Barnes, John. Losers in Space. Viking Juvenile, 2012.
Losers in Space is a young adult novel in the manner of Robert Heinlein. It is darker than most of the Heinlein models. The novel’s smart but dysfunctional teens make it more of a mash-up of The Breakfast Club and Lord of the Flies than an update of Rocket Ship Galileo. John Barnes, who has co-authored a couple of books with Buzz Aldrin, is the perfect guy to tell us a story of a group of misfit teenagers stranded on an Aldrin cycler that uses a low-energy orbit to travel between Earth and Mars. The novel is self-consciously hard SF with interstitial Notes for the Interested that offer extra science infodumps on such subjects as orbital mechanics and reaction mass. The first one also usefully defines the hard-SF genre as one that “when Superman leaped a tall building at a single bound, he kicked a hole in the sidewalk.” He also provides this useful variation on an old joke to explain a common exposition problem in hard SF: “How many characters does it take to change a lightbulb in a hard SF story? One to do it, and one to say, ‘As you know, Bob, a lightbulb consists of a tungsten filament in an inert gas-filled enclosure…’ He says that the Notes for the Interested make it possible to skip such infodumps to maintain the narrative flow. The novel is narrated by Susan, who calls herself Crazy Science Girl but her online rating depends on how much cleavage she shows. Barnes pokes fun at the post-scarcity, always-on culture in which jobs are so few that online celebrity is the only route to success without elite intelligence. 4 stars. ( )

What's great is discovering a book you absolutely love, and then finding out the author has written 30 other books! It’s 2129 and the singularity has happened, so everyone is rich and well-cared for. The result is that fame is the only thing that matters. Some non-famous “loser” teens decide to hijack a spaceship to Mars as a publicity stunt. Problems: it turns out running a spaceship is difficult, and one of the kids is an amoral murderer. A nice blend of hard sf and YA. ( )

I started out really liking this -- the voices of the teens were authentic and funny and the premise intriguing. Essentially, how can I get maximum fame, the only thing these kids really care about. On the way, they lose some friends -- who indulge in happy stuff, a meth-like substance that eventually turns them into vegetables then kills them -- but then find new human connections on their troubled quest for notoriety. I especially liked Barnes' infodumps, which provided excellent and fascinating real facts about the science he is writing about. I'm enough of a geek to really like this. Unfortunately, about half way through, I lost interest -- the characters just didn't hold me. ( )

Three days and I made it, like, 50 pages in. And I just don't care. When there are better, more interesting books calling to me from the coffee table, I just can't justify muddling through something that can't hold my attention for longer than 15 or so pages at a time.

Sorry "Losers," maybe next time.

In the near future, nobody works. Everybody receives enough to live on, and if you want more, you need some form of celebrity. A group of self-styled losers, children of celebrities, need to make their own fame. To do so, they stowaway on a Mars bound spaceship. It's a lark, until they realize that one of their number is truly dangerous. ( )