Review: The Genesis of Misery

Title: The Genesis of Misery

Series: The Nullvoid Chronicles

Author: Neon Yang

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: War, death, violence, unreality (severe), injury, sexual content (consensual, minimal descriptions), terminal illness, parent death, religious trauma, religious bigotry (mild), mental illness (delusions/hallucinations), confinement, involuntary sedation with drugs, medical content (mentions)

Back Cover:

An immersive, electrifying space-fantasy, Neon Yang’s debut novel The Genesis of Misery is full of high-tech space battles and political machinations, starring a queer and diverse array of pilots, princesses, and prophetic heirs.

It’s a story you think you know: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war.

But Misery Nomaki (she/they) knows they are a fraud.

Raised on a remote moon colony, they don’t believe in any kind of god. Their angel is a delusion, brought on by hereditary space exposure. Yet their survival banks on mastering the holy mech they are supposedly destined for, and convincing the Emperor of the Faithful that they are the real deal.

The deeper they get into their charade, however, the more they start to doubt their convictions. What if this, all of it, is real?

A reimagining of Joan of Arc’s story given a space opera, giant robot twist, the Nullvoid Chronicles is a story about the nature of truth, the power of belief, and the interplay of both in the stories we tell ourselves.

Review:

I picked this up for two reasons: a nonbinary protagonist and the idea of Joan of Arc but in space. And you know, this book definitely has both of those things. Misery is most definitely nonbinary. And there definitely are Joan of Arc-type elements to the overarching plot (although you probably have to know that’s what it’s supposed to be to spot them – it’s definitely more “Joan of Arc-inspired” than “space opera retelling of Joan of Arc”).

But if you go in expecting just that, you are not at all going to be prepared for what The Genesis of Misery is going to throw at you. Because like I said, those elements are there, but they are definitely not the main thrust of the story.

Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Misery for a moment. (I’m going to be using she/her pronouns here, because while Misery uses both they/them and she/her, the narrative primarily uses she/her.) She’s an interesting character by herself. She’s a bit of a troublemaker – not for the sake of making trouble or being rebellious, but because she just has other priorities that rank higher than “obey the rules.” One of those priorities is self-preservation. Born with the disease that killed her mother, and experiencing the delusions and hallucinations that the disease causes, her driving motivation at the beginning of the book is survival. And the best way to do that seems to be to convince everyone that the symptoms of her terminal illness are actually symptoms of being god’s chosen messiah. All of that makes for a very interesting character. Her tenacity, resourcefulness, and general focus on prioritizing what matters to her over what people around her want her to do made her compelling and enjoyable to read about.

I haven’t read many unreliable narrator stories – not intentionally, that just hasn’t been a big aspect of my reading in general. Misery definitely qualifies as one, though, and in a really interesting way. She’s unreliable because she experiences hallucinations and delusions as a symptom of her illness, and she is very aware of that fact. So I may not be able to tell if the narrative is telling me the truth, but neither can she. In fact, she was so unreliable that I ended up believing the exact opposite of whatever she believed. At the beginning, she was 100% sure it was just hallucinations and she was faking the messiah thing as a survival strategy. At that point, I figured the twist would be that she was really divinely chosen after all. But as the story goes on, she began to slowly begin to think that maybe she was god’s chosen after all – and I began to doubt that she really was the messiah, or even that this deity existed in the first place. It wasn’t really an unpleasant experience, but it was weird to basically switch opinions with the protagonist throughout the course of the book.

This review is already pretty long, and I haven’t even gotten into the plot. But honestly, the plot is not really all that important here. In fact, you could argue that there really isn’t much of one. Misery’s people are at war with the Heretics, who have rejected their god and are trying to invade. Misery is playing messiah (or growing into the role of messiah, depending on who you believe) to cover for the fact that she has a fatal disease. A lot of people are doing politics and such around Misery and have big plans for this and that, but for the most part Misery is doing her best to 1. Stay alive, 2. Stay not imprisoned, and 3. Convince people that the weird stuff about her is from messiah-ness instead of mind-altering space disease, in that order. Sure, there’s some Pacific Rim-style mech battles in space, but those don’t come in until quite a ways through the book and they’re not what it’s about anyway.

What really makes this story work is the religious aspect. This society has one god, the one true god, who agreed to help the humans who dispersed among the stars. This deity chooses saints, identifiable by their iridescent hair, who have powers to activate and control special types of stone that are used for all kinds of things through this society. This religion is integrated so deeply with the society that they never actually talk about a religion or name the faith – knowledge of this deity, following religious observances, the way the saints’ ability to control special stones make society function, it’s just part of how things are. At the beginning, despite being raised in the church, Misery doesn’t even believe in this deity. But ideas of heresy, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, paying lip service to religious rules while doing what you want anyway, the difference between ethics and religiosity, power structures, belief, and fanaticism are wound throughout the whole story. I don’t really know how to describe it. As someone raised in a religion that was big into fanaticism, private hypocrisy, and ignoring the spirit of the rules where possible, I found it both strange and sci-fi while simultaneously intimately and painfully familiar. Watching Misery start to believe that maybe she was the messiah had a similar ring – it was nearly the same process as my journey out of religion, but the opposite direction. It left me feeling a bit disoriented – which is, honestly, an appropriate feeling for this book.

I don’t think I have adequately expressed yet my overall opinion of this book. It’s good. It’s very, very good. But it’s an uncommon type of good. Some really good books hype you up. They get your adrenaline pumping, leave you emotionally exhausted at the end, and make you want to yell from the rooftops that everyone should read this book. (Honestly, as much as I liked it, if you’re not up for a book that’s heavily about weird space religions, you probably won’t enjoy it very much.) Instead, it’s a much quieter kind of good. It makes me want to slow down, savor the story, and appreciate the richness of the world and the journey. It makes me want to think and linger over all the religious elements, both thematic and emotional. There’s some bittersweet tones as I understand exactly why Misery is doing what she’s doing but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be painful for her. I can already tell I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.

The Nullvoid Chronicles:

1. The Genesis of Misery

Review: A Pale Light in the Black (DNF)

Title: A Pale Light in the Black

Series: NeoG #1

Author: K.B. Wagers

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), guns (brief), violence (mild)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 18%

Back Cover:

For the past year, their close loss in the annual Boarding Games has haunted Interceptor Team: Zuma’s Ghost. With this year’s competition looming, they’re looking forward to some payback–until an unexpected personnel change leaves them reeling. Their best swordsman has been transferred, and a new lieutenant has been assigned in his place.

Maxine Carmichael is trying to carve a place in the world on her own–away from the pressure and influence of her powerful family. The last thing she wants is to cause trouble at her command on Jupiter Station. With her new team in turmoil, Max must overcome her self-doubt and win their trust if she’s going to succeed. Failing is not an option–and would only prove her parents right.

But Max and the team must learn to work together quickly. A routine mission to retrieve a missing ship has suddenly turned dangerous, and now their lives are on the line. Someone is targeting members of Zuma’s Ghost, a mysterious opponent willing to kill to safeguard a secret that could shake society to its core . . . a secret that could lead to their deaths and kill thousands more unless Max and her new team stop them.

Rescue those in danger, find the bad guys, win the Games. It’s all in a day’s work at the NeoG.

Review:

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to science fiction and fantasy, I much prefer the fantasy half of the equation. When I do pick up a sci-fi, I tend towards post-apocalyptic and steampunk over aliens and spaceships. So please recall that this review is written with personal opinions, and I don’t hold it against the book that I didn’t like it.

Considering that I’ve only read one other space opera (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet), I found it a weird coincidence that they both featured a young woman attempting to escape the expectations, infamy, etc. of their rich and powerful family by joining the crew of a spaceship in a far-away area of the solar system. In this case, there’s Max, escaping her family’s rigid expectations by joining the Near Earth Orbital Guard, which is like the space Coast Guard. She has a hard time fitting into the crew because she constantly doubts herself (#relatable) and the strict military discipline she grew up with doesn’t mesh with her new crew’s lax relationship to authority.

I don’t know if she’s supposed to be The Protagonist, though, or just one of an ensemble cast, because she doesn’t come in until a bit of the way in. The story starts with the crew before she joins on a mission, setting up a strong emotional attachment to the character that Max ends up replacing. A weird choice to me, but the rest of the characters weren’t terrible and I wouldn’t call it a deal-breaker.

What I really had issues with was the crew’s priorities. Personally, I was interested in the adventure and intrigue – why scavengers on a dead ship would be so afraid of being interrupted that they would resort to bribery, if the disappearance of 90% of long-range passenger spaceships from a particular launch was actually a conspiracy to convert up a failed drug trial, that kind of thing. But all the crew cared about was the Boarding Games. From what I could gather, the Games are an annual event where different branches of the military form teams to compete against each other in different events (like hand-to-hand combat and puzzle challenges) and the team with the most points at the end wins. It sounds like it’s fairly fun, but winning the Games was top priority for all of the crew and it was not at all what I cared about in this story.

From some of the emphases in the writing, the Coast Guard parallel is super prominent and (to the best of my non-military understanding) true to life. I almost categorized it under “Military Scifi” as a secondary genre because that really feels like what it’s going for. Maybe if you’ve been in the military all this will be more interesting and relatable to you, or you’ll like it more if you can get more invested in the Games than in all the other plot hooks. Either way, it’s not a bad book – just not one that I particularly want to keep reading.

The NeoG series:

1. A Pale Light in the Black
2. Hold Fast Through the Fire

Review: Once & Future

Title: Once & Future

Series: Once & Future #1

Authors: A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy
The names on the book cover are Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, but these are the names on the authors’ website and seem to be what they prefer to go by as of this review.

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, death of animals, death of parent, murder, blood, gore, genocide, rape (mentions), violence, grief, body horror (mild-moderate), prison (brief), needles (mentions), being injected without consent, misgendering (once, accidental and immediately corrected)

Back Cover:

My name is Ari Helix. I have a magic sword, a cranky wizard, and a revolution to start.

I’ve been chased my whole life. As a fugitive refugee in the territory controlled by the tyrannical Mercer corporation, I’ve always had to hide who I am. Until I found Excalibur. Now I’m done hiding.

When Ari crash-lands on Old Earth and pulls a magic sword from its ancient resting place, she is revealed to be the newest reincarnation of King Arthur. Then she meets Merlin, who has aged backward over the centuries into a teenager, and together they must break the curse that keeps Arthur coming back. Their quest? Defeat the cruel, oppressive government and bring peace and equality to all humankind. No pressure.

Review:

King Arthur in space. Cool idea, right? It gets better.

King Arthur and his knights are reincarnated every so often. The 42nd King Arthur is Ari Helix, an illegal immigrant from a blocked-off planet currently on the run with her adopted brother after their mothers were arrested and imprisoned for not turning Ari in. They’re on the run from the Mercer Corporation, the galaxy-wide monopoly on everything that blocked off Ari’s planet for saying that monopolies were bad, actually, and basically are the government because if the government does something they don’t like they can just stop delivering food and water until the government changes their mind.

Ari herself is hard-headed, stubborn, devoted to those close to her, and deeply passionate about truth. She is almost physically incapable of telling a lie, hates lies by omission just as much, and once ended a relationship because she felt like her girlfriend not telling her every single thing about herself immediately up front was tantamount to being lied to. Not only did that make her an interesting character, but it functioned as both a positive thing and a character flaw depending on the situation.

Merlin was a point-of-view character, cursed to age backwards so a couple millenia after helping the original King Arthur he’s somewhere around seventeen. It’s his job to mentor each reincarnation of Arthur, train him (or her, in the case of Ari), and accomplish a series of steps that the Lady of the Lake set out to end the cycle of reincarnation. Forty-one Arthurs before Ari have died without completing the steps, and Merlin carries the guilt of every single one. He is also incredibly gay, and completely adorable falling for one of Ari’s “knights.”

All of the characters in this book are stellar (pun intended). From Ari herself to her love interest Gwen (regal, pragmatic, and literally queen of a planet); Merlin (terrified of de-aging out of existence and not sure what to do about teenage hormones) and Morgana (not quite a physical being and fairly terrifying); Ari’s knights, including her relentlessly practical brother and a nonbinary friend who uses they/them pronouns; and the director of the Mercer Corporation who gives the faceless evil company a hateable and very punchable face.

I’ve seen criticisms of this book saying the pacing is all over the place, and I can absolutely understand not liking this. But personally, I found it a delightful sort of chaotic. This book gets really dark at times, from relationship betrayals to literal genocide, and fits a lot of really intense emotions into less than 400 pages, but it’s balanced somewhat by witty quips and bordering-on-absurd situations. It’s one of those books where looking back some of it was a little ridiculous, but in the moment it was a great read.

Considering the end of this book, I’m not sure I want to read book two – the ending wasn’t bad, but it was setting up what sounds like a vastly different type of adventure, and I don’t know if that’s really what I want out of these characters and this concept. But this book was absolutely worth the read.

The Once & Future series:

1. Once & Future
2. Sword in the Stars

Review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Title: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Series: Wayfarers #1

Author: Becky Chambers

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: Death, violence, grief, xenophobia, war, genocide, drug use (mild), terminal illness, sexual content (discussed/implied but no on-page sex), blood, abelism, imprisonment, injury, trauma/PTSD-like symptoms

Back Cover:

Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.

Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.

Review:

This is a really hard book to review, because despite what the back cover makes it sound like, Rosemary isn’t the main character. The story starts with her, but each member of the Wayfarer crew is a protagonist. This isn’t so much a story about Rosemary as much as a story about the people of the Wayfarer as individuals and a group.

Third-person omniscient perspective is hard to do, and either it was done poorly (which again, it’s hard, and I don’t blame Becky Chambers if she just didn’t get it right) or it wasn’t going for third-person omniscient and I just got confused by perspective jumps. It also skips through time a fair bit, too, glossing over days and sometimes months with little to mark it, leaving me occasionally confused. But those are overall minor problems, and didn’t take too much away from my enjoyment of the book.

The story starts with Rosemary, a girl running from her past and looking to get as far away as possible from her old life on Mars, joining the crew on the Wayfarer. She joins a delightful crew already there – Ashby, Kizzy, Jenks, Sissix, Dr Chef, Corbin, Ohan, and Lovelace the AI. All of them are well-developed and interesting, with unique personalities and backstories, and for the most part are people I would love to spend time with myself.

This is not a plot-driven book. In fact, up until the end there isn’t a whole lot of a plot. The Wayfarer takes a long-haul job that requires them to spend nine months traveling to a place that was until very recently a war zone, and this book is almost entirely these characters on this nine-month trip – interacting with each other, stopping off at occasional planets to get more supplies, occasionally meeting interesting people but mostly just being together. It’s heavy on the world-building and more than anything is a wonderful, sweet story of found family.

If you go into this expecting a rip-roarin’ scifi adventure, you’re going to be disappointed. Because that’s not what this book is. The world is stunning, but it’s not even about the science fiction. It’s a sweet, simple story of love and found family and choosing the people you are close to, and it just happens to be set on a wormhole-making spaceship in a spacefaring world and some members of this found family just happen to be aliens. There’s plenty of scifi to satisfy a scifi fan, but at the core are emotions. If you go in expecting that, you won’t be disappointed.

My only real disappointment is that the Wayfarers series is a bunch of standalone novels in the same world, so this is the only book where I’ll get to enjoy these particular friends. I might try reading one of the other books (number three looks most interesting at the moment), but regardless if I pick up any of the rest of the series, I still consider this book to be absolutely stellar (pun intended).

The Wayfarers series:

1. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
2. A Closed and Common Orbit
3. Record of a Spaceborn Few
4. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within