Orders of Magnitude

By: Yuval Kordov

Narrated by: Ian Grady

The Moon was once colonized. Now it lies silent—mostly. When a mysterious radio signal echoes from the abandoned colony of Serenitatis, the Vatican dispatches an elite squad of space marines to investigate. Paladin-Captain Samuel Cohen’s mission is simple: locate survivors, uncover the signal’s source, and get out. But beneath the sterile domes, something ancient stirs—an adversary that challenges not only the mission but the very foundations of his faith. Orders of Magnitude explores the resilience of the human—and holy—spirit in the darkness of the void. For fans of Event Horizon and Richard Paul Russo’s Ship of Fools.

©2025 Yuval Kordov (P)2025 Yuval Kordov

the faith

jew/catholic faith and self sacrifice in the service of God, I'm impressed with the writing and description inner turmoil. All in all a pretty good story

Doom but Catholic, and very very good

Do you like space marines like in Doom, Halo or Starship Troopers? Well what if they were commissioned by the Vatican and traveled with an exorcist as they go to investigate haunting spiritual portents that began an evacuation from the moon? This feels like a scifi version of “Hellmouth” by Giles Kristian, only much much better!

This is the hook for Yuval Kordov’s Orders of Magnitude, an excellent religious, scifi horror novella.

We follow a space marine named Samuel who is ethnically Jewish but converted to Catholicism as he and the other soldiers of the Order of St. Michael investigate what happened on the moon colony that caused a panicked exodus. While the book is religious scifi, it’s by no means didactic and certainly isn’t attempting to proselytize. This is also partially because in his authors note Kordov clarifies that he is not in fact Catholic but is Jewish, and is simply writing within a Catholic worldview for this novella.

This is also because the novella is a part of what is called the incense-punk movement. Rather than writing scifi that ignores serious religion in the far future as many authors have tended to do, incense-punk looks to deal with future problems through the ancient lenses of theology, using real world religions as their guide.

This is done to excellent effect in this novella. The marines pray, observe the rosary, ponder what God’s will is, and wrestle with their own sin nature. (All of which are uniquely religious experiences)

Overall I loved this novella. If this is incense-punk, count me in. This novella delivers more than a gimmick of “scifi + religion” and I’m glad that it does. It’s pretty trim, and I found hard to justify the cost for a story this short (as I often do with novellas) but it’s well worth the read and I definitely recommend it.