THE SIXTH NIK

A girl on an interstellar intelligence mission faces a series of peculiar and grotesque dangers.

Sisilla, the narrator of Kraus’ first foray into SF, is a Niffakoq, one in a line of golden children selected for special missions, their brains enhanced with six “niks,” small implants that bestow deeper reserves of intelligence and empathy. These are effectively suicide missions—Niffakoqs traditionally die before their teens. But of course Sisilla isn’t traditional, starting with her deliberate (and gory) removal of one nik from her eye socket to quell a headache. Whether she’s strengthened or weakened by one fewer nik is the open question this brash, if overlong, novel strives to answer. Sisilla is tasked with heading to the planet Fém on behalf of a “trigov” to learn why it’s gone incommunicado. Assisting her is a literal motley crew that hews to space-opera type: A security guard named Murder 005, a buxom engineer named Jayne Mae Marilyn Bardot, and a captain who may be Sisilla’s father. But Kraus, who’s cut his teeth on horror novels, lets the ickiness abound: Their ship, The Sickness, is made of a squishily organic material, deaths tend to arrive in spectacularly bloody fashion, and the internet is so troll-infested that even a moment’s search means exposure to violent, traumatizing imagery. Kraus seems to have borrowed heavily from both Ender’s Game and the Alien franchise for worldbuilding purposes, though he adds a few of his own peculiarities—his vision of Fém, a “metal planet” where the waters resemble oceans of chains, is inspired. Still, much of the (convoluted) story alternates between the gross-out and the whiz-bang, obscuring the deeper themes of parentage, womanhood, and mythology that Kraus explores. Le Guin covered similar territory more smoothly, with less need for stomach-churning digressions.

A hybrid novel that messily blends the uncanny and the otherworldly.