Ancestral Night

Wow. Amazing book with depth of character, moral dilemma, and an interesting plot. So glad it was recommended to me as it really made me stop and think.

I went into this looking for a fun sci-fi romp, and instead got some philosophical navel gazing on the nature of intelligent life, one woman working through her cult upbringing baggage, and a general feeling like this book was written with a purpose in mind and directed at somebody specific, rather than to tell a story to a general audience.

Haimey Dz is a salvage mechanic, part of a crew of two (plus an AI, plus two cats) who plumb the depths of white space looking for derelict ships to recover and sell off. One of their salvage trips goes awry, however, when Haimey inadvertently takes on an alien symbiote that ends up augmenting her sense of space around her. Despite wanting nothing to do with this alien taking up residence under her skin, Haimey finds herself pursued by people intent on taking it from her. Things happen, and she finds allies in entirely unexpected places to get her out of the mess she's fallen into.

The writeup makes it sound interesting, and it was for about the first half of the book. Then we get a large center chunk dedicated to Haimey discovering that her childhood upbringing in a cult was somewhat of a lie, and her coming to terms with what this means. We also get quite a bit of discussion about what it means to be free in a society governed by sci-fi dictators, and a brief romance fling awkwardly shoehorned in to round things out. Haimey's inner monologue does most of the heavy lifting of the story, which gets a little tedious and boring after a while. I also felt like the plot thread didn't go anywhere, nor was anything really resolved at the end to any degree.

It just felt like a disconnected mess to me by the end, which was a huge disappointment to me.

I love space opera, and I love stories that examine what it is to be human. Ancestral Night hits both those notes, and a few others (truly alien minds, transhumanism, extreme body modification, etc.).

There are at least one or two spots where I had to put the book down and wonder if Bear would really do this to me (or, her characters anyway), and just had to trust that she knew where the story needed to go. And it went. Looking forward to the second book, which I will be starting as soon as I hit "post" on this review!