This is the sequel to Ancestral Night, but there will be no spoilers. This is a "takes place in the same universe" kind of sequel, where we get some recurring characters rather than a continuation of the same story.
The bad news is that this book does not feature space cats (though Bear assured me on Twitter that she has plans for further books featuring space cats). The good news is that we get more mantis cop.
This book takes place about 5 years ans after the events of Ancestral Night. The main character is Llyn Jens, a trauma doctor at Core General. She and her team have been dispatched aboard the Synarche Medical Vessel I Race to Seek the Living, better known as Sally (the name of the shipboard AI). They've picked up a distress call from the centuries-old Terran generation ship Big Rock Candy Mountain, launched before humanity got it's collective shit together, discovered FTL, and joined the galactic community at large. When they get there they find a few thousand humans frozen in cryo, a primitive AI suffering from memory loss and doing it's best to care for them, another Synarche ship docked with the Rock but the crew and shipboard AI in some kind of stasis, a weird tinker-toy like machine filling many corridors of the ship, assiduously pulling away from Dr. Jens and reforming behind her, and assorted other mysteries.
But those mysteries can wait, because there's a few thousand lives to save. Llyn is a dedicated (if extraordinarily cynical) professional, and the Synarche in general and Core General in particular considers any cost worth it to save sentient lives, so they roll up their sleeves (metaphorically, cause the vacuum of space and all) and get to work.
And naturally the aforementioned mysteries don't wait, and Llyn finds herself wishing that all she had to do was successfully thaw out a few thousand culturally backwards corpsicles and see about getting them integrated into society.
Despite Jens’ cynicism, this is a wonderfully optimistic book. Those who have read Ancestral Night will be familiar with the Synarche, a United Federation of Planets-like galactic government where all sentient beings are valued and treated with respect, whether they’re human, giant praying-mantis thing, sentient tree, or any other flavor of life under the many, many suns.
A major part of Ancestral Night was “rightminding,” the idea that humanity (and indeed most species) are able to rise above crude evolutionary survival instincts and achieve true civilization through deliberate control of brain chemistry. The ability to literally turn off emotions that aren’t socially helpful is an interesting idea, and a troubling one. It’s not as central an issue here as it was in Ancestral Night, but it’s still present.
Overall this was a great read. It started out a bit slow, but really picked up speed around the middle to the point where I stopped being a functional human being for several hours and could only communicate in grunts because I couldn’t put it down. Jens is a wonderful character to spend time with, and her assorted multispecies friends make for great company.
The pun-lover in me particularly appreciates that Starlight, the sentient tree that runs the hospital admin, is referred to by the Terrans aboard Core General as “the administree.” Bravo on that one Bear.
As I said, this was wonderful. I give it a solid 5 stars, though if “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is still stuck in my head in 48 hours I might have to drop it down to 4.
Bingo categories: Optimistic (hard mode), Published in 2020 (it’s due out in October), Big Dumb Object (easy mode).