Dark Knight Station: Origins By Nathan Lowell - A Prequel Story For Fans Of The Golden Age Tales

Dark Knight Station: Origins by Nathan Lowell

Vagrant Station hangs in space with the purpose of serving interstellar commerce. From the outside, it looks like a serene place that belies what is actually happening on the inside. There is much unrest aboard the station as its residents go about their business. The owner of the station only seems interested in lining his pockets with as many credits as possible. Of his two sons, the one who is being groomed to take over when the owner, Edgar Vagrant no longer can, is a malicious predator. The younger of the two, Zachary, is happy to work in the hydroponics lab, but circumstances thrust station management upon him. He’s not ready and knows it. On top of all this is an apparent threat of a hostile movement to unseat the Vagrants from their ownership.

All of that is just the tip of the iceberg in this character-driven story set in Nathan Lowell’s Dark Knight Station: Origins set in the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper universe.

The tale is told from three points of view. Zachary Vagrant is a young man with no interest in being part of station operations. When his brother, Malachi, fails to find and solve problems, Edgar, Zachary’s father and owner of Vagrant Station, taps Zachary to take Malachi’s place. Zachary finds and tries to get the job done, but soon finds himself overwhelmed.

Malachi Vagrant is a man with absolutely no redeeming qualities. He prowls the station just looking for people to hurt and sometimes even kill. In his mind, he keeps lists of people to take revenge on if he perceives they have wronged him, and everyone he encounters seems to wrong him.

Verkol Kondur starts out as a barge captain. The barges go out to the asteroid belt near the station and bring back ore to sell. Kondur’s barge, and most of the others serving Vagrant Station, become inoperable because of the lack of maintenance and the use of substandard supplies. When it is time to deliver a load of ore to another station, Kondur is called on to be the first officer of the delivery ship. We learn he is a good man. Kondur is even-tempered and thoughtful. He treats everyone with respect but is not above snapping them back if the need arises. He receives the offer of a lifetime, but is reluctant to take the task on until he has all the facts, and friends convince him he is right for the job.

Every character in the story, including the minor characters and the walk-ons, have a depth to them that makes them seem real.

The story flows logically and moves at high speed. There is no waste of words and no point that the story becomes tedious. Once one opens this book, there is no stopping, you just cannot set it down.

For those of us familiar with the universe of the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, this will seem like a prequel novel since these events take place before the events of the Ishmael Wang stories. What Nathan actually gives us with this story is a nod to his fans. On his blog, (https://nathanlowell.com/category/catalog/books/) Nathan explains:

“I picked up and combined some of the ideas that fans submitted to write the origin story of Dark Knight Station and how Verkol Kondur came to run it.”

The tone of this book differs from what we are used to in Nathan’s previous writings. It is grittier than his other stories and can make one a little uncomfortable thanks to the exploits of Malachi. That being said, there is no point at which the story is implausible. To those of us that read Nathan’s work, these stories are real, filled with genuine people we care about.

The theme that strikes me most in Dark Knight Station: Origins is how people who care about others can triumph over those who only care about themselves. We never really get the backstory on what happened with Edgar Vagrant to make him such a bitter, miserly, uncaring old man. Maybe we’ll get that story later on.

I give my highest recommendations for this book, and all the rest of Nathan Lowell’s stories.

Nathan Lowell was born in Portland, Maine, in 1952. He grew up in an agricultural community in rural Maine and spent time working on fishing boats along the coast. His first literary success came with the publication of a poem while still in elementary school. That early success was followed by forty years of attempt, rejection, failure, and ultimately giving up on the dream of writing science fiction.

In 2007, with the rise of podcast fiction, he started writing again. He completed his first successful novel - Quarter Share - in January, 2007, and podcast it through Podiobooks.com over February and March, 2007. Since then he has written more than twenty novels, several short stories, and a novella. His podcast novels have been finalists in the Parsec Award five times, and he’s won Parsec Awards for Speculative Fiction (long form) twice - 2010 and 2011.

He’s been a full time, self-published author since 2012 and was elected to the board of directors of the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2018 as Chief Financial Officer.

He holds a BS in Business Administration with a minor in Marketing from SUNY/Buffalo (92), an MA in Educational Technology (98), and a Ph.D. in Educational Technology with specializations in Distance Education, Interactive Media, and Instructional Design (04). He lives in Colorado but travels the world online.

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