Afternoon all,

Picked up _Splintered Suns_ by Michael Cobley at Christmas and started reading it on the bus this morning.  Very Travelleresque so far.  The main characters (as far as I've got) read like a typical Traveller merchant crew and the novel starts with a  museum heist which could be straight out of the first chapter of The Traveller Adventure!

But I was particularly struck by this quote on p.55 of my paperback:

"Pyke [the captain, negotiating with a patron] managed to avoid laughing out loud.  So there is a catch!

One of the regular hazards for trader-smugglers like Pyke was the client whose job offer started off as something fairly innocuous, then somewhere along the line turned into a proposal to go in search of legendary treasures, lost alien worlds, buried temples, or underground caches of ancient mechs/devastating weapons/mechs armed with devastating weapons.  Close questioning nearly always revealed that these locations lay within the territory of some ruthless regime, or criminal organisation, or beneath the sacred monument of a homicidal cult, or floating somewhere in an asteroid field, being fought over by rival scavenger squads..."

If that's not either a summary of past Traveller adventures or a blueprint for the next, I don't know what it is. 

Anyway, it's a fun read so far so you might want to check it out.  I'll report back if there's more to like (or not to like...)

tc