N
ew Book Spotlight
Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle
A mini-interview Renan Bernardo
Tell us about your new book?
Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle is a dark space opera novella set in a generational spaceship returning to Earth after a disastrous expedition. Biospheres are failing, life support is a mess, and the crew is completely lost to corruption and selfishness. Reva Castro, Life Support Officer, is tweaking the quotas of some of the passengers in order to illegally benefit her son, who hasn’t been doing the work to keep up with his right to breathe. When Captain Horvat decides to make things right, Reva will have to make an alliance with her worst enemy: First Officer Hannah Torres, the woman who killed Reva’s daughter.
It’s a fast-paced struggle for survival as Reva (and the Needle’s crew and dwellers) will do what they can to not be sent to O1, the infamous deck where the breathing mix is not ideal and surviving is excruciatingly harder.
The book also contains two previously published short stories set in the same world and which deal with the same ethos: what do we do when we have power in our hands?
What aspect of the book was the most fun to write?
Researching the aspects of how a spaceship of this size would work and how oxygen recycling and the breathing mix actually work was very fun. This is not a hard SF novella, even though it has some hard elements, but I’m happy with how the research turned out in the end. Another very fun part was developing the relationship of Reva with the several parts of the ship, including the other members of the crew and the dwellers. She’s this woman despised and respected at the same time, almost a sort of passive executioner, but years ago she was seen as an important and valuable element in the ship.
If there is one emotion or theme that you would hope that the reader connects with, what would that be?
I really think most people will think of it as a brutal story. And it really is. But if I’m to pick an emotion, I’d like the readers to feel anger, meaning that space exploration purely for profit, without any plan for it to be a beacon for the human experience on Earth, is a brutal and useless endeavor which will only make people suffer.
