can do anything, tell any story that crosses your fevered mind. Want to do noir? Cool. A romance? No problem. A war story? Absolutely. Throw in some ray guns, little green men and some hand-wavey, black-box techno-whatever to stitch it all together, and you're good to go.
None of this is an insult. Some of the best pulp sci-fi was exactly this. You ever read Theodore Sturgeon's ? It's about. But no one has ever mistaken it for great literature.
