Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. Here in the darkness, a war for control of the Legion has been waged for generations, with no clear resolution.
Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say there are her family. She is told she is their salvation, the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan’s new family is not the only one desperate to gain control of the prized ship. Zan finds that she must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion’s gravity well to the very belly of the world.
In the tradition of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels and Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, Kameron Hurley has created an epic and thrilling tale about tragic love, revenge, and war as imagined by one of our most celebrated new writers.
My Take
This book feels like the middle book in a trilogy. Not in a bad way, I just want a prequel to show how this world came to be, and a sequel so I know what happens next. Some of the most inventive, creepy world building I’ve ever seen. Gross yet also mesmerizing. Nice to sci-fi that’s more organic, less manufactured. It’s really difficult to understand the relationship between Zan and Jayd at the heart of the book because Zan herself doesn’t understand it.
Anyway, I asked for a dark, challenging, adventurous book that I already owned, and this one popped up. Love being able to filter by mood!
And I’m sorry, I don’t grasp the comparison to the Culture novels. I haven’t read the Chronicles of Amber.