Building a Life in the Asteroid Belt

Dave Walker is back. He is now Dave Doyle. Having married into Ceres’s influential Doyle family he changed his last name to theirs. It provides a lower profile now that he has exfiltrated his own family off Earth. He has no plans to get any closer to Earth's orbit than the Asteroid Belt.

Sometimes in the Fall, a science fiction novel by John Van Stry, follows the further adventures of Dave and both his families in a future where man has settlements throughout the Solar System. It is a sequel to Van Stry’s earlier Summer’s End.

Kid brother Ben is free from potential corporate slavery geniuses on Earth. Ben, their father, mother, and sister are safely on Ceres. Dave wants to find somewhere for Ben to continue research on the faster-than-light drive Ben’s theories say is possible. Dave’s grandfather, the head of an elite Earth family, is offering funding. Dave plans to concentrate on the shipping company he and his wife Kacey founded and start raising some kids of their own.

Unfortunately, reality keeps intruding. Pirates try to take his ship. Ben gets kidnapped by a different Elite family, requiring rescue. His grandfather wants Dave to build a shipyard on Ceres to construct FTL ships once Ben figures out how to make a practical drive. Then Ceres gets attacked by the Venusian Moral Collective, the absolutist government ruling Venus.

Some are good problems, most are bad. Dave feels obligated to fix all of them: defeat the pirates, rescue his brother, start work on a shipyard, design ships to build there – and deliver retribution to Venus for attacking his new home. Finally, find a safe place for Ben to work once rescued.

A fast-paced space adventure follows as Dave tackles each problem in sequence. Unexpected opportunities and challenges pop up, and he and his family deal with each in turn. Along the way he discovers what it means – and what it does not mean – to be a hero.

Sometimes in the Fall is the kind of hard science fiction turned out by Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, and H. Beam Piper in the 1950s and 1960s. It features clever men and women solving problems as they appear. It is the antithesis of the nihilistic science fiction dominating much of the last thirty years. It presents progress positively, showing the promise of technology. Best of all, it is fun to read.

“Sometimes in the Fall,” by John Van Stry, Baen Books, March 2025, 288 pages, $18.00 (Paperback), $8.99 (E-book)

This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.