What is on my nightstand this week: The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
There are any number of ways to approach this book.
- As Kameron Hurley fan. This blog, and the still-coming-back-some-day podcast, have been known to gush over Ms Hurley and her books. If you are a fan of her other works, and love twisted looks at both humanity and nature, then this book delivers in spades. I really thought that bug magic from the Bel Dame books, or the twisted plants of The Worldbreaker books would be hard to top, but The Stars Are Legion tops them all. The book is set on a series of colony planet en route to somewhere. The people have been traveling so long that the words for ship and planet have become the same, and things have started to degrade, or maybe there is some more complex plan that is being followed. Either way, there is a struggle going on for the control of one of the planets, and maybe the future of all of the planets.
- As a fan of stand alone books. I said in our very first review of the Bel Dame series, and stand behind the statement, not everything needs to be a series. And this book is a stand alone space opera. Which rocks. There is something to be said for a novel that completely encompasses the story, allows for new readers to try out a new author, and not all stories need more than one book to be told.
THE STARS ARE LEGION is my first stand alone novel. It seems odd to say that five years into the game.
— Kameron Hurley (@KameronHurley) December 7, 2015
- As book that has been described as Lesbians In Space, the book does not hang a lantern on the fact there are no men on any of the planets. Instead it delves into the impact of whatever has been done to these people, and what the hell is happening to them now. One of the interesting parts of the book, is for the amount of time the book spends on the world building, both literally speaking and in the action of the book, the whys are not really the focus of the book. Explaining why and exactly what happened in lot of other authors hands would have been a large part of the book, or cutely alluded to somewhere along the way (appendix or chapter quotes, maybe). Instead we get how things are now and what that means for the characters. It makes for an enjoyable rollercoaster of a ride.
TL;DR review: Highly recommended, go read it now.
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