Astrid Hawk
Added to listFirst Contactwith 1 book.
Read as a February 2026 First Reads selection. Overall, a really fun, science fiction idea about future human space travel and colonization with a creepy, dark, almost horrific setting... but too many gimmicks and side themes made the read less enjoyable.
This one is a little all over the place, and I think would be improved by either being longer, or by removing a few of the more distracting themes. I'm a big fan of space exploration scifi and first contact scifi, so I was pretty excited to see something like this in the First Reads selection. I really liked the initial setup, too - despite the fact that the mission crew seemed pretty juvenile, which is not at all how such a mission would go even IF we (humans) had done it many times before, I enjoyed the setup of human culture, the pre-alien-worldbuilding that the author did. He leans heavily into social media culture and capitalistic trends, and he had a new (in my experience) take on it - from "idols" whose every sense is connected and streamed to followers real-time, to the evolution of drug culture, with everything from death-simulators (for the DMT release) to auditory drugs known as "auditives", that provide the user with what reads like a synesthetic trip of rhythm and melody.
Music, rhythm, and math factor heavily into this book, and in most cases it's well-done. All of our 4 crew members are of Caribbean nation descent (the author is Barbadan himself), and there are elements of that culture, the sounds and rhythm and rhyme of it, woven into the story - into Cleo herself and how she interprets the world, into her rover, even into alien communication and translation. It's a very cool element IMO, and fun to find all the little references... mostly.
But when our protagonist Cleo lands on the planet they've gone to do terraforming research on, Orbis Alius, and powers up her personal rover "Shakes" for the first time... we find out she's seeded its AI personality with an eclectic mix of rappers and poets, and the thing can't communicate in anything other than rap-style rhyme. It feels so heavy-handed and gimmicky... the reader is supposed to develop (I think) some kind of feelings / sympathy for the Cleo/rover relationship - they're out there on a strange, hostile planet, all alone, years away from Earth and with no way to regularly contact their other crewmates, and they have to depend on each other completely - but every time the rover speaks it's in terrible rhyme that is just frankly annoying and disruptive.
It doesn't help that, because some words don't rhyme well, and there is no meter to Shakes's dialog, the author or editor has "helpfully" italicized all the words that are supposed to rhyme... which made me feel like I was in toddler rap class or something. Like the book had to hold my hand because it thought I wouldn't understand how to read it. There were larger points the author was making here that come together by the end of the book - of course the rhythm and rhyme theme, plus Shakes and Cleo are eventually able to communicate with an alien species that doesn't use spoken language thanks to their understanding of rhythm and rhyme and pentameter. Shakes is also a bit of a mirror for Cleo in that it is made up of a blend of personalities, just like humans like Cleo who come from blended cultures and broken families carry a little bit of everything with them. Cleo spends most of the book coming to grips with this, and that's fine - it's good character development - but the rapping really wasn't necessary. (I thought for the first few chapters with Shakes that it would develop some kind of bug that would eventually revert it to regular speech, or Cleo would get frustrated herself and override it... but no... the rover raps badly through the entire book.)
Aside from the rapping rover, I loved the dark, creepy, confusing, cerebral/trippy world of Orbis Alius and how Cleo's struggles with addiction and inability to connect with other humans impacted her understanding of this new world. Is it scientifically probable? No, not at all, particularly when Cleo finally gets out of her own survival pod and starts exploring - she survives crazy conditions she wouldn't possibly have survived, and the planet itself defies the laws of physics in every new region she enters. But it's still imaginative and fun to read about. We got not just one new intelligent alien species, but many - and the author played with pretty much every dimension we use to identify intelligence and even "life" to create these species, which I found creative and interesting. A lot of sci fi first-contact books just pick one or two dimensions - maybe the alien species communicates with sonar-like pings or light-sequences, or on a different sound frequency, but it's still a carbon-based life form with an easily recognizable communication and neural center. Or perhaps it's not carbon-based, and has different metabolic and physical needs entirely, but it still communicates in a readily recognizable language comprised of tokenized sounds arranged in sequences. In this book, Worrell just mixes it all up, and it was fun reading about each new species Cleo encounters, and watching her trying to figure out how they think, move, and communicate.
The problem, though, is that all of Cleo's discoveries feel too rushed. In fact, she doesn't actually do much solving on her own until close to the end when she figures out how to communicate with a warrior species that only "talks" through movement and dance. For the rest of the discoveries I felt like she went from "vague sense of unease/wrongness" to "none of this makes sense" with few clues to "oh so that's what it is" after seeing the answer in a dream/trip/fugue/memory. The puzzle or first contact parts of this could have really been played up - and to compensate, just get rid of all the auditive trip descriptions (after the first one, I think we get it) and of course the darn rapping rover.
I think Worrell was really on to some cool ideas here... I just wish he'd either spent more time with the alien worldbuilding and discovery, or saved some of his ideas for another book in order to just focus in on a select set.
Read as a February 2026 First Reads selection. Overall, a really fun, science fiction idea about future human space travel and colonization with a creepy, dark, almost horrific setting... but too many gimmicks and side themes made the read less enjoyable.
This one is a little all over the place, and I think would be improved by either being longer, or by removing a few of the more distracting themes. I'm a big fan of space exploration scifi and first contact scifi, so I was pretty excited to see something like this in the First Reads selection. I really liked the initial setup, too - despite the fact that the mission crew seemed pretty juvenile, which is not at all how such a mission would go even IF we (humans) had done it many times before, I enjoyed the setup of human culture, the pre-alien-worldbuilding that the author did. He leans heavily into social media culture and capitalistic trends, and he had a new (in my experience) take on it - from "idols" whose every sense is connected and streamed to followers real-time, to the evolution of drug culture, with everything from death-simulators (for the DMT release) to auditory drugs known as "auditives", that provide the user with what reads like a synesthetic trip of rhythm and melody.
Music, rhythm, and math factor heavily into this book, and in most cases it's well-done. All of our 4 crew members are of Caribbean nation descent (the author is Barbadan himself), and there are elements of that culture, the sounds and rhythm and rhyme of it, woven into the story - into Cleo herself and how she interprets the world, into her rover, even into alien communication and translation. It's a very cool element IMO, and fun to find all the little references... mostly.
But when our protagonist Cleo lands on the planet they've gone to do terraforming research on, Orbis Alius, and powers up her personal rover "Shakes" for the first time... we find out she's seeded its AI personality with an eclectic mix of rappers and poets, and the thing can't communicate in anything other than rap-style rhyme. It feels so heavy-handed and gimmicky... the reader is supposed to develop (I think) some kind of feelings / sympathy for the Cleo/rover relationship - they're out there on a strange, hostile planet, all alone, years away from Earth and with no way to regularly contact their other crewmates, and they have to depend on each other completely - but every time the rover speaks it's in terrible rhyme that is just frankly annoying and disruptive.
It doesn't help that, because some words don't rhyme well, and there is no meter to Shakes's dialog, the author or editor has "helpfully" italicized all the words that are supposed to rhyme... which made me feel like I was in toddler rap class or something. Like the book had to hold my hand because it thought I wouldn't understand how to read it. There were larger points the author was making here that come together by the end of the book - of course the rhythm and rhyme theme, plus Shakes and Cleo are eventually able to communicate with an alien species that doesn't use spoken language thanks to their understanding of rhythm and rhyme and pentameter. Shakes is also a bit of a mirror for Cleo in that it is made up of a blend of personalities, just like humans like Cleo who come from blended cultures and broken families carry a little bit of everything with them. Cleo spends most of the book coming to grips with this, and that's fine - it's good character development - but the rapping really wasn't necessary. (I thought for the first few chapters with Shakes that it would develop some kind of bug that would eventually revert it to regular speech, or Cleo would get frustrated herself and override it... but no... the rover raps badly through the entire book.)
Aside from the rapping rover, I loved the dark, creepy, confusing, cerebral/trippy world of Orbis Alius and how Cleo's struggles with addiction and inability to connect with other humans impacted her understanding of this new world. Is it scientifically probable? No, not at all, particularly when Cleo finally gets out of her own survival pod and starts exploring - she survives crazy conditions she wouldn't possibly have survived, and the planet itself defies the laws of physics in every new region she enters. But it's still imaginative and fun to read about. We got not just one new intelligent alien species, but many - and the author played with pretty much every dimension we use to identify intelligence and even "life" to create these species, which I found creative and interesting. A lot of sci fi first-contact books just pick one or two dimensions - maybe the alien species communicates with sonar-like pings or light-sequences, or on a different sound frequency, but it's still a carbon-based life form with an easily recognizable communication and neural center. Or perhaps it's not carbon-based, and has different metabolic and physical needs entirely, but it still communicates in a readily recognizable language comprised of tokenized sounds arranged in sequences. In this book, Worrell just mixes it all up, and it was fun reading about each new species Cleo encounters, and watching her trying to figure out how they think, move, and communicate.
The problem, though, is that all of Cleo's discoveries feel too rushed. In fact, she doesn't actually do much solving on her own until close to the end when she figures out how to communicate with a warrior species that only "talks" through movement and dance. For the rest of the discoveries I felt like she went from "vague sense of unease/wrongness" to "none of this makes sense" with few clues to "oh so that's what it is" after seeing the answer in a dream/trip/fugue/memory. The puzzle or first contact parts of this could have really been played up - and to compensate, just get rid of all the auditive trip descriptions (after the first one, I think we get it) and of course the darn rapping rover.
I think Worrell was really on to some cool ideas here... I just wish he'd either spent more time with the alien worldbuilding and discovery, or saved some of his ideas for another book in order to just focus in on a select set.
