The next thing they know, they, along with Henry, a neighbor who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, have blasted off into space. Earth behind they run into junkers, Space Pirates and killer robots.
It is currently available on the Kindle
and in paperback form.
Provides examples of:
- Ace Pilot: Erin quickly becomes a master at the helm of the Orion. This is justified due to the Orion rewiring her and Jake's brain.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played straight with the ship's AI, which responds to their impending death with a polite message. Possibly subverted with the Techno Droids. It's never made clear if they are AI gone wrong or if they were just programmed to boil people into oil.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: The ship reshapes itself to fit whomever is flying it.
- Cool Ship: The Orion, which can travel interstellar distances in seconds, understand multidimensional physics and uses holographic boxing gloves and tiny bugs as weapons.
- Ms. Exposition: Sam, the cat, falls under this. She spends most of the book explaining just how things work. Or at least, she tries to explain how things work.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Mostly averted. Any time space is mentioned it's in thousands of miles or more. Played more straight with how many different aliens seem to run into Gee-Bob, though that was justified by the Orion's FTL system being "noisy."
- Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The makers of the Orion. They can jump from one end of the galaxy to the other, rewire people's brains and have created a weapons that makes you dance.
- Translator Microbes: Actual microbes in the form of the Yacker Virus that lets the crew understand alien languages.
- Recycled IN SPACE!!: This is discussed by the crew briefly. However there are space pirates, space junkers, space cows, and space attack spider Santas
- Rule of Funny: What the universe seems to run on.
