This review must begin with several thank yous. Thank you, my Okazu family for giving me both the motivation and the positive reception that has encouraged me to to read classics I missed in my youth and many of the new, truly fantastic books that are filling my hours these days. Your reception and enthusiasm – and recommendations – have significantly increased my quality of life. I’d also like to thank, in a small way, the angry sad men of the various *.*gate groups and the *.*Puppies, whose railing against inclusion and progress in media of all kinds has exponentially increased the visibility of those inclusive and diverse media. Good job, guys, keep writing those boycott lists, and I’ll keep finding great stuff to read. ^_^ Finally, thanks to the Twitterverse for making it possible for me to follow those amazing authors and their conversations with other amazing authors and thereby discover new amazing authors!
It was on Twitter that I first encountered this book, when author Kameron Hurley announced that this book was on a time-sale on Amazon. I nabbed the book, knowing I’d be traveling a bit in upcoming days…and I do prefer to read genre fiction when I travel. Knowing nothing whatsoever about this book, I opened it up on my flight to Toronto.
It was excellent.
The Stars Are Legion, by Kameron Hurley, begins with a character who has lost her memory. Awakening on a dying world/ship, Zan remembers nothing of herself, but is instantly thrown into a massive conspiracy with a woman she remembers she loved, to destroy and remake…everything.
Zan is clearly a natural warrior, and Jayd, her former(?) lover is a general, but neither of those skills are what is needed, in this dying world. What is needed is ruthless belief that everything can be saved, even if it takes dying repeatedly to make it happen. Betrayal and death are everyday occurrences here, where madwomen both rule and are ruled.
After she is thrown into a recycling pit, Zan gathers allies who help her re-attain the surface, even when they don’t believe that the surface exists. As she travels, she regains bit of her memory, and find that she’s left herself clues – she learns that she and Jayd have done this before. Jayd tells her that at the beginning, but just what *this* is, she’s got to learn by doing it, again.
Because the story is itself so recursive, I don’t want to give away much, but I will tell you that this is a book that rewards careful reading. I will tell you that this is a science fiction version of a quest adventure – but it is a quest through the bowels of a great beast to an end whose goal is clearly stated right at the beginning, but only becomes comprehensible when Zan and we have enough information to understand it.
All of the characters are female; love and sex are therefore all between women. Sexuality and gender are rendered meaningless, since there are no other options on these worlds. It’s a little like early lesbian scifi that way, in which an alternate world is set up so there is functionally no politics around sex between women, except for the internal politics of the story itself.
The world-building in this book is fantastic and phantasmagoric. This was not a book I could comfortably read with meals, as majority of the world is rotting and dying. Women of the worlds conceive and give birth to lumps of flesh or bits of machinery as the worlds themselves require, without any explanation. Zan does not remember, most of the characters do not know and the stories they tell themselves are not helpful.
I was rooting for Zan and her allies even before I learned why I should be. But when I learned why I should be rooting for them, it was pretty damn awesome.
Ratings:
Story – 9
Characters – 9
World-building – 10
Service – 1 There is some sex, but very little is presented as “sexy”
LGBTQ – 0/10 depending on your point of view
Overall – 9
The Stars are Legion is tightly-told tale of a disgusting mess of a world. ^_^
