This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Inner Space will be released on July 15, 2025.
Jakub Szamalek wasn’t an author I’d heard of before this year, but I’m always looking for intriguing books from outside the US, UK, and Canada, and I have been known to enjoy a good “find the saboteur” story. So I decided to give the Kasia Beresford translation of Inner Space a try.
Inner Space takes place in a contemporary setting that limits itself to realistic technology. The focus isn’t exploring the effects of new developments so much as solving a puzzle—a people puzzle just as much as a technical one—of the sort that could plausibly arise in current conditions. The perspective shifts among a handful of characters, all connected in some way to the US space program, chiefly focusing on the astronaut leading the final cooperative mission between the United States and Russia on the International Space Station. When the sensors start to pick up alarming readings, leadership fears sabotage. But if the Russians are at fault, how did they manage it? And what should the protagonist make of the caginess on the part of her American crew?
This is an old-fashioned, figure-it-out hard sci-fi from the get-go, and while there are moments in the early going that feel a little too obvious, the slow reveals of more and more information make for a well-paced story that gets progressively more compelling as it develops. There’s never so long between new pieces of information that the reader starts to bore, but there’s always enough time for the characters to make meaningful decisions in light of new information. There’s plenty of mystery in the setup and a dramatic, action-packed climax. For those who enjoy that sort of story, it’s a real winner.
The prose is easy reading without generally drawing attention to itself, but the style breaks from contemporary trends in the amount of background it gives for each new scene. Rather than dropping the reader into a new place and letting them piece together the context, new scenes are commonly preceded by several paragraphs explaining why the characters in question find themselves engaged in the activity at hand. These interludes are short enough that they never bog down the story, but they may be a mark against it for readers who are averse to a bit of telling before showing.
There’s a fair bit of character-related drama here—and there really has to be, in order to establish multiple suspects to keep the mystery engaging—but it’s not a book that’s all about the characterization. There’s enough to establish a couple major character traits for each key player, and the story doesn’t drop any bombs without resolving them later, but the character journeys are ultimately secondary to the mystery. The characterization does what it needs to do and no more.
Despite all the cause for suspicion in nearly every direction, Inner Space manages to pull everything together for a satisfying ending. There are scientific and motivational explanations for every piece, but none of it is so obvious that the readers will see it coming too far in advance. Perhaps the opposite in fact—unlike in genre mysteries, understanding the whole picture requires information that isn’t revealed until after the major conflict. That may be a problem for readers who are trying to anticipate plot points in advance, but for those sitting back to enjoy an entertaining story, it’s no impediment.
Overall, Inner Space is a throwback hard sci-fi story that hews firmly to the known science of the contemporary setting. It’s not a book that will sell itself with prose or characters, but neither do those elements hold it back from being a quick and entertaining read.
Recommended if you like: sabotage stories, hard sci-fi.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Published in 2025, features a Parent Protagonist, and also has Epistolary segments.
Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.