A review by trish204
Annihilation by Catherynne M. Valente

5.0

I haven't (yet) played Mass Effect though I have wanted to for a long time. I have not (yet) read any of the comics or other novels in this franchise. My plan was to read them all in order. And maybe I still will. However, I couldn't resist this one because it is written by one of my favourite authors: Catherynne Valente.

Disclaimer for all those unsure: you don't need to have read any of the other books or comics and you don't need to have played any of the games to understand this story.

So what's happening? We are on a generational ship. Actually, not a generational ship exactly because the ones that boarded will also be the ones arriving at Andromeda (the destination system) thanks to cryosleep pods. Every once in a while, a team is awoken by the ship's AI to make course corrections etc.
But when the latest team wakes up, they are sick and something is wrong. Individual pods have either broken down or been contaminated with ... something ... resulting in an increasing number of deaths.
The ship only coincidentally noticed that something was off, the sensors don't see that anything's wrong. Even after more parts of the ship start malfunctioning. So the team has to figure out what is happening, how and find a way to stop it.
The problem? This is one of the ships that hosts several species and not just one. And due to the history of a number of them, tensions are very high, even among the team awoken to save them all.

As is customary for Valente, this story is driven by deep history and multi-layered characters. It was awesome to walk through the different parts of this amazing piece of technology and trying to figure out the mystery in time. Simultaneously, it was delicious to follow the characters' interactions and the complications due to the species' histories (such as the arms dealer's poignant observation that they wouldn't sell weapons and slaves if others bought rainbows and clowds instead). Equally, I very much enjoyed watching, through the characters' memories, everyone's reason to be on the ship and for hating one another (like not having a homeworld anymore).

The mystery itself was cool, too. I have a weakness for stories that take place on generational ships and if there is an added bonus of mysterious deaths and failures of the technology, I'm a happy camper. This mystery was quite clever (not always easy since almost everything has been done before already) and I loved piecing it all together. The humorous moments were the icing on the cake (I'd love to know what good old Shakespeare would say if he knew he even made it to space eventually).

The writing style is engaging and fast-paced, the world rich. Naturally, I'm not entirely sure how much is from the general franchise and how much from this author herself, but it is telling that I didn't really need the link provided by my buddy-reader, Brad, that displays all the different races because I already had a very clear image (and apparently an accurate one) in my head thanks to the author's descriptions.

Really cool book that I recommend to any scifi fan out there.