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ljcarey011 's review for:
Far from the Light of Heaven
by Tade Thompson
This is the third locked-room-mystery-in-space story I've read in the last three months. It's the first that I'll unabashedly recommend. It's meant to be a simple trip into space. All passengers on board, including the human captain, will sleep for ten years and arrive at their destination ready to start a new life. Their trip will be watched over by the AI captain/pilot who will safely guide them there and see them off. There's only one problem. When Captain Campion, the human captain wakes up to prepare for docking and waking the other passengers, the ship is in disarray, the AI isn't responding appropriately, and 31 passengers are missing, which does explain the pile of hacked up dead bodies gooily leaking in the corner. She places a call to Bloodroot, their destination, and help arrives in the form of an investigator who's meant to handle aliens and who is instead arriving under duress after an extended leave of absence thanks to some botched policing. His AI partner is sent along to keep him under wraps. More help arrives from the last gate they jumped through in the form of the Captain's godfather and his half-alien daughter.
The ship's AI continues to run rampant, the robots meant to sweep the halls are bloodthirsty, and the captain may or may not be hallucinating the wolf that's rambling through the halls. It's a proper locked room mystery that slowly unrolls itself for the reader, mixed with the high stakes work of keeping the floundering ship from destroying itself around them. All is not as it seems and it's a fantastic ride the whole time.
Great worldbuilding in how it depicts a futuristic world where Earth is still our anchor planet but humans are spreading across the galaxy and still somehow caught up in the machinations of the rich and powerful and the gatekeepers, both literal and figurative.
If you, like me, have recently picked up Kowal's "The Spare Man" and Lafferty's "Six Wakes," this is the locked room mystery for you. Not very cozy, but very smart, very fun, and action-packed, with fantastic characterization.
I was going to rate it 4 stars, but things keep popping into my mind that make the story so smart, so deeply human, so fantastically speculative, that I've got to bump it to 5 stars.
The ship's AI continues to run rampant, the robots meant to sweep the halls are bloodthirsty, and the captain may or may not be hallucinating the wolf that's rambling through the halls. It's a proper locked room mystery that slowly unrolls itself for the reader, mixed with the high stakes work of keeping the floundering ship from destroying itself around them. All is not as it seems and it's a fantastic ride the whole time.
Great worldbuilding in how it depicts a futuristic world where Earth is still our anchor planet but humans are spreading across the galaxy and still somehow caught up in the machinations of the rich and powerful and the gatekeepers, both literal and figurative.
If you, like me, have recently picked up Kowal's "The Spare Man" and Lafferty's "Six Wakes," this is the locked room mystery for you. Not very cozy, but very smart, very fun, and action-packed, with fantastic characterization.
I was going to rate it 4 stars, but things keep popping into my mind that make the story so smart, so deeply human, so fantastically speculative, that I've got to bump it to 5 stars.