Opi’s World (Flying Crooked series book 5) by Geoff Nelder (book review).
‘Opi’s World’ by Geoff Nelder is the fifth and latest novella in his space opera ‘Flying Crooked’ book series. Yet it is not space opera as many would know it!
Let’s start with Opi. Adah, who was born with a mix of human and alien Kep genes, imagined her on his homeworld. She was instantiated with the help of another alien species, the Keeps. Opi is nearly human but has some key abilities that she is still developing, such as having a vocal range that can stun people.
She and Adah are on a globally warmed and semi-drowned Earth. Adah decides to return to his homeworld of Kepler-20k and, much to his regret, leaves Opi behind. She wants to oversee the growing colonies of keeps that have been established to deal with the aftermath of the global warming. The keeps themselves are also developing, and nobody knows how they will turn out on Earth.
Pirates capture Opi as she sails down the former Suez Canal in a small boat with her boyfriend. They aim to extract a ransom for her. Opi does the only thing she can; she starts a charm offensive against the pirates while secretly calling on her beloved keeps for help.
Adah’s ship, Flying Encourages The Grass To Grow Untrampled, or Grass for short, pinches into a completely dark space that sucks energy out of the ship. Adah and the Kep pilot, known as KepG1, explore the darkness to find a way to stop the energy drain that is going to freeze them to death. Orienting within it proves difficult; escaping from it is even more so.
Turns out they are in a massive organic orb.
This novella builds ideas upon ideas. There were plenty of them in the first four novellas in the series, for which Geoff gives a very useful summary before launching into the main story of ‘Opi’s World’. Some ideas are fun, others of a serious nature. Some are believable for us more normal humans. Others appear as the handwavium of alien-given science understanding and technology, and yet, they have a hint of substantiveness that makes us want to believe they can be true in the distant future.
Nelder clearly enjoys wordplay, as demonstrated by phrases like ‘…long before Babbage babbled his coding with Ada Lovelace’ and ‘Signing on: CAN the Chicane’.
It is surprising, given how densely packed the novella is, that so much science as we know it today is correct. Only a very rare slip-up is made.
The example that stuck out for me was the existence of a black dwarf in chapter 10. Black dwarfs of the stellar kind cannot exist for about another ten quadrillion years, way before the timeframe of ‘Opi’s World’. I only learnt this after I wanted to use a black dwarf in a story, but my hopes of doing so were dashed. But heck, it made very little difference to the story.
Nelder is one of the few science fiction writers who uses senses other than sight to the full. After the first few chapters, I pseudo-smelt Opi’s natural body odour of lemons whenever she was on the page and even when there was decaying brown kelp in the story’s foreground.
Humour is used to good effect throughout and helps heighten the reader’s appreciation for the more serious and sad parts. This is a rare quality for any writer.
As the story progresses, the climate-changed, keep-infested Earth develops in some interesting ways. It leaves the reader to imagine how it will develop further beyond the end of the story.
‘Opi’s World’ is both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. If only for the enjoyment of a vastly different type of space opera, ‘Opi’s World’ is well worth reading.
Rosie Oliver
October 2025
(pub: LL-Publications, 2025. 190 page paperback. Price: £8.99. ISBN: 978-0-99755-498-4).
check out website: https://geoffnelder.com/
