This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Justin Woolley, author of Shakedowners.

About Shakedowners: Some starship captains explore strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilisations. Some lead missions of discovery through wormholes to the other side of the galaxy. Then there’s Captain Iridius B. Franklin, someone who spent too long seeking out strange new bars and new alien cocktails.

After graduating bottom of his class at Space Command Academy Iridius Franklin hasn’t had the glamorous career he envisioned, instead he hauls cargo ships full of mining waste, alien land whale dung, and artificially intelligent toy dogs across the stars.

Iridius does have talent though – he is exceptionally good at breaking starships. So, when not hauling freight, he is captain of a shakedown crew, a skeleton crew used to test newly constructed ships for faults before the real crew takes over.

While on a routine shakedown mission aboard the FSC Gallaway, soon to be pride of the Federation Fleet, Earth is attacked by an unknown alien life-form. With the galaxy in chaos, Captain Iridius B. Franklin finds himself, unqualified, understaffed and completely unprepared, in command of the most advanced starship in the galaxy.

Now, he just needs to not break it.

About Justin Woolley: Justin Woolley has been writing stories since he could first scrawl with a crayon. When he was six years old he wrote his first book, a 300 word pirate epic in unreadable handwriting called ‘The Ghost Ship’. He promptly declared that he was now an author and didn’t need to go to school. Despite being informed that this was, in fact, not the case, he continued to make things up and write them down.

Today Justin is the author of the Australian set dystopian trilogy The Territory Series consisting of the novels A Town Called Dust, A City Called Smoke and A World of Ash, the young-adult science fiction adventure We Are Omega, the science-fiction comedy Shakedowners, and is now adding to the darkness of the 41st millennium for Black Library.

Justin lives in Hobart, Australia with his wife and two sons. In his other life he’s been an engineer, a teacher and at one stage even a magician. His handwriting has not improved.

This week’s picks:

* Justin: The Lovecraft Investigations (BBC Podcast)

* Tracy: Flood – They Might be Giants

* Patrick: Only Murders in the Building – Hulu

Links:

* Justin Woolley on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester