Escaping Exodus

by Nicky Drayden

eBook, 336 pages

English language

Published Oct. 15, 2019 by Harper Voyager.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-286774-2

(7 reviews)

The Compton Crook award–winning author of The Prey of Gods and Temper returns with a dazzling stand-alone novel, set in deep space, in which the fate of humanity rests on the slender shoulders of an idealistic and untested young woman—a blend of science fiction, dark humor, and magical realism that will appeal to fans of Lauren Beukes, Ian McDonald, and Nnedi Okorafor.

Earth is a distant memory. Habitable extrasolar planets are still out of reach. For generations, humanity has been clinging to survival by establishing colonies within enormous vacuum-breathing space beasts and mining their resources to the point of depletion.

Rash, dreamy, and unconventional, Seske Kaleigh should be preparing for her future role as clan leader, but her people have just culled their latest beast, and she’s eager to find the cause of the violent tremors plaguing their new home. Defying social barriers, Seske teams up with her best friend, a beast worker, and ventures into restricted areas for answers to end the mounting fear and rumors. Instead, they discover grim truths about the price of life in the void.

Then, Seske is unexpectedly thrust into the role of clan matriarch, responsible for thousands of lives in a harsh universe where a single mistake can be fatal. Her claim to the throne is challenged by a rival determined to overthrow her and take control—her intelligent, cunning, and confident sister.

Seske may not be a born leader like her sister, yet her unorthodox outlook and incorruptible idealism may be what the clan needs to save themselves and their world.

5 editions

enne📚 reviewed Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden

Escaping Exodus

4 stars

Escaping Exodus is an afrofuture science fiction novel about future space colonists living inside of giant space whales. It's a hard book to pin down--it's messy, literally and metaphorically.

I want to say this book is a YA book, as it feels like bingo full coverage of ghosthoney's dystopian YA tiktok video. Forbidden love across exaggerated and artificial class boundaries. Wild biological worldbuilding elements. Matriarchy and gender flips. Novel family structures. Horrible Omelas-esque abuses. One of the protagonists starts a revolution. But, it's also much darker and full of way more body horror than I usually expect from YA as well.

Escaping Exodus is an afrofuture science fiction novel about future space colonists living inside of giant space whales. It's a hard book to pin down--it's messy, literally and metaphorically.

I would love to know if there is a word for this, but this book engages in the technique where it uses a common noun like "heart murmur" but then it turns out to have an unexpected meaning in this world. In this case, Adalla is a beastworker who at one point is responsible for cleaning out parts of the space whale beast's heart, like taking care of heart murmurs. But then it turns out that heart murmurs are not just things to be removed, but are also living creatures and are sometimes kept as pets?!

For me the best parts of the book are all in the worldbuilding. Everything is biological; permanent housing is made out of bones, the handwashing stations are hoglets, people get high on random gasses from the beast, and mucus is used for space travel. I love this idea of tiny humans trying to eke out a living instead of a giant space beast, and parasitically trying to take care of it as well.

Past that, I think there's a lot that's rough about the book; the plot pulls the characters along and there's not as much depth to them as I want. A number of plot points or world details don't make a ton of sense if you think too much about them. The relationship definitely makes no sense to me. The whole thing just feels not polished in a way that makes it hard to recommend.

Mostly hoping that I can kiss you without something weird happening, I'm hoping I can. I'm worried that I can't.

This quote is out of context, but I'm just leaving this here for anybody else who has read this, but holy moly the weirdness of this scene and everything that happens afterwards. I was... unprepared.

Saqer (he/they) reviewed Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden

sweet story, many complex relationships

No rating

I'd absolutely recommend this. It's a bit slow paced in the beginning but it picks up closer to the end once the relationship between the people and their world becomes clear. Be prepared for some complex and difficult relationships to form, to break, and to die.

The social world in this story is really well-constructed and thought through: the gender system is very different from what we know as the modern gender system. There's also a "diplomatic incident" that shows how starkly different gender systems can be. I loved it and loved thinking about it.