Reviewed by Alija Turkovic for Readers' Favorite

Gordon MacKinney’s Memory Mine hooks you immediately with a wonderfully unsettling premise. Dalton, an aerospace engineering washout, initially signs up for the Mars mission just to reunite with Anna, his lover and sole driving motivation on the red planet. He expects nothing more than a low-profile journey across the stars. But a sudden death unexpectedly elevates his responsibilities to running the operations as surrogate captain aboard the spacecraft Epimetheus during the voyage. From there, the corporate rules governing this eight-month awake-voyage quickly turn suffocating: the ship’s complement of eight researchers and four crew members are locked together, stripped of their birth names, assigned single-word monikers, and strictly banned from discussing their pasts. What begins looking like an extreme corporate team-building exercise takes a dark turn once Dalton realizes the ship’s gaming simulator hides a covert medical technology called R.E.A.L., designed to read and rewrite traumatic memories. As these forced memory-rewrites trigger psychological breakdowns and mayhem, Dalton is left scrambling to maintain control. With the ship’s digital assistant, TINA, lingering in the background with suspiciously quick suggestions, Dalton is forced to protect a crew that’s rapidly forgetting who they are.

Gordon MacKinney’s Memory Mine is a slow-burning, clever sci-fi novel that builds a pressure cooker out of hidden corporate agendas. The plot development moves like a runaway train once the cracks in the crew’s behavior start to show. The unembellished, urgent writing style drops you right into the middle of the conflict without wasting time on huge info dumps. The world-building relies on the realization that large corporations will weaponize isolation for data collection. Dalton’s frantic attempts to manage a deteriorating situation make him a highly relatable protagonist because he is visibly out of his depth. I love how the pacing transitions smoothly from a tense workplace drama in deep space to a high-stakes corporate conspiracy that threatens the very core of identity. It is fascinating to watch the psychological chain reaction play out as the characters’ altered minds clash with reality. If you want a space-bound thriller that leans into psychological fractures rather than relying on external alien threats, this book is worth your time.