A review by space_and_sorcery
The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O'Keefe

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

 

I received this novel from Orbit Books, through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review: my thanks to both of them for this opportunity. 

 

After enjoying Megan O’Keefe’s The Protectorate trilogy, I was more than eager to see where she would take her readers next, and after reading this first volume in The Devoured Worlds series, all I can say is that this author managed to enormously improve from an already amazing starting point. The Blighted Stars is a complex novel based on many narrative threads that are handled with such skill that I never felt lost (something that happened at times with the equally complex The Protectorate) - such complexity, however, compels me to share more of the story than I’m used to in my reviews, but I will try to do so avoiding any spoilers. 

 

In the future, humankind has made amazing breakthroughs but also lost a great deal: society is in the hands of five dominant families who control the economy and rule humanity through what looks like a feudal system. Mercator is the most powerful of these families: they hold the monopoly on the mining of relkatite, a material employed in the construction of space habitats and the cores of ships’ engines, among other things. Unfortunately it seems that wherever relkatite is mined extensively, the world falls prey to the shroud, a fungal growth that destroys all indigenous life: several worlds - also called cradles - have been lost to the shroud, including Earth, and a growing conservationist movement asking for a stop of relkatite mining is trying to oppose the Mercators’ expansion to other cradles. 

 

Naira Sharp is the most vocal adversary of the Mercators: once the personal bodyguard - or exemplar - to Acaelus Mercator, the family’s head, she tried to stop the mining through a public hearing that she lost, thanks to the testimony of Tarquin Mercator, Acaelus’ son and a renowned geologist. Losing the battle also meant that Naira was put “on ice”: in this universe people’s minds can be transferred to a new body, which is printed by the evolutionary successors of our 3D printing machines. It’s a technique that insures virtual immortality, provided that you can pay the process of re-printing, and that the death of your previous print was not a violent one, because in that case the transferred consciousness “cracks” and becomes irretrievable.  This also means that one’s mind - as is the case for Naira - can be stored indefinitely (“iced”) and never re-transferred into another body.  Virtual death. 

 

As the novel starts, Acaelus and Tarquin are orbiting Cradle Six, another promising world for the mining of relkatite, when something goes horribly wrong: Tarquin and a few survivors manage to shuttle down to the planet, and among them is also Naira Sharp, whose consciousness was transferred - thanks to the conservationist underground - into the body of Tarquin’s exemplar.  The planet they find themselves on is already in an advanced stage of shroud predation, and it’s also infested by misprints, mindless creatures whose body printing went awry and whose instincts bring them to target the survivors.  As the uneasy relationship between Tarquin and Naira grows into a tentative alliance, the two of them discover that many of their respective assumptions might be wrong and that humanity is facing a danger of frightening proportions. 

 

As I said, I was completely engrossed in this story: there are so many narrative levels here, and I enjoyed them all. The whole concept of preserving human consciousness - or neural map - and transferring it to another body, is both fascinating and terrifying: if one can afford the expense, any time a body is damaged, or old, that individual can migrate to a brand-new one being so assured of near-immortality. But it’s not a perfect process, because multiple re-printings or a particularly gruesome death can affect the map and cause it to “crack” in the new body and bring the subject to madness - and even if the process is successful, where people are unable to upload their memories to the map, the new being might lose part of the experiences that occurred between the previous reprinting and the current one, and be a different person altogether. And all of the above does not even take into account the ramifications of suicide or euthanasia to preserve an individual’s map in the transition from a damaged print to a whole one - there is one sentence in the novel that to me summed up the various implications of the process: 

 

People get to keep coming back, as long as they can afford to reprint. But I don’t believe the human heart has caught up with technology. 

 

The society depicted here is equally fraught with contradictions: where on one side we see a star-faring humanity expanding through the universe, we have on the other a limited group of individuals ruling over their subjects with literal powers of life and death, asking for obedience and submission in exchange for the chance of a better life.  Environmental, economical and political themes are also explored in a way that is never preaching but well-integrated into the story and the aspects of privilege and the relationship between ruler and subjects are woven into the narrative creating an intriguing whole that never suffers a moment of boredom. 

 

The characters are equally well constructed and explored and I must applaud the way Megan O’Keefe treated the theme of enemies-to-lovers because I was not only captivated by the slow-burn development of the relationship between Tarquin and Naira, but I was actively rooting for it, something that does not usually happen to me, given my wariness toward any romantic entanglement in the stories I read.   Tarquin is something of a naive individual, uncomfortable with the power his family exerts and more inclined toward academic studies rather than wielding that power and the privilege that come with it. Naira, on the other hand, had to fight for her survival all her life and she is a mixture of combat readiness and vulnerability that instantly endeared her to me.  The way in which tentative banter and growing mutual respect turn the relationship between the two of them from bodyguard and charge to uneasy allies and to something more - united in a common front against the looming danger that might wipe out humanity as we conceive it - was a delight to behold and certainly one of the main strengths of the novel. 

 

And of course there is the mystery at the core of the story, one that is slowly uncovered through a series of well-placed twists and turns that keep the pace going at a good speed and move the story from adventure to fight for survival to horror and to breakneck runs through a shroud-infested terrain that will keep you on the edge of your seat for most of the book.  As the start of a new series, The Blighted Stars manages to both lay the groundwork and to create the stage for what promises to be a no-holds-barred battle for survival against a pervasive, insidious foe - and I can’t wait to learn how that battle will be fought.