Then a man who has nothing to do with the Corp, a stranger who calls himself March, enters Sirantha's cell. He claims the Corp's "treatment" is intended to break, not heal, her. That matches her own conclusion, so she lets March take her from her cell. The Corp reacts violently to her escape, but she and March reach his starship, where she makes some unhappy discoveries.

March rescued her because his ship's jumper is dead. The navigator burned out in grimspace, and her crewmates put her down like an Old Terra horse with a broken leg. Jumpers—people with the life-shortening J-gene that lets them traverse grimspace—are rare. So, scared as she is, Sirantha must take March's ship through grimspace, or doom his crew, who risked themselves to save her. But there's another problem. Jumpers form extremely strong and intimate bonds with their pilots, because their minds intertwine in grimspace. Though Sirantha has just lost her beloved pilot, she must entwine her mind with that of March, whose own pilot skills are rusty, and who clearly has no liking for her.

Sirantha brings March's ship safely through grimspace to the world of Lachion, and into a universe of shocks: Not all jumpers work for the Corp. There are secret plans to develop an independent jumper-training school. And, because she is ancient for a jumper—33—and has made more than 500 jumps without frying her mind, there are many who wish to uncover the secret of her survival. Not that she knows what this secret is. But, with the Corp and innumerable bounty hunters seeking her dead or alive, Sirantha helps March and his crew continue their interstellar quest. And she discovers that her feelings for March are moving in an unexpected direction.

A romance writer discovers sci-fi

Under the byline Annie Dean, the author of Grimspace has published three novels and a novella in the romance genre. So it's inaccurate to call Grimspace, the first novel under the byline Ann Aguirre, her first novel. However, it is (barring an undiscovered byline) her first SF novel. And it benefits from her previous novel-writing experience.

In Grimspace, Aguirre creates an intriguingly flawed and sympathetic protagonist in her kickass heroine, Sirantha Jax. Sirantha has a distinctive first-person voice (narrated in present tense). She trades entertaining banter with her rescuer and possible love interest, the emotionally scarred March, and with the bereaved engineer, Dina. Aguirre keeps the latter's justifiable anger at Sirantha from getting out of balance, while avoiding the cliche of the lesbian supporting character who falls in love with the straight-girl protagonist. Aguirre also makes her male lead, March, interestingly dark and driven, without turning him into a bad-boy alpha-male cliche.

Not surprisingly, given Aguirre's earlier fiction, Grimspace has a romantic subplot. The novel could easily be marketed as SF romance (and, in SF-romance fashion, its settings and aliens are more reminiscent of SF movies and TV shows than they are of post-Heinleinian SF literature). However, the romance element is not as strong in Grimspace as it is in, say, Linnea Sinclair's Gabriel's Ghost or Kristin Landon's The Hidden Worlds. Grimspace is focused on its SF jumpers and on its protagonist, Sirantha Jax.

While Sirantha grows and changes, her character isn't as well developed as it could be. Instead of showing readers certain aspects of Sirantha's character, the author instead has her protagonist tell readers about them. For example, Sirantha never really manifests the celebrity jumper's snobbery she ascribes to herself. True, she often puts her own needs and wants ahead of other folks'. But that's not rock-star attitude. That's the behavior of a grief-stricken person who has narrowly escaped death herself, and who is compelled to help people she barely knows and doesn't like. The disjunction between her deeds and words isn't wide enough to make Sirantha an unreliable narrator, which may irritate fans of the type. But most readers should enjoy Sirantha's smart-mouthed company.