Noah Chinn Reviews: Will Save the Galaxy for Food by “Yahtzee” Croshaw

“Yahtzee” Croshaw is best known for his video game reviews series Zero Punctuation (so named because of the way it’s spoken, edited, and sped up so that you have a hard time knowing where, if any, punctuation exists).

One fun thing about listening to him read his own audiobook, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, is that if you speed up the narration speed to x1.5, he pretty much sounds the same as he does on his show. In fact, listening to him at x1 speed makes him sound downright slow and plodding.

But I digress. Will Save the Galaxy for Food is a satirical science fiction adventure about my favourite kind of space trope—the captain of a small ship just trying to make ends meet. Only… spaceships are kind of obsolete now, what with Quantum Tunnelling being able to teleport people wherever they want in an instant. A rather boring and unglamorous instant. The golden age of space travel has come to an abrupt end.

This has made for an awful lot of out-of-work and nearly out-of-work pilots who were once heroes of a hundred worlds, having defeated countless enemies and saved millions of lives. Now their only means of income is desperately trying to appeal to tourists, literally hounding them at QuanTunnel gates with placards promising tours filled with grand stories of the golden age.

In fact, things are so bad for pilots and pirates alike that many of them have come to an arrangement where pilots will let themselves get attacked by pirates so that they can dump their passenger’s cargo as part of their “escape” and then split the proceeds in secret.

What’s worse, some blowhard named Jaques McKeown has been writing extremely popular adventure novels and stealing all the best stories of all the unemployed and underemployed pilots out there, making him the most hated man of the increasingly unused space lanes. Only nobody has ever seen him…