Why this indie space opera hooked me, with Sebastian Howarth on food, found family and the PanTerran Saga

Every so often, a book arrives in my inbox that completely catches me off guard.

The Synthetic Hunger was a cold review request. An email landed asking if I fancied reading a 440-page, 130,000-word indie space opera from South African author Sebastian Howarth. It was his debut novel, the first in a planned series, and the premise sounded interesting enough that I agreed to give it a shot.

A few days later, I was halfway through and emailing back to say that I was completely hooked. Then I demolished the rest.

This is, without question, the best book I have read from a cold review request.

It was so good that when I finished it I was fuming mad. I was angry because the sequels weren’t written yet and I craved more (I was literally addicated to Dune in 2025).

And because I had questions, I did something slightly different with this review. I sent a few of them directly to Howarth. I wanted to know where this universe had come from, why its crew felt so believable and, perhaps most importantly, whether there was more coming.

So this isn’t quite a review followed by an interview. Instead, I’ve laced Howarth’s answers through my own experience of reading the book.

Turns out, some of the things I loved most were very deliberate.

Meet Lorian Vance, Space Pirate

Lorian Vance bursts into The Synthetic Hunger feeling immediately familiar.

He’s handsome, self-assured, operating somewhere in the murky space between legitimate courier and space pirate, and initially has more than a whiff of Han Solo about him. He has the ship, the swagger and the ability to get himself into situations that a more sensible captain might perhaps have avoided in the first place.

I liked him immediately.

But Vance becomes considerably more interesting once that initial roguish-space-captain impression starts wearing off. Because he’s actually a really good captain.

His crew trust him completely, but the book gives us reason to believe that trust rather than simply telling us it exists. Vance respects the people working alongside him. He trusts their judgement and abilities. He listens to them. When things go spectacularly wrong, you understand why these people continue to put their faith in him.

And that crew might be my favourite thing about the whole book.

Well.

Almost.

Actually, Pip Is the Best Character

Sorry, Vance.

Pip wins.

Pip is a remarkably human android and, without wandering into spoiler territory, the absolute MVP of The Synthetic Hunger. No Pip, no resolution. Give that android his flowers.

What I loved most, though, wasn’t simply Pip’s usefulness to the plot. He gets a genuine character arc, and it’s a lovely one. In one of the first chapters he gains a ‘sarcasm module’, you know you’re in for a good time.

He’s surrounded by characters who could easily have become supporting crew-shaped furniture but don’t. Juno and Cassian have distinct personalities, motivations and relationships with one another. They feel like people who existed before we arrived and will continue existing whenever Vance isn’t looking at them.

There is a real found-family quality aboard the Audacity.

So I asked Howarth about it.

Interestingly, he didn’t begin with enormous character biographies detailing every moment of their lives. He told me that he had their personalities and some basic outlines in place, but discovered much of their history through writing them:

“As I went along I found the characters telling me their backstories through their reactions to situations.”

But the part of his answer that really made the Audacity click for me was where that familiar dynamic came from.

“It feels like the friend group I had in my late teens and early twenties– people I would have done anything for, and who had my back in any situation.”

That makes complete sense.

The Audacity doesn’t feel populated by a protagonist and his collection of side characters. It feels like a group of people who know each other extremely well. They annoy each other, trust each other and function as a unit because they have history.

And then Howarth throws that little found family directly into an absolute nightmare.

Excellent.

Who Actually Feeds Everyone in Space?

This is where The Synthetic Hunger gets clever.

Science fiction has been sending humans into space forever, and food is one of those problems the genre can conveniently handwave away. Star Trek gives us replicators. Other stories discover conveniently habitable planets or invent some futuristic nutritional substitute and get on with the lasers.

But The Synthetic Hunger made me think about something surprisingly mundane:

What the hell are billions of humans actually going to eat?

There is no guarantee that humanity spreading across space means discovering planet after planet capable of producing food with the nutritional requirements necessary to sustain human life. Colonising somewhere and feeding everyone who lives there are two very different problems.

Howarth’s answer is the PanTerran Nutritional Authority.

And that is a horrifyingly believable answer.

Humanity has become almost entirely dependent upon a single enormous organisation for its food. Suddenly this isn’t just a background piece of science-fiction worldbuilding. Food becomes infrastructure. Food becomes dependency.

Food becomes power.

When I asked Howarth where the idea came from, it turned out I was looking at the concept almost backwards. The PanTerran Nutritional Authority wasn’t created to service the plot.

It was where the whole idea began.

“I once read […] that all conflict, from the earliest history to the present, boils down to access to, and production of, food. It’s the basic survival metric for any civilization.”

From there, Howarth began imagining something even more unsettling:

“I started to envision this empire controlled not by a government, but by an almost commercial body which controls the food supply.”

That’s the bit I can’t stop thinking about, because the PanTerran Nutritional Authority doesn’t need to be some cartoonishly evil galactic empire. Humanity needs it. That’s considerably more interesting.

And then The Synthetic Hunger takes that dependence and makes it worse, because this food doesn’t simply sustain people… it can teach them.

And if something can effectively put information into a human being, the obvious horrible question becomes:

What else can you put in there?

There is something fundamentally disturbing about the idea of essentially coding human behaviour through eating. You can’t simply opt out of food. When the mechanism being exploited is a basic requirement for staying alive, the entire idea of consent starts getting very uncomfortable very quickly.

I asked Howarth about that too. His response made me laugh:

“I completely agree with you about the unsettling aspect of the connection between food, learning and control. That freaked me out too!”

Good.

It should.

But he also revealed something rather important about where the PanTerran Saga is heading. The immediate catastrophe gave him something that could be confronted within one novel. The Authority itself is different:

“This in itself is something to cast in an adversarial light, however I felt that this was a longer term story than a single novel.”

Oh.

Oh no.

Because The Synthetic Hunger might resolve its central story, but humanity is still dependent upon the people controlling the food.

That’s a much bigger problem.

Thank God Nobody Stops to Explain 600 Years of Galactic History

There is a trap waiting for anyone writing a massive science-fiction or fantasy universe.

Worldbuilding.

I like worldbuilding. I like huge fictional universes. I like lore. What I do not particularly enjoy is when the actual story grinds to a halt because I apparently need three chapters explaining the political history of Planet Whatever before anyone is allowed to open the airlock.

The Synthetic Hunger is over 130,000 words long. It does not feel like it. That might be one of the biggest compliments I can give it. The plot moves.

Howarth has clearly built a much larger universe than the tiny portion we’re seeing here, but he resists the urge to show us his homework. Places, technologies, political structures and different variations of humanity emerge because the crew encounters them. We learn what matters when it matters.

And again, this was intentional. Howarth told me:

“My approach to the worldbuilding in this universe is to build it, brick by brick, through the story itself.”

He specifically contrasted his approach with stories such as The Lord of the Rings, where history can be communicated directly because understanding that history is essential to the present story. That’s not what he wants to do here.

Instead:

“I’d like the reader and the crew to mostly discover the universe together.”

That’s exactly what The Synthetic Hunger feels like and why I was hooked so quickly. I didn’t feel left out the loop.

Howarth already knows that there are strange places, different variations of humanity and all sorts of other nonsense waiting somewhere beyond what we’ve currently seen. But we aren’t getting the PanTerran Wikipedia entry upfront.

We’re on the Audacity.

We’ll see it when they do.

As Howarth puts it, he hopes that discovering the universe alongside the crew will make the reader “feel like they are part of the group of friends.” It works. And interestingly, that approach doesn’t just make the worldbuilding better. It makes the tension better too.

This Stops Feeling Like Star Wars Surprisingly Quickly

When I asked Howarth about his cultural influences, I was quietly expecting Star Wars to appear somewhere.

It didn’t.

Shows what I know.

Instead he named 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Time Machine, Battlefield Earth, The Bicentennial Man and Brave New World among the works that had stayed with him.

His explanation of what he took from those influences was more interesting than whether I’d successfully guessed them:

“I feel that sci-fi which completely explains the mechanics of the astonishing technologies contained within robs the readers of some of the magic and wonder.”

That’s also why there’s no familiar Earth or recognisable Solar System anchoring the PanTerran universe. Howarth wanted the freedom to build something without, as he put it, being “held to the yardstick of reality.”

But my earliest impression of The Synthetic Hunger was still something approaching Star Wars. Basic, I know.

Vance helped. Cocky space pirate, eccentric crew, adventures aboard a ship called the Audacity. I settled very comfortably into the idea that I knew roughly what flavour of science fiction I was reading.

I did not.

Because the jokier, swashbuckling opening gradually gives way to something much more unsettling.

At some point, I stopped thinking about Han Solo and started thinking about Nightflyers, not because the stories are particularly alike, but because The Synthetic Hunger develops that same horrible feeling of being trapped somewhere while knowing that something is wrong and not knowing enough to understand what.

Crucially, neither does the crew.

The book doesn’t give the reader a convenient head start. We’re trying to piece together what is happening at roughly the same time as Vance, Juno, Cassian and Pip.

Which takes me straight back to Howarth wanting the reader to discover things alongside the Audacity. It’s a suspense device.

From the moment Vance and Pip board an abandoned ghost ship in the middle of space, only for the lights to turn on mid-exploration, the tension shifts and very quickly the plot becomes a mystery.

Once things start going wrong, we’re stuck in the uncertainty with them and Howarth doesn’t immediately release that pressure. Even once we start getting answers, the situation keeps evolving, which means that despite being a pretty chunky book, I kept doing the dangerous:

One more chapter...

Then another…

Then another…

Also, There Are Guns and Robots

I don’t want all this talk of food infrastructure, corporate control, artificial intelligence and human behaviour to make The Synthetic Hunger sound like 440 pages of people sitting around discussing the ethics of nutritional policy.

Stuff blows up.

There are guns. Robots. Computer attacks. Coding. Big action sequences. Horrible situations requiring extremely quick solutions. The crew find explosives another character calls ‘mini-nukes’. Cool, right?

And this is another reason the book worked so well for me. The ideas underneath it are interesting enough to sit and pick apart, but Howarth hasn’t forgotten that this is also supposed to be a space adventure.

It’s fun.

It’s tense.

And when it needs to go big, it goes big.

So Obviously I Asked How Many Books There Are

When I finished The Synthetic Hunger, I had one extremely important professional-journalistic question for Sebastian Howarth:

Essentially, how much more of this are you giving me?

His answer:

“I don’t have an exact number of books yet.”

Sebastian.

Don’t do this to me.

Fortunately, he continued:

“I’m estimating around eight books in the main series.”

Eight.

This is acceptable.

And he’s not simply planning eight disconnected adventures with the same crew. Howarth already has an outline for where the wider saga is going, characters we haven’t met yet and ideas for places and people the Audacity will encounter as the larger story develops.

There’s even a potential sideline series centred on a character we haven’t met.

According to Howarth:

“I have so many great ideas for wonderful places and people the crew will encounter, each with their own stories and parts to play in the overall tale.”

Most importantly:

“I have already started writing the second instalment in The PanTerran Saga.”

Excellent.

Because The Synthetic Hunger manages something I desperately want from the first book in a series: it tells me a satisfying story while making the universe beyond that story feel enormous.

I don’t need seven books explaining what I just read.

I want seven books because I want to know where the Audacity goes next.

The Best Kind of Surprise

There’s one last thing about this book that I can’t quite get over.

Sebastian Howarth started writing The Synthetic Hunger in October 2025.

The bulk of the original story was written before December 31st.

A 130,000-word space opera.

Sebastian, are you okay?

His description of the process is perhaps reassuring:

“Writing this book involved a lot of late nights and veritable buckets of coffee.”

Yep. There it is.

That initial burst was followed by months of revisions and, in Howarth’s words, “I don’t know how many drafts” before the book became the version I eventually received.

It’s his debut novel.

And I think that’s part of why this one has delighted me so much.

Apparently I’ve got another seven of these to get through.

Sebastian, get writing.

Check out the latest blog posts:

• The Synthetic Hunger Review: Well, This Was Unexpected
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