Who said - “Two vast and towering stacks of books ~ Comment by Camestros Felapton on File 770 That floats on high o’er vales and hills, MenckenĪ fragmented excerpt from The Filer and the Astronaut by Louise Carol: "I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey." ~H.L. Still, we do have this book, and it is fan-freaking-tastic. I would love to know, at a minimum, how the Legion was built and who built it. This is supposedly a standalone book, but I hope Hurley writes more stories in this universe. The final choice she makes tears herself free of the endless loop she had been trapped in, and sets her newly rebirthed worldship on the path free of the Legion. This character arc comes to its fruition in the final section of the book, when the truth of Zan's previous life, and her journey, is revealed. The people Zan meets on her journey to the upper levels of Katazyrna, and the choices she makes to get her little band to their destination, change Zan in profound ways. Yet all this, no matter how nasty it is, is necessary. This is where the worldbuilding gets down to the blood and guts and slime there are some deeply disturbing things to be found here, and this part of the book is not for the fainthearted. The middle section is the longest, and is the torturous story of Zan's journey through the guts of the worldship Katazyrna. The worlds of the Legion are dying, and the fabled ship the Mokshi, which Zan has been told she repeatedly tries to board, repeatedly fails, and returns with her memories stripped from her each time, holds the key to the Legion's survival. Zan and Jayd are part of an ongoing battle for control of the Legion, a generations-long war that is about to come to an end, one way or another.
Zan because she has amnesia, a groan-inducing trope that turns out to have very important plot reasons, and Jayd because she holds her cards so close to the vest, and is playing such a deeply layered game, the reader is never sure if Jayd herself knows what she is supposed to be doing.
Our two protagonists, Zan and Jayd, are both unreliable narrators. The Legion is a swarm of living biological worldships orbiting an artificial sun, and the "humans" (and I use the term loosely, as they're clearly not Earth humans furthermore, they've evolved in tandem with the worldships) in this book inhabit these worlds like intestinal bacteria, or maybe parasites. The worldbuilding stands out with this one, however. I pre-ordered it sight unseen, and it's quintessential Kameron Hurley: messy, gory and brutal, full of unlikable characters and hard choices. This is my first really good book of 2017.
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