Astronauts are extraordinary people: masters of self-control, willing to sacrifice everything in their lives for the chance to undertake science fair-type experiments with lettuce and snails, so long as it’s happening in space. If you’ve ever dreamed of doing a stint at the International Space Station, but you have the kinds of dreams where everything slowly and inexorably goes wrong, Inner Space is the book for you. The story, with all its twists and turns, unfolds during a single ISS expedition helmed by American mission commander Lucy Poplasky. Under her command are three other Americans, one of whom is a tech billionaire paying to be on board, and two Russian cosmonauts. Her main points of contact with Earth are NASA Deputy Director Steve Ayers, whose eye is always on his own career objectives as much as on the safety of the crew, and Lucy’s husband Nate, who’s a full-time dad to their young daughter.

Author Jakub Szamalek’s other job has him doing narrative design and writing for video games, notably The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015). His skill at visualizing and fleshing out fully three-dimensional physical environments comes to the fore in the tight confinement of the International Space Station. The claustrophobic environment of the ISS is vividly conjured, in all its grottiness and clutter. “In general,” writes Szamalek, “people associate space vehicles of any kind with technology: plastic, metal and glass. They seem devoid of life, sterile, filled with dry, lifeless air. Nothing could be further from the truth” (p. 100-101). There’s a lot of game-like mechanics to understand here: the connections between station modules, how fluids and solids behave in microgravity, and how packing and storage work for complex missions where every surface is both a floor and a wall. The hard constraints of life on the ISS mimic a gameplay rulebook, where the challenge is to puzzle out solutions from among the narrow paths available. Szamalek does a marvelous job of building tension as the possibilities close in, and successful resolution comes to seem hopelessly remote. The astronauts themselves are stuck in some endless iteration of Farmville, constantly attending to mundane chores or routine agricultural experiments in response to an inflexible clock set by Houston (for the Americans) and Korolyov (for the Russians). Once the action gets underway and the stakes mount, the characters’ options for response are severely limited.

Inner Space is set more or less in the present day, between August and December of 2021, concluding shortly before Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Geopolitical pressures are a factor in the plot and in the psychological reasoning of the major characters, as well as those making decisions at NASA and Roscosmos. The book gains in richness from its melding of different threads and genres: hard science fiction with psychological thriller, politics with personal ambitions and grievances, and a human story about marriage and career. The handlers at NASA also contend with the necessity of courting a fickle public for continued funding. There’s an enjoyable digression midway through about a hypothetical press event where the cameras zoom in on some hapless flight controller with a large mustache, spawning the viral hashtag #AstronautStache, until it all comes crashing down in a storm of “human interest.”

Szamalek (who himself sports an impressively groomed and luxuriant ‘stache, if we can trust the evidence of his author photograph) was born in Poland, educated in the UK, and currently lives in Canada. Inner Space was written in his native Polish and published in 2023 as Stacja. This English-language edition is translated by Kasia Beresford working under the HarperVia imprint, which focuses on international voices. Poland has its own set of deep antagonisms with Russia, complicated by ties of Slavic heritage. Linguistically, Polish and Russian share some vocabulary but have distinct features (with Polish using the Latin alphabet, not the Cyrillic). There’s a dizzying feeling to reading an English translation of a Polish-language novel by a Canadian which features American protagonists in conflict with Russians in space: The perspective is shifted just enough to offer a fresh view on a classic post-Cold War scenario.

The author’s voice in this translation is crisp and highly readable, with a good mix of narration and dialogue. Descriptions are straightforward, never veering off into poetic rhapsodies, just setting the scene so that the reader can be correctly oriented for the ensuing action. Szamalek does make some choices that hamstring him a bit, in that he divides the story into time-stamped segments (e.g. “ISS—August 4, 2021, 21:15 GMT”), which forces him into telling the tale in strict chronological order, with events unfolding piecemeal. He also chooses a close third-person point of view, within which we’re privy to the thoughts of one character at a time, rotating between Lucy, Steve at NASA, and Nate back at home. Close third-person is a good choice for a psychological thriller with stakes for multiple people, as we get a window into the motivations and internal sensations of various players. One limitation, though, is that it can lead to situations where characters stand around thinking about their backstory, usually while ostensibly involved in some other task, but it can’t be anything too absorbing—so we spend a fair bit of time in the opening pages accompanying our protagonists in boring activities like waiting for a press conference to begin, or riding a bus. The action does pick up tremendously after page thirty or so, and it’s well worth the wait. But this may not have been the most engaging way of getting the backstory onto the page.

Still, and as its title suggests, character work and the quotidian are key to the novel. The cramped and relentlessly scheduled conditions on the station, for example, are mirrored in the everyday mindset of Lucy’s husband Nate, who suffers from an anxiety disorder. He’s been prescribed a benzodiazepine for this, but hasn’t used it, as he’s solo parenting and worries about being incapacitated should any emergency arise:

Also, Nate was afraid that if he took a pill, even just once, and it seemed to work, he would not be able to find the strength to put the medicine aside. Being in his head was like swimming in an icy pool: as long as you were in it, as long as you kept moving, it was still bearable, but once you got out, even very briefly, you wouldn’t be able to bring yourself to return. So Nate had to keep swimming. All the time. Even though it exhausted him. (p. 106)

Likewise, astronauts’ microbiomes are happy to contaminate surfaces and proliferate in the recirculated air and water. Therefore, a mission-critical astronaut assignment is to perform frequent deep cleaning:

Once a week, the astronauts would arm themselves with cloths and disinfectant and wipe every surface and rail … The microbes perished in their billions; then, at lightning speed, the battle survivors multiplied and refilled the ranks—so the whole process had to be repeated. Thus, although humans had yet to encounter aliens, they were already waging war to guarantee the supremacy of their species in space. (p. 101)

Throughout the novel, Szamalek expertly builds excitement by incrementally ratcheting up the stakes, unveiling interpersonal histories, and hinting at well-kept secrets and hidden motivations. All around, Inner Space is a gripping, tense thriller that builds high stakes without resorting to a lot of graphic violence. As a female reader, I was pleased and relieved that, while Lucy’s gender plays a role in the psychology of events, at no point is she subjected to unwanted sexual advances or sexualized attacks—no need for a trigger warning on this one, at least for that specific trigger. The climax is dramatic when it arrives, and even the wrap-up scene back on stateside ground manages to sustain tension. Not all unraveled threads can be neatly tucked away in the end, but the conclusion is satisfying. As in a successful space mission, Szamalek overcomes all manner of challenges to bring in the payload—a fabulous story.