Michael Barnes
Rivers Solomon has set their challenging debut novel in the HSS Matilda a generational spaceship with an apartheid system with 'pales' on the upper — more spacious, comfortable and luxurious — decks and the lower class darker skinned people living in the much more cramped, much more spartan lower decks.
The story begins in the middle of a series of power outages which joins other mysteries uncovered via our main POV character Aster, whose mother supposedly committed suicide, but her newly decoded journals reveal her mother discovering a major secret which now becomes Aster’s task to solve.
Solomon is POC and nonbinary and as would be hoped does a great job of presenting us an organically (as opposed to shoehorned in) diverse cast of characters. Aster is neuroatypical, as is another major character, Theo — the light-skinned bastard son of a former Sovereign and currently a high-ranking official known as the Surgeon who befriends Aster (she’s also his assistant) despite the gulf between them. Both are also otherly gendered and in fact, gender and sexuality are generally varied/non-rigid throughout the lower decks: fluid, ambiguous, or queer, with some decks that do label gender categorizing all their inhabitants differently. Aster’s deck refers to all children as feminine (“she/her”) while another deck uses “they.” This ambiguity of gender and sexuality is another thick line drawn between upper and lower decks, with the upper decks whites much more rigid. Theo, for instance, is deprecated by his own father and called “faggot” by the guards due to what he calls his “unnatural girlishness… sissyness.”
I also liked the recognition that whilst learning is managed/restricted Aster and Theo are clearly shown to be very intelligent. I have read some reviews had some issues with the science and the story's resolution I thought it was a well developed and satisfying resolution.
As Bill Capossere at Fantasy Literature concludes "I’d still recommend Solomon’s debut novel for its detailed portrayal of the casual brutality of the apartheid system. While beatings, rapes, and executions occur in real time, much of the cruelty happens off-stage so to speak, sometimes quasi-directly via memory or sometimes in chillingly indirect fashion, as when we witness Aster’s lubrication routine, done in case the not-all-that-uncommon rape by a guard occurs. The vividness, detailed or not, of the inhumanness of this society means that often this is a book one admires while reading as opposed to “enjoys.”
Rivers Solomon has set their challenging debut novel in the HSS Matilda a generational spaceship with an apartheid system with 'pales' on the upper — more spacious, comfortable and luxurious — decks and the lower class darker skinned people living in the much more cramped, much more spartan lower decks.
The story begins in the middle of a series of power outages which joins other mysteries uncovered via our main POV character Aster, whose mother supposedly committed suicide, but her newly decoded journals reveal her mother discovering a major secret which now becomes Aster’s task to solve.
Solomon is POC and nonbinary and as would be hoped does a great job of presenting us an organically (as opposed to shoehorned in) diverse cast of characters. Aster is neuroatypical, as is another major character, Theo — the light-skinned bastard son of a former Sovereign and currently a high-ranking official known as the Surgeon who befriends Aster (she’s also his assistant) despite the gulf between them. Both are also otherly gendered and in fact, gender and sexuality are generally varied/non-rigid throughout the lower decks: fluid, ambiguous, or queer, with some decks that do label gender categorizing all their inhabitants differently. Aster’s deck refers to all children as feminine (“she/her”) while another deck uses “they.” This ambiguity of gender and sexuality is another thick line drawn between upper and lower decks, with the upper decks whites much more rigid. Theo, for instance, is deprecated by his own father and called “faggot” by the guards due to what he calls his “unnatural girlishness… sissyness.”
I also liked the recognition that whilst learning is managed/restricted Aster and Theo are clearly shown to be very intelligent. I have read some reviews had some issues with the science and the story's resolution I thought it was a well developed and satisfying resolution.
As Bill Capossere at Fantasy Literature concludes "I’d still recommend Solomon’s debut novel for its detailed portrayal of the casual brutality of the apartheid system. While beatings, rapes, and executions occur in real time, much of the cruelty happens off-stage so to speak, sometimes quasi-directly via memory or sometimes in chillingly indirect fashion, as when we witness Aster’s lubrication routine, done in case the not-all-that-uncommon rape by a guard occurs. The vividness, detailed or not, of the inhumanness of this society means that often this is a book one admires while reading as opposed to “enjoys.”