The pitch that got me to buy this was, more or less verbatim, “lesbians in space,” which is funny and also not inaccurate, but undersells the actual weirdest part, which is that every ship in this book is alive, organic, birthed from the bodies of the women who live inside it. Someone giving birth to a mechanical gear that rolls off to become part of the ship’s structure isn’t a one-off gross-out beat, it’s the entire architecture of the setting, and I mean that literally, structurally. If you’ve seen Cronenberg’s body-horror stuff you already have a rough sense of the vibe, fleshy and slick and a little nauseating, except stretched across an entire solar system of dying, decaying worldships.
Zan wakes up with no memory of who she is or how her world actually works, which is a familiar device, but it earns its keep here because the reader gets to learn the setting’s genuinely strange rules alongside her instead of getting a lecture. That amnesia hook is doing double duty, plot device and worldbuilding delivery system at once, and for the first half of the book it works really well. I was fully hooked, dragging myself through gross recycler-tunnel sequences purely because I needed to know what these ships actually were.
Where it loses me, and where a decent chunk of other readers land too, is the back half. The Jayd political-intrigue thread and the Zan body-horror-climb thread eventually recombine, and the ending arrives fast and a little undercooked, several plot threads just don’t get picked back up, the giants mentioned early on never really pay off, and I closed the book with more open questions than I think were intended. It’s the kind of ending that works fine in the moment and gets worse the more you sit with it afterward.
Three stars. The premise and the sheer unrelenting inventiveness of the setting are genuinely five-star material, an all-female cast with zero handwringing about it, one of the strangest settings I’ve read in years. But the plot doesn’t quite earn out what the world-building promises, and the ending felt rushed in a way that undercut a lot of the goodwill the first half built up.