Humanity has been evicted from the Earth by a benevolent super alien, and now we all live on arks, forbidden to ever land on a planet and destroy it again. That is a hell of a premise. And it gets worse. The main character, Eryn, is the pilot of a navigational ship and she wants to find out what happened to a lost survey crew that included her sister.
This was a great space opera romp, for sure. I have seen Powell discuss this book on twitter and other places, and he nails the existential dread of nuclear annihilation we all felt growing up in the 80s. I enjoyed the characters, I enjoyed the world building, but there was something about the book that wasn’t working for me and I honestly can’t put my finger on exactly what it was.
There were whole sections in the first 2/3 of the book where I found myself thinking “I am reading a book and these are the characters acting out their roles in the book.” Not a great feeling to have when you trying to be immersed in a world. I have had this also happen in movies, where I suddenly become aware that I am watching actors portray characters on the screen. I don’t know what it was about this book that made me feel this way.
Slight spoiler about general features of the book, no direct giveaways, in this paragraph; reader beware. One thing that kind of put me off on this book was the fact that a lot of the characters get introduced, built up, and then all of a sudden die, not even on the page, but off to the side. There isn’t anything wrong with this, but it happened frequently enough that I actually found myself getting annoyed at the arbitrariness of their deaths. That being said, one of them did come back, and another seemed like they were going to come back but didn’t. And it wasn’t clear if the one that did come back really came back or if it was all in her mind. Too bad, because that was a book favorite of mine. Spoilers end.
Fortunately, as we neared the end of the book, the tension and pacing ramped up and all of a sudden I cared deeply about the characters, their plight, and whether or not Eryn was going to be able to save the day.
Powell does love his sentient starships, and his “magic system” for FTL travel was explained but not in any real detail, which was fine for me. However, the book falls pretty squarely in the space fantasy, soft SF realm as opposed to the (slightly) harder SF of Adrian Tchaikovsky. (Not sure why I am reading so many great British authors these days but I will take it.) And in this book it was clear that he was trying to be explicit about including non-white, non-heterosexual characters. Not because he is trying to hit a target, but it is worked into the plot as a non-issue, as it should be. That may actually be one thing where it took me out of the book, though. There were some sections where I was very aware that I, a white male heterosexual, was reading the portrayal of a female lesbian as written by another white male heterosexual.
I found several call-outs to popular fiction, including “I don’t know, I can imagine quite a lot” which is almost a direct quote of Han Solo toward the end of A New Hope. There were several other Easter eggs in there too, which I do appreciate, but perhaps it means I read all of his tweets.
I am only going to give this one 4 stars. It worked for me, but there were parts that … just… didn’t. And 4/5 is still a good score, and I already bought the follow up book set in the same universe (though not a direct sequel). I may just go ahead and start that one now.