The night before they are due to leave, Jang wakes Brinx and leads him down five flights of stairs to a basement where no hybrid is allowed. Through a long window they watch technicians in sealed suits cut open the sacs hanging in rows of glowing tanks and lift out small, shivering, bony children. One of them has the thin wing of skin that marks the boys’ own kind. Jang wants Brinx to see it so that he never forgets where their story started, and the scene is quietly devastating. The Intergalactics by Erik Jon Slangerup goes on to crash a ship, loose a planet’s worth of monsters and stage a breakout, but it keeps returning to that basement, and to the question of what a child grown in a tank is worth.
The Friend Who Goes Missing
Brinx is thirteen and has spent his whole life on a research base where children are tested, sometimes to death, by a company that made them. Jang, a year older, is the closest thing he has to a brother: the boy who once pushed him away from a trapdoor and has watched his back ever since. They have promised to get out together. Then the transport carrying the graduates goes down in the wild, and within hours Jang is gone, carried off on a sliding wreck in a cloud of dust.
The book is strongest when it lets that loss drive Brinx. He refuses to count his friend among the dead, and the novel rewards the stubbornness with small, carefully placed signs that Jang is somewhere ahead of him. Every one of those clues lands, because Slangerup has spent the opening chapters making the friendship feel lived in: the teasing, the shared rituals, the way Jang’s optimism props Brinx up when the base gives him nothing.
What surrounds the search is a planet designed for wonder as much as terror. Grimulus has two suns that tint the sky pink, a ring of broken moon that drops debris without warning, and a string of airborne islands that grind against each other as if they were breathing. In The Intergalactics by Erik Jon Slangerup, beauty is nearly always a trap, so readers learn alongside Brinx to distrust anything lovely, and the rare moments when the wild simply leaves the children alone carry real force. Huddled by a fire in a cave on the first night, Brinx notices the silence where the machines used to be, and for once in his life he falls asleep without anyone watching him.
The Misfits Erik Jon Slangerup Assembles
Searching means relying on strangers. Goz, an armoured girl who broke Brinx’s leg during a test and may or may not have meant it, turns out to be fiercely loyal. Sig, a climber with a tail, cannot stop joking even when he is terrified. Rigel, ten years old and able to see through rock, blames himself for Jang’s loss until Brinx tells him plainly that it was nobody’s fault. That exchange is the book’s emotional hinge. A boy who has been taught to keep score learns to let someone off.
The bonds that form here are a textbook case of found family, and the novel takes them seriously. When Brinx slips away alone, sure that he must not drag the others into danger, their reply is the warmest passage in The Intergalactics by Erik Jon Slangerup, and the gentle, blushing crush between Brinx and Goz is pitched perfectly for readers of ten or eleven.
Why Erik Jon Slangerup Calls Them Intergalactics
The title arrives late and earns its place. The guards on base have dozens of insults for the children, and one of them, a careless slang word, turns out to be a shortened label for crossbreeds sourced from many galaxies. An exiled scientist explains that the name was meant to belittle but in truth describes something more than human, and the survivors adopt it. It is a lovely reversal, and it reframes everything before it.
One earlier passage of The Intergalactics by Erik Jon Slangerup prepares the ground for it. Washing off the filth of the crash under water the group has cracked from a plant, Brinx keeps scrubbing long after he is clean, working backwards through every smell that has clung to him until he reaches the chemical tang of the tank he came from. It is an image of a boy trying to wash away his origins, and it gives the later revelation about names its charge, because by then readers understand how much of himself Brinx has been taught to be ashamed of.
It also opens the book’s real argument, which is about corporations. The adults who run the company see the children as stock, and the novel says so directly, letting a character warn that a business exists only to enrich itself. That is bold material for a middle-grade adventure, and The Intergalactics by Erik Jon Slangerup never softens it. A later moment, in which an enormous, ancient creature in a mushroom forest simply heals Brinx and moves on, wanting nothing, makes the counterpoint without a word of lecture: not everything in the universe treats a child as a resource.
Where the Book Runs Thin
The weaknesses are real, though. The supporting survivors who die along the way are sketched so briefly that their losses barely register, and the group moves on within a page or two, which sits oddly beside the care spent on Jang. The scientist’s tour of his hideout is the book’s least graceful stretch: a long walk during which the plot’s secrets are simply explained, where the rest of the novel shows rather than tells. And the gross-out comedy, from vomit in the cargo hold to a running joke about the digestive aftermath of a minor operation, is so constant that some readers will find it wears thin by the final act.
Erik Jon Slangerup and the Summer of 1977
Slangerup has written for children for more than two decades, starting with picture books, and this is his third novel for young readers. In his acknowledgments he traces his love of science fiction to being taken, aged eight, to see Star Wars in California in the summer of 1977, and the influence shows in the book’s dusty frontier planet, its battered freighters and its gang of underdogs stealing a ship. He also thanks fellow creature-makers, which explains the sheer variety of the planet’s wildlife.
Aladdin, the Simon & Schuster children’s imprint, published it on 29 September 2026, aimed at readers of eight to twelve. Nothing yet marks it as the start of a series, but the final page leaves a great deal of universe unexplored.
Where It Leaves You
Parents should know that young characters die often, if briefly, and that captivity, cruelty from adults and a grim plan for the children run through the final third. Within those limits, The Intergalactics by Erik Jon Slangerup is a generous, funny and genuinely thoughtful adventure, and its best pages belong to friends choosing one another over the futures they were sold.
Readers who loved the adoptive household of ghosts in The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman will recognise the same faith in chosen families. Older siblings might move on to Unwind or The Maze Runner, both about young people discovering what the adults have planned for them, or to Scythe by Neal Shusterman, which asks harder questions about who gets to decide a life’s value. The Intergalactics by Erik Jon Slangerup asks the young version of that question, and answers it with a great deal of heart and very little doubt.