Somehow, through all these different elements, Nova Drift gives me space warfare the way it’s written up in something like Light, the gorgeously doomy sci-fi novel by M. John Harrison. Like Light, Nova Drift takes you to a universe in which quantum physics has pushed ship-to-ship combat into the realm of the truly eldritch. It’s a realm in which ships blink out and disappear into K-space, and where entire wars unfold with great consequence, and yet are somehow bundled into less than a second of human time. Nova Drift is beautiful and dangerous and full of surprises, in other words. And that’s not a bad recipe in itself.