Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson / An Excerpt

 

Read an exclusive extract from Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

There is no need to know what no one will ask. Walking on gravel, boots crunching with each step, Shell doesn’t know if she is who she is because it’s what she wants or because it’s what her family expects of her. The desire for spaceflight has been omnipresent since she can remember, since she was three. Going to space, escaping the solar system, surfing wormhole relativity, none of these is any kind of frontier any more.

There will be no documentary about the life and times of Michelle Campion. She still wants to know, though. For herself. The isolation is getting to her, no doubt. No, not isolation, because she’s used to that from training. Isolation without progress is what bothers her, isolation without object. She thinks herself at the exact centre of the quarantine house courtyard. It’s like being in a prison yard for exercise, staggered hours so she doesn’t run into anyone. Prison without a sentence. They run tests on her blood and her tissues and she waits, day after day. She stops and breathes in the summer breeze, looks up to get the Florida sun on her face. She’s cut her hair short for the spaceflight. She toyed with the idea of shaving her head, but Max Galactix didn’t think this would be media friendly, whatever that means. Shell spots something and bends over. A weed, a small sprout, pushing its way up between the stones. It shouldn’t be there in the chemically treated ground, but here it is, implacable life. She feels an urge to pluck the fragile green thread, but she does not. She strokes the weed once and straightens up.

Humans in the cosmos are like errant weeds. Shell wonders what giants or gods stroke humanity when they slip between the stars. The wind changes and Shell smells food from the kitchen prepared for the ground staff and their families. Passengers and crew like Shell are already eating space food, like they’ve already left Earth. Around her are the living areas of the quarantine house. High- rises of glass and steel forming a rectangle around the courtyard. One thousand passengers waiting to board various space shuttles that will ferry them to the starship Ragtime. Shell, just out of training, along for the ride or experience, committed to ten years in space in Dreamstate, arrival and delivery of passengers to the colony Bloodroot, then ten further years on the ride back. She’ll be mid- forties when she returns.

Might as well be a passenger because the AI pilots and captains the ship. She is the first mate, a wholly ceremonial position which has never been needed in the history of interstellar spaceflight. She has overlearned everything to do with the Ragtime and the flight. At some predetermined point, it will allow her to take the con, for experience and with the AI metaphorically watching over her shoulder. She turns to her own building and leaves the courtyard. She feels no eyes on her but knows there must be people at the windows.

LITTLE BROWN

A Murder Mystery in Space / Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson

A Murder Mystery in Space: Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson 

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

Alexis Ong
Wednesday 27 October 2021

There’s nothing I love more than a good locked-room murder mystery, an eternally beloved subgenre of crime writing that embodies humanity’s dogged need to know. But these can also be, more often than not, one-dimensional narrative dioramas that stick to the basic formula without distinction. This is, unsurprisingly, not the case with Far From the Light of Heaven, Tade Thompson’s newest novel which marries shades of gothic horror with a sleuthing mystery and hard sci-fi rooted in real astronauts’ accounts of living in space.

Translating a complex murder from a conventional terrestrial setting into the rigidly-controlled environment of space comes with its own risks, namely when it comes to balancing the dry technological foundations of the story’s reality—the minutiae of astronaut training, space travel and so forth—with suitably gripping momentum. The novel unfolds a bold vision of Afrofuturistic space in the form of the Lagos system where Earth is mostly a distant bureaucratic presence. Even when you edge closer toward the third act, Thompson’s light touch and subtle misdirections mostly steer Heaven away from getting overly mired in heavy-handed cliches and formulaic wrap-ups.

But Heaven is a slow burn, taking its time to build emotional connections between a tight ensemble cast: acting spaceship captain Michelle “Shell” Campion, disgraced “repatriator” Fin and his Artificial companion Salvo, veteran astronaut Lawrence Biz and his too-cool-for-school half-alien daughter, Joké. Then of course there are the AIs who go by their given ship names—the interstellar spaceship Ragtime which holds the scene(s) of the crime, surrounded by a small constellation of lesser AIs that loosely follow a familiar rubric of Asimov-like rules.

Shell, assigned to her first spaceflight as first mate on the Ragtime, wakes from sleep to find that the ship’s AI has gone rogue, along with a pile of dead body parts. The Ragtime isn’t just any old ship, either—it’s carrying the richest man in known space, a cornucopia of unknown biological experiments, and an elusive killer. Shell, who has been sculpted for this role from birth thanks to her high-profile spacefaring family, has to bring all her training to bear for a situation that theoretically shouldn’t be possible. Enter Fin, a law enforcement “repatriator” from the planet Bloodroot who shunts stray Lambers—mostly docile alien entities who offer humans drug-like comforts—back into their dimension. He, Lawrence, and Joké join Shell on the Ragtime and inadvertently get roped into solving the murders, with chaotic results.

The premise invokes one part Event Horizon, one part “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (which Thompson explicitly names as an inspiration in the afterword) with a touch of HAL 9000 and Hellraiser—there are no interdimensional portals to hell realms, but a pointed look zealotry and morality and what happens when both human and AI transcend those limits. Thompson, who has a knack for bending assorted genres to his will, borrows from the supernatural. There’s a good chunk of ominous build-up and a rather Gothic portrait of internal torture and struggle woven into mostly economical, businesslike scenes of people trying to stay alive on a malfunctioning spaceship. There’s an unintentional touch of Hitchcockian humor in Fin’s story, too, and one can’t help but think that Thompson flavors some of his more macabre snippets with his professional experience as a psychiatrist.

But Heaven doesn’t fully show its hand until well past the halfway mark when we’re introduced to the other side of population—an indentured community of miners who “belong” to MaxGalactix, an omnipotent, seemingly omnipresent mega-corporation founded by aforementioned quintillionaire Yan Maxwell.

Due to their vocation, the Tehani’s bodies are riddled with toxins (nebulously referred to as “Exotics”) so they must stay away from the rest of the world, forced to dig, and generally keep their existence as unremarkable as possible under MaxGalactix’s watchful eye. Their chosen champion is named after a Biblical prophet, and they serve mostly as a stand-in for the multitude of oppressed indigenous communities in our current reality, as well as those that will inevitably fuel the future wave of space colonization with their bones and blood.

Over the course of the novel, Thompson breaks down the lone genius detective trope into a haphazard group effort where everyone is very clearly flying by the seat of their respective pants. And for the most part it works, thanks to Thompson’s “less is more” approach to exposition and worldbuilding—for the first chunk of the novel, for instance, we’re mostly left to fill in the blanks about Lambers and their role on Bloodroot. Heaven’s well-oiled narrative is very much founded upon this small ecosystem of characters working together, but if given more time on their own, Fin and Joké, and to an extent Lawrence, might have benefited from a little more conceptual flesh on their individual bones.

The real meat of Heaven coalesces around a very distinct strain of slow, seething justice that comes at a tremendous cost. It’s the sort of justice that has the potential to bring clarity and strength to others before it’s too late. Thompson preys on contemporary fears to devise grisly but familiar scenes of machine-driven devastation, possibly because so much of modern life is pop culture living rent-free in our collective consciousness. That aside, Heaven offers refreshing perspectives on both terrestrial and space colonialism, the impact of multiculturalism and Blackness in a realm historically dominated by white capitalism; it’s a meticulously-crafted slice of Yoruba culture brought to the stars.

The most compelling thing about Heaven, though, is the way it positions Lagos at the very end of the book—cut off from Earth but bristling with a galvanized sense of solidarity that overrides its internal differences. It’s a big beautiful explodey fuck-you to the space capitalism as we know it, and perhaps a message that we should hear more often.

Far From the Light of Heaven is published by Orbit.

TOR

The best science fiction and fantasy of 2021. 
Illustration: Maïté Franchi

 

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

A locked-room mystery, interstellar office politics, a masterful space opera and more

Adam Roberts
Friday 3 December 2021

Far from the Light of Heaven
by Tade Thompson (Orbit)
Space is vast but spaceships are by nature claustrophobic: Thompson plays cannily on that contrast. Passengers aboard the starship Ragtime are in suspended animation on their way to the distant planet Bloodroot, but 30 people have been murdered in their sleep. Thompson’s tale is cleverly plotted and tensely told as the investigating captain must work against her own crew, bio-contagion, violent robots and a demonic AI to uncover the murderer’s identity. The book does more than the description “locked-room mystery in space” suggests: not only wrong-footing the reader as its mystery unfolds, but creating a series of believable, compelling worlds with some genuinely alien aliens.

The Actual Star
by Monica Byrne (Voyager)
This ambitious, inviting novel ranges from the declining Mayan civilisation in the year 1012, via a storyline set in 2012 in Belize, to the year 3012, when humanity lives in “a global system of nomadic, anarchist self-organisation”. By “inviting” I mean that it offers itself to readers as a way of thinking how to move beyond what the novel calls the “four great evils: capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism”. Whether or not you agree that those are the four great evils, you will be swept into Byrne’s meticulously worked world-building by her compelling storytelling and rich prose. This is a book about the profound interrelations of past and present – the Mayan sections are marvels of vividly rendered research – and the hi-tech, mystical, sex-positive, post-climate-collapse diversitopia of its imagined future is simply extraordinary.

Cwen
by Alice Albinia (Serpent’s Tail)
Although in the last few decades there has been an almost pathological obsession with dystopia, utopian writing is a much older mode. Not that there’s any wishful thinking about Alice Albinia’s feminist community, set on an archipelago “somewhere off the east coast of England”. When the de facto leader leaves for the uninhabited island of Cwen, named for its presiding goddess, what she has achieved on the archipelago is picked apart. Albinia engages throughout with the difficulties of trying to work for something better than what we have: the inertias and frictions of our world, its resistance to emancipation. She combines this with a wonderful vision of Britain’s deep history of myth and matriarchy.

The Employees
by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (Lolli Editions)
The Six-Thousand interstellar spaceship is a workspace; this short novel’s characters are workers. “You’d probably say it was a small world,” one of the characters says, “but not if you have to clean it.” The arrival on board of a number of strange alien objects galvanises a jumble of mundane and transcendent memories and provocations: intensities of taste and touch, of smell and consciousness. The book owes something to the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (or to the film Andrei Tarkovsky made of it, Stalker), though its alien artefacts are more compelling, and the ship more recognisably a place of office politics and corporate-speak. Coolly but artfully written, The Employees is a remarkable piece of work.

Shards of Earth
by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)
Since 2015’s breakthrough Children of Time, in which humans encounter a species of sympathetically rendered, sentient spider, Tchaikovsky has consolidated his position as the finest purveyor of high-quality space opera around. His new series, The Final Architecture, kicks off with this masterly example: space battles, cosmic mystery, alien superstructures, a ragtag crew of humans and aliens piloting a battered but trusty ship. Earth has been transformed into a vast “flower” and destroyed in the process: the war with the mysterious Architects is not as over as people think. The story treads some familiar ground, but does so with an expert touch, and the whole is deft and clever, expansive and readable, all informed by Tchaikovsky’s superbly baroque imaginative fecundity.

THE GUARDIAN

 

Tade Thompson’s Far from the Light of Heaven is a locked-room mystery in space. 
Photograph: Irina Dmitrienko

The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup

Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson; The Cabinet by Un-su Kim; Femlandia by Christina Dalcher; When Things Get Dark edited by Ellen Datlow; The Workshop of Filthy Creation by Richard Gadz

Lisa Tuttle
Fri 8 Oct 2021 12.00 BST

Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson (Orbit, £8.99)
When rookie pilot Michelle is assured on her first trip into outer space that the AI never fails, readers will guess that she’ll wind up in sole charge of the spaceship Ragtime, responsible for the lives of hundreds of passengers on their way from Earth to colony planet Bloodroot. But that’s the only predictable thing in the Rosewater author’s inventive, exciting and compulsively readable new novel. The plot involves a classic locked-room mystery, but the stakes are far higher than they could be for any Earth-bound detective. Campion is constantly on the brink of death, along with everyone else on her ship, unless she can discover and neutralise the murderer. This book is like the Tardis, larger inside than out, with a range of ideas, characters and fascinating future settings making it probably the best science fiction novel of the year.

The Cabinet by Un-su Kim, translated by Sean Lin Halbert (Angry Robot, £9.99)
Before bursting on to the international scene in 2019 with crime novel The Plotters, Un-su Kim won an award in South Korea for this, his first novel, in 2006. Cabinet 13 is where a bored office worker discovers hidden case studies of people known as “symptomers”. They display such unusual symptoms as hosting a tongue-eating lizard, growing a ginkgo tree on a finger, or falling asleep for years at a time. The studies were written by Professor Kwon over four decades. On his deathbed, he tasks his assistant with keeping the files hidden until such time as the symptomers may be recognised as humanity’s heirs – but there are sinister figures determined to exploit them. What begins as a rather whimsical set of stories turns into a much darker novel, raising issues of difference and acceptance, what people must do to survive, and what is truly monstrous.

Femlandia by Christina Dalcher (HarperCollins, £14.99)
Dalcher’s bestselling debut Vox was a feminist dystopia, but the villains of this story are women who take their desire to live free from male domination too far. In a very near future US suffering from catastrophic economic collapse, formerly wealthy Miranda is a destitute widow, soon to be made homeless. Her main concern is to keep her teenage daughter safe, and after a close escape from a gang of rapists, she overcomes her antipathy to radical feminism to seek shelter in Femlandia, a women-only commune founded by her estranged mother. As with most utopian communes, the reality has strayed far from the original intent, and Femlandia holds a sinister secret at its core. Dalcher is not a subtle writer, but she knows how to hit the emotional buttons; even if you see the twists coming, this is a compelling, fast-paced read.

When Things Get Dark edited by Ellen Datlow (Titan, £17.99)
In a new collection of short stories inspired by Shirley Jackson, Carmen Maria Machado references without ever naming the “cup of stars” from The Haunting of Hill House for a powerfully suggestive story about childhood abuse and memory. Elizabeth Hand’s response to the same novel is a very different sort of haunted house story. John Langan seems to have taken his inspiration from Jackson’s gently humorous pieces about family life but injected a shot of horror. Other stories are equally memorable, but for me, the outstanding one is Skinder’s Veil, a breathtaking blend of fairytale, dream and reality by the incomparable Kelly Link.

The Workshop of Filthy Creation by Richard Gadz (Deixis, £14.99)
As the title suggests, Richard Gadz riffs on Frankenstein, imagining Mary Shelley’s novel was based on actual experiments conducted by a certain Count Victor von Frakken. By 1879, a descendent of von Frakken has made huge strides in creating unnatural life, but his attempts to enlist the aid of an English scientist have resulted in the escape of one of his creations. Gadz (pseudonym of horror writer Simon Cheshire) brings the squalor of Victorian London to life, managing to make some modern medical procedures seem almost plausible in that setting. The fast-moving story maintains a good balance between the outright horror of gleefully gruesome scenes and the increasingly sympathetic character of the “monstrous” Maria, as she learns what it means to be human.

THE GUARDIAN