‘How To Steal A Galaxy’: A Fun, Escapist Sci-Fi Rom-Com Heist

I have been harsh — though fair — on second instalments of SF series over the years (whether the Cerulean Chronicles, the Kithamar Trilogy, Sand Chronicles, or The Matrix). In any genre, the follow-up is a tricky task, so when Beth Revis released the second of her rapid-fire Chaotic Orbits trilogy I thought I would give it a read to see how the author of thousands of pages of writing advice would go about the task.

First, though, I wanted to be appropriate about expectations. After an exhausting election season I wanted something quick and light—a properly fun and escapist read. Revis, most famous for her best-selling Across the Universe YA novels, producing a novella trilogy with some deliberately pulpy titles, seemed set to deliver exactly that. I was not looking to How To Steal a Galaxy for mordant satire or for an epic world-building quest but for the advertised “heist turned rom-com.”

And it delivered.

If you have not read the trilogy’s opener Full Speed To a Crash Landing (August 2024) — and I had not — I will refrain from spoiling it except to say that our protagonist Ada Lamarr (named by Revis after Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr) is a sexy, mercenary scavenger who is one step ahead of good-looking, intelligent government operative Rian White in a larger plot that involves saving Sol-Earth while playing fast and careful with what is “technically legal.”

How To Steal a Galaxy successfully renews Ada and Rian’s teasing tryst at a huge charity gala on Rigel-Earth where an obnoxious trillionaire named Strom Fetor is about to announce a huge new initiative to clean up the polluted waters of Sol-Earth. In the Chaotic Orbits universe, Earth is barely surviving its ongoing pollution and climate crisis, but humanity has populated a number of planets that it calls Earth while appending the name of the star around which it revolves.

Each of the different Earths has its own personality. Centauri-Earth was the first settled, Gliese-Earth was a hard slog to make liveable, Rigel-Earth was “super easy to set up” and as a consequence is pretentious and wealthy — “most everyone on Rigel-Earth is a dick.”

In her acknowledgments Revis does say “[s]orry for cussing even more in this one, Mom,” but that’s about the level of the unapologetically crude and amusing Lamarr.

The focus of the book remains tight on the will-they-won’t-they couple. Lamarr is always a step ahead of White — as well as ahead of the reader. Occasional other characters appear with lines and actions, but Revis refuses to be sidetracked more than is necessary to provide distractions to deceive both White and reader. Not every piece of dialogue or plot works, but Lamarr is engagingly self-conscious enough to rescue anything sub-optimal and the plot zips along at a deeply satisfying pace.

On a purely commercial level, writers always have to strike a balance between supply and demand. For contemporary writers who regularly interact with their readers like Revis (or Martha Wells or Becky Chambers) one way to do that is to write relatively frequent novellas. Indeed, with novellas in August (Full Speed), December (How to Steal) and April 2025 (Last Chance to Save the World), Revis seems to do just that. In both timing and content, Revis’ output seems ideally calibrated to serve an audience that may have been Young Adults a decade ago but who are now ready for fast-paced and cheeky adult fare.