Steal the Stars is the story of Dakota Prentiss and Matt Salem, two government employees guarding the biggest secret in the world: a crashed UFO. Despite being forbidden to fraternize, Dak and Matt fall in love and decide to escape to a better life on the wings of an incredibly dangerous plan: they’re going to steal the alien body they’ve been guarding and sell the secret of its existence.
Half romance, half first contact, half heist story adds up to a tasty mix. The reality of Steal the Stars is quite similar to ours: large companies in bed with US government, immigrants from Mexico sneaking through the southern US border, retired military personel working for private outfits. Except for that one deeply hidden spaceship. And an alien body inside it. And a very peculiar engine on board of that spaceship.
Steal the Stars
is the first podcast from Tor Labs, an imprint of Tor Books. It aired weekly starting in August 2017, and ran for 14 episodes. It is written by Mac Rogers (The Message).
A novel based on the podcast was published November 2017, written by Nat Cassidy.
This show provides examples of:
- Action Girl: The protagonist, Dakota Prentiss and her deputy, Patty.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Alien named Moss is covered with some kind of moss, the purpose of which is unknown to anyone throughout most of the show. We learn its true nature in the last episode.
- Energy Absorption: Harp drains all electricity in its vicinity once it activates. It will also drain will to live from unprotected humans, with effect ranging from severe apathy to being turned into a zombie without any will to live.
- Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Harp is this for most of the show. There are event attempts to outright weaponize it.
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Despite working for 11 years on analyzing the craft, the alien themselves and the harp, noone has any idea how those things work, or is there any sort of connection between them. There's plenty of observations and theories though, which vary from character to character.
- The Power of Lust: Dakota and Matt start with a kiss out of blue, followed by carefully hidden intense physical attraction. Love seem to come afterwards, with all its problems.
