Detour

Title: Detour (2026)
Author: Jeff Rake // Rob Hart
Publisher: Random House Worlds

Book jacket: A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind.

Joe says: Detour is a smart, entertaining ride that lives in that sweet spot between serious science and popcorn propulsion.

Detour is a speculative sci-fi thriller that moves faster than a rocket achieving orbit and barely bothers with warning lights before stage separation. The premise is sleek, the cast is fun, and the whole thing reads like a Netflix series that mysteriously drops all episodes at once and ruins your weekend plans. Master author Rob Hart and TV showrunner Jeff Rake tag-team with the writing, delivering a story that punches hard, pivots fast, and then smiles politely while you’re still catching your breath. Fair warning: this is one of those cliffhanger endings that shoves you through the airlock and waves goodbye while the credits roll.

Set a few years beyond the 2020s, the story follows the crew of the Starblazer (but not the Yamato nor the Argo) on a mission to Titan, Saturn’s enigmatic moon, to scout potential settlement. Rake and Hart both go into wonderful high-level detail over Titan’s atmosphere and terrain, offering a refreshing (ahem) detour from the genre’s obsession with our friendly neighborhood red planet. The crew itself is a multicultural grab bag: astronauts, a scientist, a cop, and a social media celebrity, because even the far future apparently refuses to escape influencer culture. Before you can say “Beam me up, Scotty” the crew is off to Saturn when they encounter… well… that would be telling. Suffice to say, once the astronauts arrive home, reality itself appears to have taken a wrong exit.

Tonally, Detour lives in that sweet spot between serious science and popcorn propulsion. The DNA is obvious but well used: the grounded science of The Martian, the paranoid edges of Capricorn One (still underrated, still worth renting), and the multiverse-bending zaniness of Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter. Yet the novel never feels derivative. Hart and Rake keep the pacing aggressive, the science digestible, and the emotional stakes personal, making the book just as viable as a beach read as it is a late-night “one more chapter” trap.

By the time the final pages hit, Detour has proven itself as a smart, entertaining ride that understands momentum is everything. The final beat is applied with a steady hand rather than a sledgehammer. Buckle up, check your mirrors, and don’t trust the road signs. This detour is wholly intentional.