Far from the Light of Heaven

I read this book because it was on a list of genre-defying sf books that looked interesting[*] and also because I had enjoyed the Rosewater books by Tade Thompson as well.

That list billed this book as a "locked starship murder mystery", and having that expectation disappointed me a little. This is no The Spare Man or Six Wakes where the plot involves chasing clues about the killer and the climax is the reveal of what's been going on. There is definitely a detective and a starship captain and a mystery, but the pacing of when the reveal happens makes this book feel much more like thriller/action/horror than an out and out mystery book. This is mostly my own expectations ruining things, but that structure removed a lot of the tension for me.

I enjoyed the aliens in this book (as expected from Tade Thompson). I won't talk details to avoid being too spoilery but I appreciated the afterword, where Thompson says "I try to lean away from aliens being Other because that’s tied up with colonialist thinking" and I think that's successfully done here.

Overall, I wanted to like this more than I did and wasn't particularly grabbed by any of the characters or the world. If you wanted a Tade Thompson recommendation, I'd still read Rosewater first. If you wanted a space murder mystery, read anything I've mentioned above or Fugitive Telemetry or The Tea Master and the Detective or or or

[*] bookriot.com/genre-defying-sci-fi-books/

FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN is a locked-spaceship mass-murder mystery with a disgraced detective and a rookie ship captain.  The ensemble of characters is interesting, I especially like Joké. Her storyline was the most engaging for me, and I like how she comes into her own. The main thing that frustrated me is that there was literally no way to figure out the answer any earlier than the extended sequence which explains the whole thing in great detail. The actual answer was fascinating enough to loop back around to regaining my interest, but it does mean the middle of the book dragged for me. I like the world that was built, but not really the way that it was conveyed, and I enjoyed the political wrangling.

It’s Michelle Campion’s first mission, accompanying a transport ship to the colony planet Bloodroot. She’ll be asleep for most of it, and the ship’s AI will take care of everything. She’s there just in case something goes wrong, even though AI’s never fail… Yet when she awakes ten years later, the AI is down and some of her passengers are missing.

Far From the Light of Heaven is a fantastic addition to the something bad happened while we were in statis sub-genre. At its core is a murder mystery, with thirty-one passengers dead while everyone was asleep and the ship’s AI out of action. She discovers the gory remains of some of them, unsure if the killer is still onboard.

When Shell calls down to Bloodroot for support, they send up Rasheed Fin, a repatriator currently on suspension. He doesn’t do space but it’s his chance to get his job back after a past mission went bad. His job is one unique to Bloodroot, and the context is revealed throughout the story.

Across the vastness of space, the Lagos space station gets wind that the Ragtime hasn’t reported its arrival at Bloodroot. An old family friend sets off to assist Shell, with his daughter in tow, together with Fin’s Artificial assistant, this makes up the investigative team on the Ragtime. Soon even more things start to go wrong, and they are in a race against time to save themselves, and the hundreds of souls still asleep in their pods.

It was nice to see a colony planet that has decided to learn from Earth’s mistakes, especially in contrast to the backstory which involves a quintillionaire in space and the human exploitation that got him there. Even now, the technology we have all come to rely on is sourced from precious metals mined from the Earth in countries with poor human rights records. What if those elements were so toxic that your job was a death sentence and exile all rolled into one?

I liked that this wasn’t a too far-fetched vision of space travel. It takes ten years for the Ragtime to reach Bloodroot form Earth, and Shell can’t just leap out of stasis without ill effects. Space is an ever present deadly spectre, if you don’t fix things quick, you die.