Theft of Fire, a 2024 Prometheus Best Novel finalist, is now available as an audiobook.
Author Devon Eriksen has announced the belated recording and availability of the audiobook, which is available on Apple Books, Google Play and Kobo.
Billed as the first novel in Eriksen’s Orbital Space series and blending hard SF, romance, mystery, suspense and even comedy, Theft of Fire offers a Heinleinesque space opera portraying a free-frontier space culture where big risks can lead to big rewards.
“Was it easy? No. Was it cheap? Also no. But thanks to the support of Kickstarter backers, the Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1 audiobook exists, and I am so delighted to announce it now,” Devon’s wife Christine Eriksen wrote in a blog update on her husband’s website, devoneriksen.com
Devon directed three actors – Dain, Emma and Ashley – in the audiobook to bring to life the three central characters in Theft of Fire.
“People with hundreds of hours of audiobook listening under their belts are saying this is the best audiobook they’ve ever heard, and I couldn’t be prouder of what Devon and his voice actors created,” she wrote.
Eriksen’s novel – impressively, also his debut novel – also became a Dragon Award finalist and received rave reviews and a broad readership, unusual for a first novel.
“Think Leviathan Wakes – if written by Heinlein.” – Analog magazine
“A great read – hard SF by a retired engineer.” – John Carmack, creator of Doom.
The first three chapters of the audiobook, which runs 16.5 hours, can be sampled here on BookFunnel.
As the Prometheus Blog review by Eric S. Raymond and Michael Grossberg notes, one ingredient in the novel’s success was the way Eriksen mastered the classic Heinleinesque mode of SF exposition by indirection, allowing his propulsive and inventive novel to focus more on its three well-developed central characters and their complex, evolving relationships.
Set mostly on an asteroid-mining ship headed toward the outer solar system in search of what may be hidden alien treasure, the story revolves around Marcus Warnoc, the ship’s stubborn captain, and Miranda Foxgrove, a smart and savvy heiress who’s hijacked his ship and locked him out of its computer controls.
Miranda hijacked Marcus’s ship after her discovery of a faint signal from the edge of colonized space that could lead her to vast further wealth and shift the balance of power in the alien-artifact wars that have previously transformed civilization – most notably, through the creation of fast fusion-drive spaceships that have propelled the solar system’s industrialization and colonization.
Coping with the limits of her gene-twisted, pint-sized and highly sexualized body and fiercely desiring success independent from her super-wealthy and privileged family, Miranda struggles to forge her own destiny while remaining in control of Marcus’s ship.
Marcus, a resourceful loner operating as a pirate beyond the law and haunted by regrets about lost friends and family, finds himself simultaneously attracted to and irritated by Miranda amid his ongoing obsession with regaining control over his ship.
As the Prometheus Blog review observes, “Marcus and Miranda’s love-hate relationship of mutual manipulation, betrayal, misunderstanding and denied attraction adds delicious subtext, charm and flavor to an already engrossing story.”
WHEN WILL THE SEQUEL BE PUBLISHED?
So what about the long-awaited sequel?
Ever since Theft of Fire was published to acclaim, fans have been eagerly awaiting the publication of Box of Trouble, Eriksen’s direct sequel and Book Two in the projected four-novel Orbital Space series.
Although Eriksen had largely finished a first draft of his more-than-130,000-word manuscript by the summer of 2025, his efforts were delayed by a family crisis (his wife’s cancer, happily now in remission).
Based on Eriksen’s latest blog update, it now looks like Box of Trouble is likely to be published in 2026. Here’s hoping.
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