Bones Burnt Black Serial Killer in Space eBook Stephen Euin Cobb
Download As PDF : Bones Burnt Black Serial Killer in Space eBook Stephen Euin Cobb 
A serial killer--brilliant, methodical, and suicidal--sabotages a large commercial spacecraft's engines by setting it on an eight-day trajectory to burn up in the sun, then remains aboard ship to murder and torment its passengers and crew. With no other ships near enough to reach them, rescue is impossible, and they must fight their unknown enemy while trying to invent a way to survive the growing heat of the sun.
Praise for BONES BURNT BLACK
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"A riveting and realistic portrayal of space travel gone wrong, and of a crew who must fight for their survival. Bones Burnt Black is exciting, and expertly told. A must-read."
J.C. Hutchins, author of the 7th Son series
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"Without a doubt one of the most entertaining and believable science fiction books I've ever read."
Janine K. Spendlove, author of the War of the Seasons series
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"Stephen Euin Cobb has achieved an excellent cross-genre work in Bones Burnt Black. This is much like an Agatha Christie plot, with a stalker hunting down the victims one by one and Cobb handles this very well. Bones Burnt Black is a mystery, it is science fiction and it is a great page turner. If you enjoyed books like Caves of Steel or movies like Ten Little Indians, you should read this book. You will find that science and murder can be a powerful fusion."
Colleen R. Cahill, writing in the SFRevu
Bones Burnt Black Serial Killer in Space eBook Stephen Euin Cobb
A science fiction murder mystery of the closed room subgenre - because on a spaceship with only two handfuls of people, you know you are locked in with the killer. One by one people die but the scary countdown is not the killer on the inside of the ship. The void of space is nowhere near as forgiving as a psychopath. Damage during the first murder compromised the ship's navigation and its course will skirt too close to the sun for the environmental controls before aiming out into the freezing forever of the universe. With only days to go, can the main character avoid the killer long enough to save the survivors?Mr. Cobb wrote a hard sci-fiction story; knowing him from ConCarolina's science track, I bet even the near-pass of the Sun was worked out to the third decimal point. His characterization isn't quite as well done as the science, but the murder mystery plot line keeps things hopping.
If you want more science than fiction in your story, this read is the perfect choice.
Picked up while free on kindle in relation to ConCarolinas 2016.
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Bones Burnt Black Serial Killer in Space eBook Stephen Euin Cobb Reviews
This book contains better developed characters, more believable science (to be expected in a prequel, and an amazing twist ending. While Mr. Cobb still hasn't mored this series up with the greats, I think that it's on it's way. If his rate of improvement continues this way I expect him to be right up there with Brin, and Clarke by boook four or five.
BTW, some people may note some superficial similarities between this book and David Brin's "Sundiver" (diving into the Sun, a feeling of "Mystery in space"), I actually contacted him about this to see if it was a source of inspiration, and was informed he had never even heard of "Sundiver".
This is a great spaceship science fiction thriller, it even has a moving love story, you will enjoy this novel.
In fairness, Stephen Euin Cobb’s Bones Burnt Black deserves three-and-a-half stars. But, forced by ’s limitations to round one way or the other, I decided that its faults weigh it down a little too heavily to give it four stars, and so it gets a mere three. And they’re a contented three; overall, I enjoyed this read, and I’d recommend it to someone who likes spaceship-based sci-fi. Unfortunately, this story, which would’ve survived perfectly well in Cobb’s qualified hands, and probably flourished there, if told solely as a sci-fi disaster tale, is instead forced by its creator into a somewhat more dismal chimeric co-existence as half sci-fi disaster/ half murder mystery. The “serial killer on the loose” parts of the story are fairly weak, in my opinion, and they really wouldn’t have been necessary. The characters’ environment is so out of control, and their predicted fate so unpleasant, that the added tension of a hidden murderer, if you’ll forgive the expression, is just overkill.
The story takes place on the spaceship Corvus, a vessel about the size and shape of a twenty-story building that is mostly used to run cargo and passengers from Earth’s moon to one of Saturn’s. Under thrust, the passengers usually experience about a tenth of one (terrestrial) gravity, and the ship is designed with a definite “up/ceiling” and “down/floor” on each stacked deck, also like a twenty-story building, except that what on a building would be the first floor is on the Corvus the highest numbered deck. While mostly empty at the Lunar end of its circuit, a pre-docking maneuver is cut off by an explosion on one of the Hydrogen fuel lines of their fusion engine. The engines shut down, and the compromised line immediately starts venting high pressure fuel. Not only is the Corvus now incapable of changing course or steering itself, but the force of the fuel spurting out of the rupture starts the entire ship tumbling about its center like a majorette’s baton. Since there’s a lot of fuel in the tank and they can’t reach the leak to fix it or shut it off, their rate of spin quickly climbs as the fuel continues to gush, and the centrifugal force starts to throw everything and everybody out towards each end of the ship. This results in a gravity-like pull, the direction of which depends on which deck a character is on. Down is still down on the higher-numbered decks, but on the low numbers, the ceiling is now the new floor. As the spin gets faster and faster, the force increases, and the ends of the ship are soon experiencing more g-force than a human being can move through or even survive. To add to their torment, the stricken Corvus is also careening on a path that will take it close enough to the sun that ship and contents are expected to start melting in eight days’ time. (I don’t know how freakin’ fast they were travelling, if they can travel from our moon to inside Mercury’s orbit in only eight days when it would take NASA months to get to Mars, but I’ll give Cobb that one.) More explosions, determined to have been the result of precisely-placed plastic charges, further cripple the ship and worsen its occupants’ chances of survival. Crew and passengers soon come to realize that one of them must secretly be the bomber. Finally, just to put the cherry on top, crew members start turning up murdered, one-by-one, slasher film style.
First, the good points. The space disaster component of this story is an excellent idea and Cobb describes it and plays it out expertly. A story similar to this one would make a really great space disaster film. There are definite thematic similarities to Alfonso Cuaron’s successful film Gravity, released in theaters two years after Cobb published this novel. Cobb’s strengths as a writer lie in tenaciously yet vividly describing all the problems that his characters are faced with when gravity stops playing nice, and then also in having them come up with several original solutions to get around them. He sets his scenes like a physics teacher putting a complicated free-body diagram up on the board, but nonetheless makes it very easy to keep track of where the characters are, where the obstacles all are, and why the various hazards exist in any given scene. With Cobb painting the scene, I never had a problem mentally picturing the action or sympathizing for the characters suffering such battery. One character is performing an EVA when the explosions start, and after being put through the gauntlet for a while, her safety line snaps and she’s blown away from the ship. The sequence of scenes describing her plight and her slow return to the Corvus are very well written. The part where she finally makes it back to the ship but, owing to its brutal spin, still can’t get back inside without suffering even more abuse and misfortune are probably Cobb at his best. He’s got a decent measure of Arthur C. Clarke blood flowing in his fingers and his brain, and these scenes prove it. Even with a less dire circumstance, Cobb still shows mastery with use of physics as a storytelling tool, in a lot of ways that most people probably wouldn’t even think of. His characters have to invent their way around a number of problems that would be non-issues in normal gravity, like how to move supplies or injured people from deck to deck or how to reach upside-down doors or controls when you’re stuck standing on a high ceiling. Some of them seem minor at first, until you realize just how bad the environment has gotten for these people. For example, there’s a great part where one character has to figure out a way to hoist another character’s unconscious body up into a shuttle pod on a deck where the g-force pull is inverted (ceiling is now acting floor,) and strong enough that everything weighs twice what it would on Earth. Because of the inversion, the pod is hanging upside-down from its docking clamps on the floor. There’s a dangling chain ladder, but even if he weren’t already thoroughly exhausted from everything else, neither ladder nor man are strong enough for him to climb up it while carrying a second person in the doubled gravity. He has a pulley, but only one, and their weights are now such that he’d never be able to keep his grip on the rope, and she’d just fall and hurt herself even worse. Cobb’s solution to this predicament is simple, smart, and immediately effective, and it’s one of the many small strokes of genius that keep his main characters one step ahead of doom.
A feature common to the best parts of this story are that they involve only one character (or at least only one conscious character.) Cobb’s writing skill, so strong when one character is fighting circumstance on their lonesome, tails off when he’s forced to juggle multiple players. Dialogue and character portrayal are some of his weaknesses, and this comes out strong any time he has more than two characters in a room. There are only ten or so people on the ship to start with, since it was mostly empty when the explosions started. Two of those ten are Cobb’s main players; Mike and Kim. Most of the remaining characters are pretty shallow and undeveloped, and from their actions and their speech, I had a hard time buying that any of them were intelligent or mature enough to crew a spaceship. They don’t do very much except bicker with each other like children and serve as sacrificial victims to the mystery murderer. One character is portrayed as little else than a flirt in revealing clothing, and the male characters are all written as obsessing over her and making awkward and inappropriate passes. Some of the supporting cast seem pretty stereotypical the geeky socially awkward Japanese computer engineer, the cold and severe Russian, the Arab that nobody trusts, the gruff and gray-haired captain. I didn’t really miss them when they started dropping like flies. Cobb half-heartedly tries to paint them all as red herring suspects, but frankly the only one that is depicted as possessing the means to do what the bomber/murderer is clearly doing is also the only one that gets at all fleshed out, making it pretty easy to guess the killer’s ID early on. That’s also why I feel that it was a mistake for Cobb to mash a murder mystery plot into a sci-fi disaster story that didn’t need it; mystery whodunit clearly isn’t Cobb’s forte. Believable internal monologue also isn’t something that Cobb shows a lot of skill with. Having heard from the captain that his girlfriend likely died in the explosion, and right after not only discovering the first murder victim but also learning that the only evidence points the finger at him, Cobb puts us in Mike’s head. But he’s not pining for his lost love or sweating out the likelihood that people will accuse him of being the murderer, he’s just ogling one of the female passenger’s curves like a middle school boy with a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Seems unlikely, given the circumstances. Halfway through the story, Cobb also gives us a snippet of internal monologue from the as-yet unidentified killer’s POV, but it just reads like trite and tired villainous gloating fresh out of a cheap comic book. Even after the killer’s identity is revealed, Cobb gives his two-dimensional villain nothing to do except gloat and taunt, and taunt and gloat.
There are some other flaws with the writing that ultimately led me to round down to three stars, not up to four. Cobb has a mildly annoying habit of occasionally dropping in and out of a character’s head in mid-stream for no good reason. Here’s one example, from pretty early in the book “His viewing angle was now ideal for admiring the softly curving skin of her perfect breasts, especially the far breast which could be seen almost in its entirety when she breathed just right. Mike didn’t notice – even when her shoulder brushed his and then brushed it again – not because he was wonderfully noble or chivalrous, and not because he accidentally glanced for a split second and then looked away pretending he hadn’t seen anything. It was simply that his concern for his old friend was such that this woman had momentarily ceased to exist.” Aside from being titillation just for titillation’s sake (another of Cobb’s foibles,) this passage makes no narrative sense. Earlier in this scene, we were viewing events exclusively from Mike’s POV and, as expected, we knew what he knew and saw what he saw (and, conversely, didn’t see anything that he didn’t see.) Cobb drops out of Mike’s POV and elaborates on what a great view Mike’s got of this woman’s body, but then states adamantly that Mike wasn’t looking and didn’t see any of it. Then who did, and who’s telling us all about it? Mike’s our POV, Mike never looked there, so why is Cobb going on and on about perfect breasts in the first place, and then rattling on even more about how Mike might have looked, but never looked, but here’s what he missed, but he was too preoccupied, but… That’s just one example; Cobb makes that same mistake of jettisoning and then re-acquiring character POV a few times. He also has a tendency to fall into what I think of a “science teacher mode.” If his character is trying to open a hanger door, Cobb will take the opportunity to provide us with a bunch of fun facts about hanger design and pressure differentials, none of which has the slightest to do with his character’s attempt to open the stinkin’ door. If his character is getting close to the ship’s skin, Cobb goes off on a tangent about how the skin is designed to absorb micrometeoroid impacts, and why they leave small craters. If his character is cycling an airlock, Cobb may blab for a bit about why you may or may not see ice crystals inside an airlock as the pressure increases. I don’t mind science with my sci-fi, but it needs to be part of the story, not just random trivia stuck in pell-mell because the author wants to talk science. It feels as if Bill Nye were sporadically photobombing the narrative, when Cobb does this. I can’t give Cobb any kudos for incorporating amnesia as a plot device, either. Having a killer leave little poems as a calling card at the scene of the crime is just about as bad, and Cobb throws that in, too. These are the tired tools of bad soap operas, not good science fiction.
All in all, as much complaining as I’ve done about it, I do recommend this story, even though I can’t in good faith award it any more stars than three. I love watching movies where the characters’ dilemma seems to get worse every ten minutes, but somehow they still manage to scrape their way out, and the sci-fi disaster half of this tale was a well planned and skillfully told example of that kind of storytelling. If not for the sub-par murder mystery half, and if the author had improved his characters’ depth and given them more mature things to do and say, this book would have earned five brightly burning, bone-charring stars. As it stands, it’ll have to somehow survive on three.
A science fiction murder mystery of the closed room subgenre - because on a spaceship with only two handfuls of people, you know you are locked in with the killer. One by one people die but the scary countdown is not the killer on the inside of the ship. The void of space is nowhere near as forgiving as a psychopath. Damage during the first murder compromised the ship's navigation and its course will skirt too close to the sun for the environmental controls before aiming out into the freezing forever of the universe. With only days to go, can the main character avoid the killer long enough to save the survivors?
Mr. Cobb wrote a hard sci-fiction story; knowing him from ConCarolina's science track, I bet even the near-pass of the Sun was worked out to the third decimal point. His characterization isn't quite as well done as the science, but the murder mystery plot line keeps things hopping.
If you want more science than fiction in your story, this read is the perfect choice.
Picked up while free on kindle in relation to ConCarolinas 2016.
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