Previously:
The House of Wisdom (HOW) was a science vessel where the best and brightest went to do their research. Among them were Jas's parents (and Jas, but he was only 12). A bioweapon was released onboard, killing everyone quickly (and painlessly). Jas was the only survivor, because his mother sent him away in one of her experimental ships before he could be infected.
Zahra's father, Dr. Lago, was a space archeologist who was part of the HOW's team until days before the outbreak, when he was removed from his post for hiding data from a satellite (UC33-X) sent back to Earth by one of the ships who left pre-Collapse.
The Collapse happened about 200 years prior, with humanity almost going extinct and society having to rebuild from the ground up. Humanity's now governed not by nation-states, but by the Councils. Life is quite good for its citizens (almost utopian), but its also rigidly structured (where conformity is king). For those who want to live outside this rigid structure, there's the Wastelands, with its decimated soil and scarce water. (But at least they're living free of tyranny.)
To escape persecution due to guilt by association, Zahra's family moved to the Wastelands of North America. There they joined the Family of Light, a group lead by a visionary genius named Adam. Everyone that is part of the family takes the Light last name. Adam hates the Councils for their tyranny and has decided that the only way to truly be free is to commandeer the HOW and escape to explore the stars (it's advanced engine will make it impossible to catch).
The plan is simple: Zahra and her team will kidnap the shuttle carrying Jas (and 10 other graduate fellows), use his genetic signature to disarm the security drones and board the HOW. Zahra's team will then cleanse the ship of any remnants of the pathogen and rendezvous with the Homestead, a smaller ship carrying the 300+ members of the family.
While Adam's goal is stealing the HOW, Zahra's goal is also to find evidence to exonerate her father's name and provide a good life for her twin younger siblings. Zahra is confident that the man she knew could never have done what he was accused of doing. The Captain's initial log supposed that Dr. Lago must have been the cause of the outbreak, but the Councils ran with it, even though no one had any proof of his guilt.
The plan starts off strong: they're able to successfully kidnap the shuttle and disable the security drones. They're able to board the HOW and begin to bring over the hostages and the shuttle's cargo. But then, everything goes wrong: In the cargo hold, they find a desiccated corpse of a woman who slit her own throat (down to the bone) rather than dying peacefully (she also with deep gashes on her arms). Blood is everywhere. And then, the unthinkable: the shuttle explodes with only the 8 who had boarded the HOW surviving (Zahra and 3 family, Jas and 3 fellows).
Due to the medical quarantine, navigating the ship is slow and difficult. The group decides to head to the ship's mainframe to shut it down. The ship is very cold and creepy. They continue to come across nightmarish corpses. While they pass a horrible 'fort', Ariana, one of the hostages, is accidentally pricked by one of the pieces of metal. Her enviro suit quickly repairs the puncture, but it's too late. She's been infected.
My Thoughts:
This story has stuck with me and my enthusiasm for it hasn't dulled with the passage of time (I read this on Jan. 7). It is an extremely engrossing tale with some very creepy moments, making me very glad that I am safe on Earth and not in space. (There's a scene where a dead body reanimates. Still gives me the willies.) It's intelligently and intricately woven, switching between Zahra and Jas's POVs. (With Jas's POV, we find out that the sickness progressed quickly and not peacefully: it's spread through contact with tainted blood and its victims would have pain and hallucinations of something crawling under their skin, try to dig it out using anything available, and many became violent.) This technique gives us an amazing, wrenching story, eloquently (and beautifully) told and one that will stay with me for a long time.
The characters are flawed people rather than uber-heroic superheroes. They have hubris, fears, hopes, dreams, and none of them are 2-dimensional black/white people. While we're left with a bit of an open ending, the story doesn't feel unfinished. It leaves me hopeful that maybe, just maybe, this time around things might turn out differently and the promise of the Councils (and Ellis Island before it) might be fulfilled. It doesn't have to be utopia, but we can do better than repeating the mistakes of the past.
5/5 stars
It's really hard for me to do a vague discussion of this book, so I'm warning you now...
Spoilers ahead...
One of the things that I appreciate about the book is how it doesn't give us info-dumps (which would be really easy to do). Instead you suss out how this world operates and the less-than-obvious context for events as they unfold in 'real-time.' Things are oddly worded or people react contrary to what is normal in 21st Century USA, and by the end of the book, your suspicions are either confirmed or rejected. For instance:
Adam is a whackadoodle cult leader.
There are hints early on about the family's cultishness. The Family members frequently reference Adam and his wisdom, what Adam would want to do, how Adam knows best. As the story progresses, Zahra is able to do some reflection on the plan, Adam's over-arching plan and his influence over their lives/thoughts, and this, plus the Family's reactions to Adam's increasingly erratic and zealous behavior, reveals that the Family is a cult and Adam's decided to pass out the Kool-Aid. In the end, we find out his name isn't even Adam Light. Whackadoodle.
Jas is gay.
Jas's homosexuality is briefly touched on - not as a way to define him, but instead as a way of showing why he's so invested in getting his friends off the HOW alive. (If the story were simply from Zahra's POV, we wouldn't have known his orientation and there's nothing Jay overtly does until 4/5th of the way through the book.) His deep friendship with his childhood best-friend could easily be explained as a deep bond springing from shared difficult experiences, but about halfway through the novel, Jay reveals that his feelings for his friend are not platonic and are, unfortunately, unrequited.
There's a parallel you can draw between their world and ours with regards to politics and immigration.
When life in the Wastelands is discussed (those criminals trying to sneak across the border), there's definite parallels that you can make between their politics and those in the US since 2016. There's a similar disconnect between good people and how they turn a blind eye to the suffering of people wanting to immigrate: like us, citizens of the Councils are aware of the conditions for people waiting at the Southern border. People know what's happening, they might discuss it among themselves, politicians use xenophobic rhetoric to justify their policies and nothing really changes. It remains something intangible and disconnected from every day life. I appreciate the incorporation of this issue because it puts human faces on the plight of the immigrant without being preachy.
There was no bioweapon. The cause of the outbreak is so much worse. (Cue the creep factor.)
From the beginning, Jas is confident that Ariana is infected, something that is confirmed when she begins to shriek about something crawling under her skin. At first, he thinks that Ariana is suffering from hallucinations. When they try to stop her from hurting herself, she becomes violent, but then she goes quiet. While the group tries to make sense of what's happening, Ariana goes slack-faced and is unresponsive, and then she runs out of the room.
When Ariana later finds them again, she's unresponsive with the zombie-glaze, and they see something moving under her skin. There's ***something moving under her skin.*** When they try to detain her, 'to help her', she becomes violent and one of them uses a stun gun to incapacitate her. The electric shock instead incapacitates the parasite growing/crawling under her skin. Ariana is able to return to herself, and through her descriptions of her experiences, Jas and the other 2 fellows theorize that it's a bioengineered parasite spread through the blood. At some point, the parasite takes control of the host. There's a sentience at work, along with an overwhelming compulsion to do something.
As Jas's group is discovering the existence of the parasite, Zahra's group discovers where the parasite came from. Zahra's group finds the lab with the satellite (UC33-X) and a recording made by the last scientist working on it before the end. UC33-X was sent by one of the lost colony ships which had reached a viable planet. The colonists were infected when they were excavating some ruins. They sent UC33-X as a warning, but the parasite accidentally came with it. The scientist reveals that even though they were careful, somehow a bio-contaminant got through their safety measures and infected the ship. This is the proof that Zahra needs to exonerate her father, particularly because it's clear from the recording that it's extra-terrestrial in origin, rather than a terrestrial bioweapon.
They're able to unravel what the last hours onboard the HOW were like and what happened to Jas's mother.
Once they reach the bridge, they find a recording of Jas's mother and the Captain in their final moments before they set off the fire suppression system ship-wide and smothered everyone onboard. The Captain unequivocally refuted her earlier assertion about Dr. Lago (the recording just never made it off the ship) and explained that the parasite acts with a hive mind and it was using non-crew members (including children) to fly the HOW and crash into Earth. It was only through the brilliance of Jas's mother that they are able to thwart the parasite and program the ship to maintain its orbit around Earth. The pair sacrifice themselves to save Earth and hope that what they're doing with save everyone down below. (Cue the tears.)
Humanity is humanity is humanity.
Because Jas is Indian and his grandmother is extremely influential in the Councils government, I got some flashes of her being like Chrisjen Avasarala from The Expanse series, at least in the beginning. Like The Expanse, in the future, humanity has made it to the stars but it's still making the same mistakes, playing the same power games and callously ignoring the uncomfortable or inconvenient. Like so many other stories set in the future, there's an underbelly that is distinctly non-Star Trekian. But as I mentioned, the events and the story's open ending leave me hopeful for humanity's future: people sacrifice for the greater good, people have the strength to stand up for what's right, and some of the do-gooders have an opportunity to actually make an impact on humanity's future.
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