2025 space opera, third in its loose series. Dr Sunya Song has
travelled to the edge of the galaxy to work on the investigation, and
evacuation, of the Baomind, a massive alien data repository orbiting a
dying star. She hadn't expected the pirates.
There's a great deal going on here, and Bear is able to wrangle
it all so that the book never feels overcrowded. There's family drama,
as Sunya's wife has brought their two teenage children (and the cats)
out to the research site too. There's the puzzle of the Baomind's
language (it is at least a form of communication, but learning more is
hard). There's another mystery, which may be a part of that or
something else entirely. There's an old professional and personal
rival. And there are piratical Freeporters, human chauvinists who are
stuck in the competition-is-all mindset that most humans (and others)
have got away from since being able to put their neurochemistry under
conscious control.
I hate it when people with terrible belief systems turn out to be
reasonably intelligent. It upsets my sense of the natural order of
the universe, which is to say: that everybody smart should agree
with me.
This is a setting with many technological miracles, but they are
miracles that have rules. A protective suit, or an FTL drive, works
like this, and if Bear doesn't include a full technical appendix I
am at least confident that the thing won't suddenly manifest a new
operation mode just when it's convenient for the plot. When the
radiation-blocking fungus gets overloaded, it will fail in this way…
There is a diversity of people among the humans, never mind the
aliens: some are good with firearms for various reasons, handy when
the pirates start to board the habitat, some are functionally
non-combatant, and others know that their skills lie in other fields.
"Print me a cricket bat."
"A cricket bat?" Salvie said incredulously.
"An aklys. A tetsubō. A shillelagh. Don't bother me about the ethnic
details; I want a hitting stick."
It's slow and lush; I never felt impatient to see where things were
going, but rather was happy to let them unfold in their own time.
Sunya agonises: is her old rival really up to something illegal, or
just her usual tricks of social dominance? And is Sunya's own
experience biasing her evaluation to excess? Just how possible is it
for a human to get away from the tendency to turn an incomplete set of
evidence into a narrative, and then look for things to reinforce that
narrative?
And just how do you design an emergency pressure suit for a cat?
Not-Toby tried to murder me with his fishhooks, but luckily for me
his hardsuit had a rescue handle and no little diaphragm ports for
kitty claws to poke through. Somebody thought that design through, I
tell you.
There are passing mentions of people and places from the other books,
but I think this book can effectively stand alone. I think, on
balance, I liked Machine very slightly more, but that spoke more
directly to specific points about which I care; I'd recommend this one
too, and I may go back to reread Ancestral Night to see if I enjoy
it more from my current perspective.