Artifact Space

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The story centres on Marca Nbaro, a new midshipper on the Greatship Athens – a massive space faring vessel run not by a purely benevolent government but by a consortium of business interests inspired (one suspects) by Venetian mercantile culture. Marca has a troubled past, and the things she's had to do to get a position on the Athens frequently leave her vulnerable to those out to get her. But she also finds friends aboard the ship, and a growing sense of purpose even as the near-calamitous situations she winds up in reveal her strengths. The economic/political system is a little cringy for me. I feel like it tries to position itself as beyond capitalism, but you've got people of privilege, including the main character, using their government positions to enrich themselves. And the book passes this off not only as the way things are, but as a positive thing, I feel? I'm not sure. It's done well and makes sense, and it doesn't make me dislike the main character (who is eminently likeable) but when I think about it, I'm like mad at myself for liking it, if that makes sense.

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He sees only a fat man in a leather greatcoat slouched wearily upon a mule, Estevar thought, someone too slow to present a genuine threat. Someone he can bully as he pleases. The likelihood may be small, but it was substantial enough for Harvard University Astronomy Department Chairman Avi Loeb to co-author a paper presenting the possibility. In the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Loeb and postdoc Shmuel Bialy wrote that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.” One slight warning, though – the ending is a real cliff-hanger moment, which will either annoy or make you want to read the next book straight away. Sadly, it is not out until next year, I understand.I’m a bit ambivalent about this one. I love Christian Cameron’s Greek novels and this seemed a good opportunity to branch out into his science fiction/fantasy ones. A lot of speculative fiction authors dabble occasionally in historical fiction. Why shouldn’t the process go both ways? One of Cameron’s best skills is his ability to reproduce the feel and lived experience of the period, so here where he gets to create the whole universe it should give him a real chance to be creative. The world he’s created is suitably complicated, though I’m not wholly clear on the government’s operation. It’s based loosely on the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages, as you can tell by the fact that most of Venice is aboard the ship we start off with. The navy is really a glorified merchant fleet, with trading rights being part of why you sign up. I thought that was interesting. Space traders was not something I expected to see in a military scifi novel.

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Thanks to the publisher and author for an advance reading copy of Artifact Space for review consideration. This did not influence my thoughts or opinions. The world building is really, really good. The way that space travel works and the restrictions on it, and how the human part of the galaxy has evolved based on that, is really well thought out and makes total sense. Tyrant’s Throne Falcio has one chance to restore the rule of law in Tristia, but will can pay the price? And that’s where Harvard’s Avi Loeb comes in. Especially due to the remarkably fast speed with which Oumuamua entered the solar system, he argues that a probe sent by intelligent others cannot be ruled out, that science must be open minded. We are thrown into a futuristic society, following the character Marca Nbaro, who joins one of the great ships destined for a trade point to collect xenoglas, a precious material that almost dominates society. But, she is a character with a traumatic past and suffers as a result, with no trust for those around her and a constant foreboding of being discovered and thrown out of her newfound home.Two, there's a definite military flavor throughout the book. It is, after all, a navy, and there are legitimate space battles. There's also detailed bits about flight paths and trajectories that I largely ignored. One of my friends noted Cameron had a tendency to go on about armor in one of his other books. So you probably have to either have a tolerance for armor and battle specifics, or the ability to read past. Guess which I did? And Artifact Space is nothing if not a naval novel in space—unless we want to get more specific and call it a Merchant Marines novel in space. It stars Marca Nbaro, barely escaped from an exploitative orphanage onto the Greatship Athens , an enormous ship that serves to facilitate trade between the human sphere and a distant and poorly understood alien culture. But something is destroying Greatships, and if the crew of the Athens can’t figure out how to stop it, they may be next.