Matthew C. Lucas’s Come and Get It! is the second book in a comic science fiction series centered on Joey Mumbai, a professional gambler who’s been forced to run the most dysfunctional space station at the edge of the galaxy. Joey still owes an enormous debt to insectoid mob boss Fat Okko, and Halcyon is still populated by a crew that sounds like the result of somebody emptying a toy box, a liquor cabinet, and a role-playing game onto the same table. There’s Daryl Ponds, a giant Southern-accented manatee engineer; Mags, the temperamental fortune teller; Chef and Auntie, the station’s khazid restaurateurs; Hali, the relentlessly cheerful station intelligence; and Natalie, a malevolent supernatural being who lives in a deep fryer. Lucas throws all of them into a plot involving organized crime, an incoming drug-running shuttle, a crew of sentient chicken tenders, and one increasingly desperate attempt after another by Joey to keep everybody alive.

The real engine of the book is its comic escalation. An interrupted ritual turns eight chicken tenders into tiny, angry combatants, just as Joey learns that Okko expects him to make a rival mobster’s ship disappear. From there, the problems pile up with impressive speed. A drug-addled rabbit pilot, revolutionary terrorists, murder, sabotage, rave dust, supernatural interference, and a catastrophic landing-bay disaster all become pieces of the same increasingly tangled mess. The story has the rhythm of a farce, with Joey constantly improvising a solution that creates two or three new problems. Lucas has also built a surprisingly detailed comic universe underneath the absurdity. Galactic bureaucracy, organized crime, religion, technology, economics, and political extremism all have their own ridiculous internal logic, which helps the strangest jokes feel as though they belong in the same world.

Joey’s first-person narration gives the whole thing its personality. He’s selfish, crude, anxious, quick with an excuse, and unusually talented at talking himself into terrible decisions, but the book gradually gives him more to do than simply react to disasters. What makes the story satisfying is the way his reluctant attachment to Halcyon and its crew starts competing with his desire to escape. The supporting cast matters more as the book goes on, too, especially Daryl and Mags, and even some of the broadest comic characters get moments that make the station feel like an actual community. That becomes especially clear late in the novel. Joey receives nearly half a million dows that could have been his route toward freedom, yet ultimately spends almost all of it repairing and improving Halcyon because the station needs to survive. His final decision to pay the bill and “make the best of it” lands as genuine character growth without requiring the book to abandon the smart-mouthed voice that got it there.

I’d recommend Come and Get It! to readers who like their science fiction rowdy, profane, fast-moving, and unapologetically weird. Fans of space-opera comedy, dysfunctional found families, lowlife protagonists, elaborate running jokes, and humor that happily wanders into gross or inappropriate territory will have plenty to enjoy here. Beneath the talking poultry, terrible beer, murderous deep fryer, mobsters, and bodily-function jokes, there’s a warm story about a group of screwups becoming important to one another. The epilogue brings that side of the novel into focus when the station’s tiny population gathers to remember one of their own, turning an intentionally ridiculous funeral into something unexpectedly affectionate. That combination of absurdity and growing camaraderie gives Space Station Halcyon its charm, and readers who enjoy comedy that can be ridiculous one minute and oddly sincere the next are probably the ones who’ll appreciate it most.

Pages: 281 | ASIN : B0H5WF3FG6