Sandra MacDonald The Outback Stars

James Nicoll recommended this highly earlier this year.

There's a way of travelling FTL built by missing and mysterious aliens that takes you around a circuit of worlds, all clearly terraformed and all much like Earth, and all settled from Australia. Space travel is a monopoly of "Team Space", a military organization. A ship has recently exploded and a young female lieutenant called Jodenny is trying to forget that ship and her lost friends get to grips with her new assignment.

There's a lot to like here for fans of military SF, and there's a quite legitimate SFnal mystery of the aliens, and there's a central romance, and if everything works out a bit too conveniently who cares, as there are space ships and dreams of the Australian Aboriginal mythos.

This was a ton of fun without ever rising to being really good. I gather that MacDonald is writing, or has written, a sequel. I hope she doesn't settle down to write a ton of stuff in this universe but keeps on developing her talents in other directions. The best of this was the military bits and the places where the universe seemed to be opening out in different and interesting ways. I don't especially want to see more of this, but I hope she gets to build lots of new worlds in future.

(I did wonder slightly whether the use of the Aboriginal stuff, and the Australian stuff generally, counted as cultural appropriation.)