Ms. McDonald has let me down. Where the first book of this series showed us a great deal of her strength in describing Team Space, this delves into the world of Arthur Clarke and 2001 and 2010. We are taken back to that Space Odyssey where the aliens are plying such a long game that they can wait millennia to make things happen and humans do not control their destiny because of it.

That is the worst crutch we employ as a writer, we make all decisions ultimately in the hands of a higher power that shows man does not control his actions in the end.

That as an author, while McDonald weaves a universe, makes her heroes so less heroic that I wonder why bother. Further strands at the end of her book an isolated group of humanity where the gene pool is as small as Pitcairn Island. We know from genetics such is doomed to failure.

For shame McDonald. Team Space is the story. The mystery of human to human politics and interaction in your universe was the story that captured my interest. The Mythos that you weave we have seen before. Aliens have to follow physics and reality as well. Mysticism for Aliens tied to Aborigine views of a pseudo religion that are taken to the stars where science must get them out of Earth orbit is weak, and though the author has built it up so there is complexity to it, the suspension of disbelief is to large to overcome.

One can only hope that Team Space and the mechanics of the naval institution that has been strong before will emerge again in the thrid book. ( )

Exciting story with interetsing characters and plot twists. ( )

Not as good as the first one, but worth reading. More mystical than the first, with very little about naval life. ( )

I read the first book in this series, The Outback Stars, earlier in the year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn't totally overwhelm me with its brilliance. All the same, I liked it enough to reserve the sequel from the library. I think part of the reason I wasn't totally captivated by the first book was that it focussed largely on the running of the Stores section of a large starship, with a small diversion into a larger, more mystical plot. It was interesting, but all the details on shipboard practices were not totally my thing (on the other hand, I have a friend who just loved the book for exactly that reason).

In this second book, the main protagonists from The Outback Stars are now married, stationed on-planet and trying to ignore their bizarre trip through the alien travel spheres that happened at the end of the previous volume. Of course, things don't work out that way, and before long both Jodenny and Myell find themselves caught up in both unwilling research on the spheres and combating an alien invasion.

There was so much more to this book, I felt. McDonald goes further with Aboriginal mythology, infusing the vanished aliens who built the spheres with the Dreamtime as their history. They remain enigmatic figures about which little is known, but we do learn more about the sphere system and how Myell's destiny is linked to it. Jodenney on the other hand, is left behind in the more prosaic "real" world, dealing with alien spaceships in orbit around Earth.

McDonald threw out a lot of names, ideas and concepts in the first book without providing a lot of detail about what they meant or how they fitted into the landscape of her books but here she goes into more detail - unfortunately not in consideratin of the reader but because the plot requires it, but all the same it made the world she has created a lot deeper and more real which helped with my understanding of the story. I now wonder if I would get more out of the first book if I went and reread it.

It's a much tighter, faster paced story too, as both Myell and Jodenny deal with their problems and Myell finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the Dreamtime, much against his will. The ending is downbeat, but there's another book coming (The Stars Blue Yonder, due out in July 2009) and my gut feeling is that Jodenny and Myell's story is far from over. The ending fits with the tale, and doesn't really feel like an ending at all, so while it wasn't exactly a happy ending, I wasn't left feeling totally depressed about it either. Instead, I found myself hanging out for the next book.

Two lost characters from The Outback Stars reappear, and while I'm totally on board with what happened to Sam and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to him in the next book, I found the whole thing on the planet with the crocodile women and the return of the tech (sorry, I can't remember her name) to be kind of weird. It didn't seem to fit with either the mysticism or the science aspects of the book as it tried to cross between both and was really the only place the book failed me.

All in all, The Stars Down Under is fascinating and different both for its use of Aboriginal mythology and its generally neat blending of science fiction and fantasy. Jodenny and Myell remain fascinating characters and I want to know what happens to them next. I also desperately want them to have a happy ending, although I have no idea what I expect that to be.

The Stars Down Under
Sandra McDonald
Outback Stars, Book 2
9/10 ( )

Not as good as the first one, but worth reading. More mystical than the first, with very little about naval life. ( )