Starhawk, by Jack McDevitt, was first published in 2013. It’s part of the Prescilla Hutchins stories as a prequel. The story follows Hutch as she qualifies as an interstellar pilot and how she tries to find her way in her career. If you’ve read Engine of the Gods, Chindi, or Omega, you’ll be familiar with Hutch later in her career.

As I read the previously mentioned stores, I wondered about how Prescilla had become Hutch, the revered interstellar pilot. We don’t get much of the story about what happened while she was training, but I think we get a good sense of it from her qualification flight with Jake. The first painful lesson she had to learn was that a good pilot sometimes has to sacrifice himself for the good of everyone else. We also get to see the toll that takes on people who knew and loved the pilot.

Through Jake, we get insights into why pilots are often single and why their relationships seldom work out; they’re world is just too different from that of the rest of us. After losing a close pilot friend, Jake re-evaluates his life choices and tries to settle down to a peaceful life on the ground. That comes to an end when he is called upon to pilot a research mission to a new world.

Hutch also learns that playing politics, as a pilot, is a good way to get blacklisted in her profession. Kosmik, an interstellar company, is terraforming a planet for human colonization, but they’re wiping out all the existing life in the process. This causes an outrage among activists who resort to terrorism to stop Kosmik from going any further. Hutch refuses to take another load of needed cargo to the world where Kosmik is working. As a result, nobody else will hire her and she’s stuck on the wheel doing administrative work.

I liked getting to see how Hutch grows into her job. You can really feel her eagerness to get out among the stars, but I think she really needed the time on the wheel to find herself. There are plenty of twists and turns to keep you in the story throughout the novel, too. I highly recommend this one if you’re a space opera fan. Jack McDevitt proves, again, that he belongs up there with Clarke, Asimov, and Bova.