2.75⭐️

Another book where it feels like the author came up with some great ideas—a generation ship mystery in which human memory is stored and decanted into mortal bodies—but lacked the skill to make a good story out of it.

I get that it’s a novella, but the elements of the world do not hang together to form a rich and believable environment. I had so many questions about the social structure of the ship, its governance, its ideologies as I was reading it. Even as sci-fi, it fails for me: everything from the memory decanting and human cloning (?) to the memory cocktails and automated chef and the ship’s AI felt arbitrary brainstorm ideas rather than part of a world. You don’t have to spend hundreds of pages explaining every aspect of the world in a novella (or even a novel). But the bits and pieces of the setting that is revealed to me should be relevant to the story and characters, and should give me a glimpse into an interconnected and layered world. Arbitrary coziness and fake science all around.

Most disappointing of all was the mystery element. There was no suspense at all. Even though I didn’t guess who did it, the issue was that I was not compelled to want to figure it out. The author then revealed each new piece of information in the dullest way possible. My reaction to a reveal was “oh, okay then. So now what…” No suspense.

Light spoilers!

When the protagonist pieces everything together and has a conversation with one of the implicated people, that character then gives a half-baked “you can’t trust the system.” This is my least favorite way to incorporate themes into a book! Throughout the entire book, the author doesn’t give the reader any information or event to really set us up to think about the “system” or the authority that cops/detectives have. And we’re supposed to be engaged and moved by this sudden ACAB speech? Idk, man. Obviously ACAB but there was no buildup to that.

I also had some complaints about writing quality, but it was bearable for the novella length. As with most recent publications by newish authors, I think the editor is responsible for 80% of my complaints!!!

Some things I liked and wanted more of:

• the descriptions of waking up in “someone else’s body” and feeling disconnected from its physiological reality. As someone who is critical of mind-body dualism, it would have been interesting to take this thought experiment where the two are literally separated further.

• Apparently the ship has its own currency + universal basic income, but people can make profit which gets taxed by the ship. How does all of that work? Who came up with it? How did they divide up non-cash resources on the ship to begin with?

• Some actual sapphic relational depth instead of describing a bunch of hot women, one tragic romance in the past and one jealous evil femme. Come on.