Quarter Share
Reviewed by Matthew Hunter
| Jan 1, 2007
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Quarter Share is the first of Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper “Trader’s Tales,” and it opens a series I’ve come to like quite a bit. Taken as a whole the run is good and genuinely memorable – even if this first volume is a little awkward on its own.
The setup is low-key by design. A young man, newly orphaned, signs on to a merchant ship and starts at the bottom, learning the trade one rung at a time. There are no space battles and no galaxy-ending stakes, just the steady accumulation of competence, small economic wins, and the texture of life aboard ship. The worldbuilding is very well done, the universe is a genuinely unusual one, and the plot held my attention more than a premise this quiet has any right to.