A memorable voyage through a brutal human society, bizarre alien environments, and elastic realities.
In Ramsay’s debut SF novel, explorers venture to distant planets to exploit life-forms who may have a few tricks of their own.
Near the end of the 21st century, the invention of “Drag Engine” spaceship propulsion (which is effectively teleportation) grants humanity access to countless worlds, but it also reveals hidden “glitches” in the universe—leading to the disturbing conclusion that reality is a vast software simulation engineered by forces unknown. Despite this existential blow, mankind plods on, following base instincts of greed, power, lust, and self-gratification. Liquid, shape-changing artificial intelligence machines called “ancillaries” are used as servants, sexual partners, pets, and even repositories of human memories. Everyone who could afford it has already fled Earth for other planets while the moon is now a huge library for universities devoted to new sciences. Mercury is home to greedy “clans” eager to exploit alien invertebrates: “We learned the entire universe was actually overflowing with life—arthropods, arachnids, cephalopods, crustaceans, cnidaria and insects in a trillion incredible varieties.” The curious absence of vertebrates leaves humanity as the cosmos’s apex predator. In this milieu, one-time refugee Isaiah Erickson, a Columbia University anthropologist who’s also a prosperous, high-tech arms dealer, ventures to the distant planet of Conrad in search of valuable, hallucinogenic alien wasp venom, to which he’s addicted. Meanwhile, Chloe Keating, an idealistic grad student hoping to explore and investigate endangered species, gets tricked into following a previous, doomed expedition to the muddy planet Hobbes to harvest enormous centipedes. Her mission and Isaiah’s fatefully intersect.
Ramsay crafts brisk, edgy prose that splits storytelling chores across three first-person narrators: Isaiah, Chloe, and a somewhat anguished ancillary who has the memories of an adventurer who perished while on insect safari. Readers may be able to detect influences from Pokémon cartoons as well as Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, although other worlds described in Herbert’s fiction, such as the lethal Pandora in The Jesus Incident(1979), might make for more apt comparisons. Overall, Ramsay offers a work that’s a feat of considerable imagination and attitude—a stimulating tale of interplanetary intrigue and monsters, human and otherwise. Some genre connoisseurs may say that the future humanity he invokes—with its betrayals, obsessions, and sham replicas of animals, people, perhaps even the material world itself, seems like something out of Philip K. Dick’s realm of paranoiac dystopia. A semiderelict New York City that’s down to its last 50,000 people, for instance, would seem right at home in the film Blade Runner. Readers will want to know more about this strange future in which the sexes seem strongly segregated, suggesting that ancillaries have replaced domestic partners everywhere. At the same time, they’ll quietly dread whatever answers Ramsay conjures, and that’s quite an accomplishment, in accord with the credo of one of the duplicitous characters: “Space is dark and full of wonders. Wonders and horrors.” The author includes a “Bestiary” of creatures referenced in the text, illustrated by Sonntagbauer.
A memorable voyage through a brutal human society, bizarre alien environments, and elastic realities.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-69-375726-4
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Don’t Give Up the Ship Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A laugh-out-loud “why choose?” romance of intergalactic proportions.
What’s worse: to be killed by a lion or dropped on a strange planet and forced into an alien breeding program?
Dorothy Valentine had a happy career in wildlife biology, studying meerkats in their native environment and living on her own terms. That is, until a hungry lion decided to make her into lunchmeat. Abducted from Earth at the moment of her death—along with the lion who attacked her—Dory becomes Subject 4 in an alien research project. The goal: to extend the life of the Sankado species, whose females were left behind on their dying home planet. With "a few modifications," Dory is a prime candidate for Sankado breeding…except for the secret birth control implant in her arm. To make matters more complicated, she hooks up with two Sankado men, Sol and Lok, while under the influence of an alien love serum, becoming their Zhali—a mate for life. Luckily, they don’t mind sharing Dory or one another. Just when their three-way honeymoon is about to kick off, however, Lok’s old enemy rears his ugly head, putting all of their lives in peril. Lemming’s characterization really shines here. Sassy Dory, sensitive and whip-smart Sol, and the dominant, flirtatious Lok all feel fully realized, as do Toto and Intern—the lion who tried to eat Dory and the birdlike alien responsible for observing her. The sex scenes are spicy, if perhaps too few and far between, and the dialogue is snappy and realistic.
A laugh-out-loud “why choose?” romance of intergalactic proportions.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593818633
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.
This debut novel, the first of a projected trilogy, blends science fiction, fantasy, gothic chiller, and classic house-party mystery.
Gideon Nav, a foundling of mysterious antecedents, was not so much adopted as indentured by the Ninth House, a nearly extinct noble necromantic house. Trained to fight, she wants nothing more than to leave the place where everyone despises her and join the Cohort, the imperial military. But after her most recent escape attempt fails, she finally gets the opportunity to depart the planet. The heir and secret ruler of the Ninth House, the ruthless and prodigiously talented bone adept Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chooses Gideon to serve her as cavalier primary, a sworn bodyguard and aide de camp, when the undying Emperor summons Harrow to compete for a position as a Lyctor, an elite, near-immortal adviser. The decaying Canaan House on the planet of the absent Emperor holds dark secrets and deadly puzzles as well as a cheerfully enigmatic priest who provides only scant details about the nature of the competition...and at least one person dedicated to brutally slaughtering the competitors. Unsure of how to mix with the necromancers and cavaliers from the other Houses, Gideon must decide whom among them she can trust—and her doubts include her own necromancer, Harrow, whom she’s loathed since childhood. This intriguing genre stew works surprisingly well. The limited locations and narrow focus mean that the author doesn’t really have to explain how people not directly attached to a necromantic House or the military actually conduct daily life in the Empire; hopefully future installments will open up the author’s creative universe a bit more. The most interesting aspect of the novel turns out to be the prickly but intimate relationship between Gideon and Harrow, bound together by what appears at first to be simple hatred. But the challenges of Canaan House expose other layers, beginning with a peculiar but compelling mutual loyalty and continuing on to other, more complex feelings, ties, and shared fraught experiences.
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31319-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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