Braking Day - Adam Oyebanji

Braking Day is a sci-fi novel by Adam Oyebanji. It takes place across a small fleet of generation ships, as they come to the end of their journey. Soon, they're going to reach the point at which they beign to slow down ("Braking Day), and prepare to enter and colonise a new star system. But before they do, there are going to be some dark answers given to hard questions. Old mysteries are going to be dug up and dragged into the light. The survival of the society on the ships, indeed the survival of the ships themselves, may hang in the balance.

And the feather tipping that balance is a young man who just wants to be left alone, left to do his job in peace, to maybe get a promotion, to maybe change things a little. He may get rather more than he's bargained for. 

All of that sounded rather portentuous, so to save you a longer read, the tl;dr is that Braking Day is a fun, snappy sci-fi yarn. It builds out a believable inter-generational society for its ships, one which has genuine problems baked in, but isn't a theocracy or raving anarchy. It shows us young, smart people trying to do the right thing, and older, debatably as smart people whose perspective on what the right thing is may differ. It explores social class and asks questions about wha we choose to remember and to forget.But in etween the big questions it has a fast-paced action adventure story going on, with a delightful soupcon of mystery about it.

Our protagonist is Ravi Macleod, an officer candidate on one of the ships, and from a family that are very much the wrong side of the tracks. He suffers from discrimination on one side, and from disappointment on the other. His fellow students think he's a criminal, and his family aren't entirely sure he's not becoming just another member of the elite looking to put them down. Ravi, through it all, is thoughtful, conscientious, and perhaps a little prone to being led by his emotions. He carries his flaws well, though, and the story gives him the chance to be articulate and likable. If I was occasionally driven to a shake of the head at a moment of naivete, still it was possible to feel an honest joy in those moments as well, to see someone reaching out for the better option, rather than the least worst. Ravi is an excellent portrayal of a young man stepping out onto unsure footing, looking to find something of himself between the metal walls that he calls home. And he's helped by a rather fun ensemble cast. Honestly, I wanted to see more of all of them, but a shout out in particular to his cousin Boz, a young woman with a word-weary attitude decades odler than she is, but with the fire and ideals to try and make change and break things whe needed. She's an excellent foil for Ravi, and their interplay of outlooks was always a genuine delight.

They exist on one of three generation ships, creaking, much repaired vessels sailing the wine-dark sea of space. Those craft have seen their shar eof triumphs and tragedies etched inot their skins, and we see a lot of references to their history, both implicit and explicit. it's a credit to the author that the Archimedes, Ravi's ship, feels like a real, lived in space. From its battered duct-work to lost compartments, from the engineering core buried levels deep to the bar-slash movie theatre the kids go to, the environment has a humanity to it, an energy which says that this is a real space. Some of that is georpahy played out as politics, too; the tensions between a class of semi-hereditary officers and those beneath them is often palpable. Those at the bottom of the ladder are a few bad choices form being stuffed into the recycler as biomass. The ships feel their age, feel like decisions have been made there, catastrophes and triumphs all - and the socity they've built feels human too. Laced through with flaws, open to corruption, someimes driven by poor or terrible choices, but in the end, something built by people trying to do their best, trying to survive.

And the story. Ah, well, no spoilers. But this one went places I didn't expect from the jump. It's one part mystery, one part coming of age tale, one part adventure epic - and you know what, all of those parts are rather good. Importantly, it asks big questions, human questions, which will make you think - but it asks them while you're having so much fun following along that you may ot notice for a little bit. 

In summary, it's a fun story, with interesting things to say, with solid characterisation in a well-drawn world. That makes it a solid purchase, if you're in need of a generation ship mystery (and who isn't?!).

Kingdoms of Death - Christopher Ruocchio

Christopher Ruocchio’s Kingdoms of Death is the fourth in his Sun Eater series, centred around Hadrian Marlowe, a knight errant, an occasional politician, an excellent strategist, and someone who looks sceptically at their own legend. Marlowe lives in the bounds of an Empire of Man, where the gene-modified aristocracy live over generations of their subjects. Where Roman and monarchial cultural trappings live cheek-by-jowl with starships pathing the dark distances between the stars. Where legions of sword-and-laser wielding legionnaires spend centuries in cryo-sleep on troop barges before landing in the face of the alien or transhuman menace. 

Marlowe has seen more of that menace than most. He’s seen the shifting madness of transhuman technophiles, whose consciousness, skipping from body to body, seems to have lost something of its humanity in the process. He’s seen the raw tentacles of ancient, caged AI, lashing against the bars, speaking in a thousand tongues of the future and the past. He’s seen the shadow government of his own Empire, the inquuisition that seeks to cut out corruption, alien or human, brutally and swiftly, often in ignorance.And he’s seen the beasts that stalk the stars, the alien, the Cielcin.

*** Potential spoilers past this point ***

The Cielcin are the focus of a lot of this book, and, fair warning, it is a big book. Marlowe explores both Cielcin society and his own limits. Brought into the depths of their world as a captive, he’s tortured, abandoned, experimented on, tortured again. In suffering their may be some measure of truth, and that’s doubly true for the reader. We can see Marlowe pared down to his core, stripped of rank, position and indeed clothes. Left to die, or not, left to live, or not. To go mad, to decide his own fate, or settle on his own sacrifice. 

The Cielcin are not gentle on prisoners, no. Mostly, they eat prisoners. But Marlowe, him they have other plans for. The society we see painted out before us is one that is uncompromising, brutal and ancient. It has ritual and faith in its own fashion, and within their own lights, the Cielcin are in the right in their struggle to, well, eliminate humanity and use them as food.

 The author shows us that society in all its grotesque, near-human horror - from the military parades and processions, to the vicious dance of lethal politics, to the banquets on the flesh of men, and back around again, to the cultured leader who can sit and hold a nuanced dialogue, and break a subordinate with a word, can order atrocities without a qualm. This is a society that feels genuinely alien, off kilter, different to our understanding - it exists slightly outside our frame of reference in its strange familiarity. And the writer has made this work, in its magnificence and horror - so kudos. You really do feel dipped, all unwilling, into a ferocious and alien society, one which operates by its own rules, and doesn’t look on humanity as potential partners as much as threats or a food source. This is a universe with a dark mysticism and a strangeness, laced through with the baroque terrors and wonders and fragility of humanity. 

The world building, in other words, is superb. 

The character work is of a similar quality. I’ve touched on the alienness, the uncanny-seeming nature of the Cielcin. But we also spend a lot of time with Marlowe, inside his head, as he slowly breaks down, breaks away from the trappings of himself. In his suffering, depression, possible madness over years of Cielcin captivity, he gains something in self knowledge, something in understanding of the world and himself. He also gets quite a comprehensive journey through pain, desolation and suffering. But the journey, from Hadrian the knight, the killer, the once-hero of the Empire, down to Had the man, the person at the core of the outer whirl of values and worries, what remains in extremis, that journey is a long and sometimes insightful one. But it’s also a dark one filled with blood and tears and truly wretched horrors, and so I say be warned - but also, that in terms of characterisation, this is pitch-perfect, this gives us a chance to sit with Hadrian, to see him as he is and as he sees himself change, and we wrench and fall and sympathise and empathise with him as he struggles against his own desecration and diminution. Will things get better? You’ll have to read the book to see, but Hadrian, him came to know right well. 

The story, well, in many places it’s meditatively paced, slowly steeping the reader in the gentle and pervasive atrocity of horror in which Hadrian finds himself immersed. But there are moments of pure joy here too, moments of glinting starships trading fire, glimpses of heroism and personal sacrifice to make you weep. There’s snappily-drawn, uncompromising combat, both the tactical surge of laser fire, and the razor-edged, bloody tear of blade on blade. There’s time for love, too, and the kind of friendship and comradeship that can make your chest ache with it. Basically, this is a damn good story, hitting all the right notes - and one that will reward long time readers and leave them asking for more. 

It’s a very good book, an excellent addition to the series, and you should definitely go and pick it up