Kit was afraid to speak aloud what he’d seen—a man, trapped and screaming—because it sounded so crazy. And yet this was his life: teleportation, asteroids, other realities. What was one more thing in the mix? Why not a tortured ghost? [loc. 1966]
Kit is a runner, which means he can teleport to any coordinates he's given, usually with some illicit package, or a mob boss's gift (a stressed and vomitous dog) to his girlfriend. Runners, who teleport by moving through a dark featureless space called the Nowhere, are rare: they've made limited space colonisation possible. Dr Solomon Lange, a scientist working at QSF, an orbital facility in lunar orbit, has vanished while running experiments on the Nowhere: the sole witness to the accident, Emil Singh, has been thoroughly questioned by Quint Services. Now he's due to be returned to QSF, sedated and blindfolded -- and Kit is the runner chosen to transport him. But the Nowhere isn't empty...
Edge of Nowhere is an effective combination of M/M romance and science fiction. Emil is a sensible botanist who's loyal to his team, while Kit is a purple-haired, flamboyantly-dressed orphan who lives under the radar, mostly working on the wrong side of the law, unwilling to trust anyone. As Quint Services' nefarious schemes come to light, and Kit is menaced by some kind of entity in the Nowhere (could it be connected to the 'poltergeist' that haunts QSF17?), both men have to reassess their assumptions and prejudices -- and consider the possibility of a multiverse.
I liked this enough to immediately buy the sequel. There is a delightful (though outrageously neglected) cat named Niels Bohr; a former pop star who runs a bar with her wife; some extremely extra fashion choices; a lightly-sketched future (the end of the 21st century) in which climate change seems to have destroyed New York City; an appalling techno-trillionaire; and a light sprinkling of romance tropes. The science-fictional side of the novel was satisfactory -- yes, the science of the Nowhere is a bit handwavy but that's as much to do with our viewpoint characters as with the underlying logic -- and the romance works nicely. I'm not sure who recommended this to me, but thank you!
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