Tim Pratt’s Axiom trilogy ( The Wrong Stars, The Dreaming Stars, and The Forbidden Stars) is a trio of excellent, modern, space-opera pulp adventures, with a compelling cast and a satisfying amount of solving problems by blowing them up. I’m gutted that there don’t seem to be any plans for more novel-length works in this setting – and at the same time delighted by the novellas collected in The Alien Stars and Other Novellas, which form a coda of sorts to the trilogy. The Alien Stars collects three stories: “The Augmented Stars”, “The Artificial Stars”, and the titular “The Alien Stars”. Each involves or focuses on a different character from the original trilogy, and each is told with a slightly different style – though with equal amounts of panache.