SPACE TRUCKER JESS
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MK 25-1
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MATTHEW KRESSEL
Jessian Urania Darger is a kick-ass take-no-shit foul-mouthed too-smart-for-her-own-good sixteen-year-old girl with a chip on her shoulder. She and her daddy have been grifting their way across the verse for years. But when her daddy gets arrested for running crypto-credit scams, Jess is forced to get a job on Chadeisson Station as a roachrunner, fixing starships to survive.
She dreams of a better life, away from her corrupt daddy, so she's been saving up to buy a Spark Megahauler, a huge cargo ship, ever since she saw one in a printer catalog. She wants to run the long hauls, to sail alone into the black and never look back.
But when her daddy goes missing from prison, Jess realizes she just can't let him go, and she makes it her life's mission to find out where he's gone. In an odyssey that takes her across the galaxy, Jess encounters vanished planets, strange societies, inscrutable alien gods, and mind-bending secrets that may change humanity's path forever.
- June, 2025 978-1-958880-27-2
- trade paperback, 6 x 9
- Order copies below, or order ebook and trade paper print copies from these dealers.
- Artwork by Paul Chadeisson
Jessian Urania Darger is a kick-ass take-no-shit foul-mouthed too-smart-for-her-own-good sixteen-year-old girl with a chip on her shoulder. She and her daddy have been grifting their way across the verse for years. But when her daddy gets arrested for running crypto-credit scams, Jess is forced to get a job on Chadeisson Station as a roachrunner, fixing starships to survive.
She dreams of a better life, away from her corrupt daddy, so she's been saving up to buy a Spark Megahauler, a huge cargo ship, ever since she saw one in a printer catalog. She wants to run the long hauls, to sail alone into the black and never look back.
But when her daddy goes missing from prison, Jess realizes she just can't let him go, and she makes it her life's mission to find out where he's gone. In an odyssey that takes her across the galaxy, Jess encounters vanished planets, strange societies, inscrutable alien gods, and mind-bending secrets that may change humanity's path forever.
4 available
"This action-packed outing from Kressel (the Worldmender series) introduces readers to feisty, profane, and resourceful teenager Jess Darger. Her grifter father, Ignatius, taught Jess from a young age how to con people, but she intends to turn over a new leaf. . . . She learns that Ignatius has been shipped off-station to parts unknown. Despite his mistreatment of her, Jess still cares for Ignatius and gathers all her resources to find him, a mission made more complex by careful efforts to conceal the route his transport had taken. Jess’s scrappy narrative voice will put readers in mind of the television show Firefly, and Kressel skillfully balances suspense and humor in the service of a page-turning adventure set in an inventive universe. A sequel would be welcome news to space opera fans."
— Publishers Weekly
"Space Trucker Jess is Space Opera in the grand style, with starships, alien gods, and a heroine in way over her head. The tension keeps ratcheting up page by page, until the whole universe is at stake."
— Dennis E. Taylor, author of Heaven's River
“If Philip K. Dick had a vision of a protagonist as gutsy Katniss Everdeen hyperdriving her way through a Gibsonesque cyberpunk galaxy, he might have imagined Space Trucker Jess—minus the humor and voice that are singularly Matt Kressel’s. Wild, philosophical, inventive and totally unpredictable, Space Trucker Jess is a recklessly paced slow burn that will take you on a journey through a warts-and-all universe where the stakes couldn’t be higher, nor nearer to the human heart.
— Carlos Hernandez, author of Sal & Gabi Break the Universe
"Space Trucker Jess rides the slipstream of a crunchy, satisfyingly articulated human diaspora across the 'Milk,' coding language and technology into an adventure into the outer and inner depths of the universe and a single being. It's a stellar ride with a tough and determined young hero in Jessian Urania Darger."
— Jessica Reisman, author of Substrate Phantoms
"Like its titular protagonist, Space Trucker Jess is foul-mouthed, funny, hungry, lonely, and tripping balls. It’s poetry and philosophy and science and religion and friendship, streaking by at light speed, a radioactive burn in the black. Matthew Kressel’s slangy prose sucks you in like a black hole, and like a black hole, is singular in the ‘verse."
— C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter
"This is a truly action-packed novel, and stuffed with wild ideas. It's told effectively in a slangy futuristic patois, and in present tense . . . What I liked best about the novel was Jess and her efforts at constructiong a new "family" of sorts, and her love for spaceships. That is — I liked the small scale aspects . . . Jess herself was someone to care about -- and, curiously, a somewhat langorous sort of coda, with Jess realizing her real dream after the big climax, was perhaps my favorite part of the book."
— Rich Horton, Strange at Ecbatan
"Space Trucker Jess represents [Kressel's] longest and most ambitious tale set in the “Numenverse,” a far-flung diaspora of humanity across the Milky Way Galaxy . . . Several times when I supposed I had a good handle on Jess’s romp across the ’verse, Kressel yanks the plot in an utterly new direction, leaving me to wonder if Space Trucker Jess is about scrappy space pioneers, found family, or “Daddy Issues,” which is the name of the space ship. But no, maybe it’s really about vanished planets, hallucinogen-fueled religious visions, super-advanced aliens, metaphysics, or the future of enslavement. I could not conceive of how Kressel might pull the wildly divergent plot elements together until he somehow manages to do so . . . If the intrepid adventurers of the future ever create an interstellar civilization, let’s hope they have plenty of Jessian Urania Dargers to diagnose problems arising on their spaceships and to keep their hubspace transceivers, slipstream drives, and spacetime-warping gravplates in good repair. For readers interested in delving more deeply into Kressel’s connected stories envisioning the lives of our space-faring descendants, I suggest checking out a couple of his shorter works: “Now We Paint Worlds” was published on Tor.com and “Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Thankfully, there is plenty of room in Kressel’s universe for many more tales of humanity’s dispersal to far-flung stars."
— Rosemary Smith, Analog
"Lighthearted, adventurous, sometimes inventive space opera . . . This is a third novel and shows considerable promise, with a particuarly appealing protagonist."
— Critical Mass
— Publishers Weekly
"Space Trucker Jess is Space Opera in the grand style, with starships, alien gods, and a heroine in way over her head. The tension keeps ratcheting up page by page, until the whole universe is at stake."
— Dennis E. Taylor, author of Heaven's River
“If Philip K. Dick had a vision of a protagonist as gutsy Katniss Everdeen hyperdriving her way through a Gibsonesque cyberpunk galaxy, he might have imagined Space Trucker Jess—minus the humor and voice that are singularly Matt Kressel’s. Wild, philosophical, inventive and totally unpredictable, Space Trucker Jess is a recklessly paced slow burn that will take you on a journey through a warts-and-all universe where the stakes couldn’t be higher, nor nearer to the human heart.
— Carlos Hernandez, author of Sal & Gabi Break the Universe
"Space Trucker Jess rides the slipstream of a crunchy, satisfyingly articulated human diaspora across the 'Milk,' coding language and technology into an adventure into the outer and inner depths of the universe and a single being. It's a stellar ride with a tough and determined young hero in Jessian Urania Darger."
— Jessica Reisman, author of Substrate Phantoms
"Like its titular protagonist, Space Trucker Jess is foul-mouthed, funny, hungry, lonely, and tripping balls. It’s poetry and philosophy and science and religion and friendship, streaking by at light speed, a radioactive burn in the black. Matthew Kressel’s slangy prose sucks you in like a black hole, and like a black hole, is singular in the ‘verse."
— C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter
"This is a truly action-packed novel, and stuffed with wild ideas. It's told effectively in a slangy futuristic patois, and in present tense . . . What I liked best about the novel was Jess and her efforts at constructiong a new "family" of sorts, and her love for spaceships. That is — I liked the small scale aspects . . . Jess herself was someone to care about -- and, curiously, a somewhat langorous sort of coda, with Jess realizing her real dream after the big climax, was perhaps my favorite part of the book."
— Rich Horton, Strange at Ecbatan
"Space Trucker Jess represents [Kressel's] longest and most ambitious tale set in the “Numenverse,” a far-flung diaspora of humanity across the Milky Way Galaxy . . . Several times when I supposed I had a good handle on Jess’s romp across the ’verse, Kressel yanks the plot in an utterly new direction, leaving me to wonder if Space Trucker Jess is about scrappy space pioneers, found family, or “Daddy Issues,” which is the name of the space ship. But no, maybe it’s really about vanished planets, hallucinogen-fueled religious visions, super-advanced aliens, metaphysics, or the future of enslavement. I could not conceive of how Kressel might pull the wildly divergent plot elements together until he somehow manages to do so . . . If the intrepid adventurers of the future ever create an interstellar civilization, let’s hope they have plenty of Jessian Urania Dargers to diagnose problems arising on their spaceships and to keep their hubspace transceivers, slipstream drives, and spacetime-warping gravplates in good repair. For readers interested in delving more deeply into Kressel’s connected stories envisioning the lives of our space-faring descendants, I suggest checking out a couple of his shorter works: “Now We Paint Worlds” was published on Tor.com and “Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Thankfully, there is plenty of room in Kressel’s universe for many more tales of humanity’s dispersal to far-flung stars."
— Rosemary Smith, Analog
"Lighthearted, adventurous, sometimes inventive space opera . . . This is a third novel and shows considerable promise, with a particuarly appealing protagonist."
— Critical Mass
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR