At only a hundred and sixty pages, this debut from Ness Brown is a short novel, but it's a tasty one that promises much. The elevator pitch is pretty obvious'Alien' on a generation starshipbut it's written well, with an impressive lead character and a couple of shifts away from the norm that were highly welcome. Those shifts arrive early, as quickly as the first chapter.
For one, this generation starship, the Calypso, along with many sister ships in the Goddess Flotilla, isn't taking us to the stars as we might expect. It's been there, done that and Proxima b didn't work out the way our species had collectively hoped. Quite how badly it went might be best illustrated by the fact that it only took fifty years to get there, but it's been twice that long on the return journey already and they're still passing Cassiopeia. I don't think I've ever read this approach in forty years of reading science fiction, an inherent admission of failure in a utopian subgenre.
For two, to emphasise how far this utopian vision has failed, the Calypso's captain has utterly given up on his job. He's Noah Albright, massively experienced and highly capable, but he locked himself inside his quarters before the book began and simply refuses all contact or responsibility, even if it comes from his daughter, Jacklyn, who has taken up the reins in his absence and is doing a solid job of it, even though she's young, female and, if the cover art is accurate, black. She's certainly a very empowering character, not because she can do anything but because she's always willing to give it a shot, even though the Calypso is already in trouble and quickly finding more of it.
Part of that trouble is that the ship, and its sisters, are damaged, limping their way through space on a fraction of their power. The inherent knock-on effects from that revolve around this becoming a true generation starship, on which people are born, live their entire lives and die, as it chips away at the light years. That means sustainability is paramount, most obviously food and air and water, but also space and changes to the load. Ness Brown doesn't dig too deep into this, because she has other troubles in mind, but it's always there as a backdrop, down to a riot that needs to be quelled.
The most obvious is that there's an external threat of unknown origin, something they're calling a set of engagements. It's not aliens with rayguns buzzing the ship, though this does turn into a sort of first contact story. It's more like waves of power that may or may not be natural in origin but are causing serious impact to the stability of these vessels, so small and insignificant in the vast void of space. It's affected communications, so the Calypso can't talk to most of the fleet and only gets the most garbled messages from her closest sister ships.
More to the point, what they are getting is a pretty consistent message: don't open the door. What door isn't clear and what might be behind it even less so, beyond a clear threat. And, as they try to figure this out, and one tech thinks he might have finally tapped into something useful that might help, the ship starts to make strange noises, as if something's in the walls. From that obvious pitch of 'Alien' on a generation starship, it's not difficult to imagine what, but Brown tackles this well, in a consistently clear science fiction voice even if it inherently means dipping at least one toe into an entirely different genre, that of horror. There's horror here, sure, but it's a science fiction novel.
It's a quick read, as the length might suggest, with never a dull moment. I've read novels twice this length that covered less ground, even from award-winning authors. I absolutely want more, but the worldbuilding, if we can use that term in regards to a novel that never sets foot on a world, is deep enough to allow easy expansion in future books, if that's where Brown wants to go. This story wraps up satisfactorily but there are other stories to be told in the reasoning why these ships went out, a bunch more in what happened when they got there and still others in why they came back. There's a whole series here.
However, crucially, this is a full story on its own. I've seen a real growth lately in novellas and short novels but they're often side efforts, telling a story within a particular universe without affecting a broader sweep. I've reviewed one of those this month in 'Flight & Anchor'. However, this was always a novel, whatever its length. It merely doesn't feel the need to hang around and spin things out. It gets on with the job at hand and it does that job conscientiously and with style, just like the acting captain whose story it tells. Jacklyn Albright and Ness Brown do much the same thing and with just as much success. I look forward to reading more from them. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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