Published by Angry Robot in January 2026
Review by Stephen McGowan
A Hole in the Sky tells the tale of Hazel, a young girl from a seemingly normal village who yearns for something far more. Fairly usual as characters and settings go, right? Wrong. Hazel’s village, and her entire world, is a generation ship, travelling through the void towards a world they intend to colonise. Their destination lies 500 years from Earth, and they’ve been flying for 900 years.
There’s a problem.
They are led by the Electronic Captain, which, aside from being a great name for a synthwave band, is a near-mythical figure akin to a deity in their agrarian society, who combined with the ship’s systems and speaks through screens in every village, usually telling them which village is hosting an upcoming dance. Characters frequently exclaim utterances such as ‘Great Electric Captain!’ and they adhere to rules set out by the Electric Captain when the ship suffered from a terrible mutiny in the distant past.
One of those rules involves euthanasia at a certain age à la Logan’s Run, depicted as a day of celebration where the old die peacefully and are lowered into the ground by an elevator. The villagers believe the bodies go to the ship’s recycler to fulfil the circle of life, or the ‘cycle’, as they call it.
If you look past the celebrations at the beginning where Hazel presents flowers to those about to die and the depiction of Cheaters, those who run away rather than be cycled, the whole thing is very dark, and it sets a great narrative tone for both the book and Hazel’s character, acting as the catalyst for her to seek out other answers and begin her journey.
It is fun to see the juxtaposition of the agrarian villages and the futuristic relics of the past. The Cheaters live in what the villagers call mountains, but which are really crew quarters from the ship, abandoned long ago. It’s even better that the characters know from the start that they are in a spaceship, avoiding that tired M. Night Shyamalanesque twist ending where they discover the terrible truth.
A Hole in the Sky is apparently a YA novel. I say apparently, because it would not be out of place amongst the other, more adult-orientated science fiction I have read in the past couple of years. The main difference is really the swearing, of which there is very little, and which is made safe by in-universe terminology… oh guano.
Without giving the plot away, an issue I had is that it doesn’t stray as much from the Chosen One trope as it should. Rather than Hazel just being an inquisitive and forthright character, she has to be someone special to drive the later plot. It is the early scenes where she fights for the existence of her ill brother and decides something must be done about the issues facing The Habitat, as they call their known world, that really make her shine as a character.
Of her companions, it is Elijah, her initial enemy for a multitude of reasons (not least of which is Hazel breaking up with his brother before the start), who has the best arc. He becomes a far more rounded character than the others, something that I was not expecting when he was introduced. The rest are characters with one or two special traits or not even that. One of them has so little to say that it surprises Hazel when he talks for the first time.
The ending too was a little unsatisfactory for me. I wanted to see what had changed after their adventure, both for the setting and the characters. There were so many world-shattering events that a massive upheaval is sure to be expected, but the story ends abruptly, without even a small peak.
On the hole (you like what I did there?), I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and have passed it on to my kids. The shift in scenery halfway through, the action and the overall setting were very interesting to me in a way that made me wonder what happens next for the ship and to Hazel, something I’m delighted to note I’ll find out in the sequel The Captain’s Daughter.
Stephen McGowan is an award-winning author, freelance editor, reviewer, and Jolly Rancher enthusiast from Sunderland. Follow him on Substack and Bluesky