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“Suppose We” follows the crew of a deep-space vessel approaching the Kepler-20h system after more than a millennium of travel. It opens with the protagonist, French exo-linguist Gaston Poirer, awakening from a thousand-year hibernation to find his spacecraft shadowed by mysterious objects. This sets up a novel about a spaceship crash landing on a mysterious planet inhabited by aliens, and the subsequent questions about the nature of extraterrestrial life this provokes. What Gaston and his friends discover there defies their expectations in ways both subtle and profound.
The aliens of the book—if they are aliens—don’t behave according to the usual genre playbook. They’re neither hostile invaders nor benevolent teachers. They simply exist, indifferent to human assumptions about how first contact should unfold. Gaston emerges as the story’s main character—a gentle, kind intellectual who constantly quotes French and whose scientific training wars with his growing awareness that some mysteries resist rational explanation. When he quotes Madame de Staël (“L’amour est l’emblème de l’éternité”) while floating in an alien jungle, the moment risks being pretentious but manages to avoid it due to the characters’ likability.
The tension between Gaston’s contemplative approach and Commander Penn’s militaristic reflexes drives the novel’s central conflict. Penn represents humanity’s worst impulses—the tendency to destroy what we don’t understand, to mistake aggression for leadership. He brings to mind Colonel Miles Quaritch from Avatar. His decision to attack the unknown objects with an “imploder” weapon provides probably the story’s most genuinely disturbing moment.
Nelder’s alien world feels authentically strange without becoming incomprehensible. The lilac skies and half-gravity jungles of Kepler-20h are described with a geographer’s eye for ecological detail. The novel’s humor works because it emerges naturally from character rather than forced cleverness. When he reflects that “perhaps his increasing irascibility and overtly military hard line was a side effect of the hibernation,” he’s describing his commander, but the gentle irony extends to all of them.
The supporting characters—particularly the female crew members Em and Delta—add necessary perspectives without feeling like token additions. Their reactions to Penn’s increasingly erratic decisions provide crucial counterpoints to the central philosophical debate. Furthermore, Nelder’s prose strikes the right balance between scientific precision and poetic sensibility. The writing displays the kind of craftsmanship that elevates genre fiction into something approaching art.
The novel’s contemplative pace won’t appeal to every reader. Those seeking space opera excitement will find “Suppose We” too introspective. The open-ended nature of the alien encounters, while thematically appropriate, leaves many plot threads deliberately unresolved. Some may find the overuse of French excessive, and Penn’s militaristic stance and character occasionally one-dimensional, though it serves the story’s thematic purposes. But these are minor quibbles with a novel that succeeds brilliantly at what it sets out to do. “Suppose We” represents the kind of thoughtful, challenging science fiction that reminds us why the genre matters and has a place in independent publishing. In an era of movies with sophisticated special effects, Nelder demonstrates that the best science fiction has always been about ideas rather than spectacle.
“Suppose We” won’t change science fiction, but it might change how some readers think about humanity’s place in the universe. The first novel in the “The Flying Crooked” series, it’s a novel for fans of “The Martian” and “Interstellar” that tackles sci-fi through a lens of realism. In a genre too often concerned with providing answers, Nelder has written a gripping story that asks the right questions with intelligence, humor, and genuine page-turning drama. That’s more than enough to recommend it.
You can get your copy of “Suppose We” here!
