Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear (2019)
Annoying: Unrealistic
Book cover blurb
Haimey Dz thinks she knows what she wants.
She thinks she knows who she is.
She is wrong.
A routine salvage mission uncovers evidence of a terrible crime and relics of powerful ancient technology. Haimey and her small crew run afoul of pirates at the outer limits of the Milky Way, and find themselves on the run and in possession of universe-changing information.
When authorities prove corrupt, Haimey realizes that she is the only one who can protect her galaxy-spanning civilization from the implications of this ancient technology—and the revolutionaries who want to use it for terror and war. Her quest will take her careening from the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core to the infinite, empty spaces at its edge.
To save everything that matters, she will need to uncover the secrets of ancient intelligences lost to time—and her own lost secrets, which she will wish had remained hidden from her forever.
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My Review
Wow, this felt like a long read.
This is a good book, for hard sci-fi lovers, I would suspect. It seems to have all the trappings you would expect and want for that genre. There are a number of interesting concepts and a nicely expansive universe.
I can't say I didn't like it, because I think I did. I read the whole thing and a lot of it lingered in my mind even when I wasn't reading...but. I did have a lot of problems with this one. But I will hold up my hand and say these are personal problems that possibly won't even register with other readers. Let me explain...
The font in this book, the hardback version, was an absolute nightmare for me, being a dyslexia sufferer. It was amazing how much more difficult it was to read this font style. possibly the main reason for Ancestral Night feeling like such a long read.
The abundance of overly long and complicated word choices! It's a style thing, I know, but ouch!
The over-worded and unnecessarily bloated explanations of every little thing.
(SPOILER!)
There are no bad guys in this! Even the main bad 'girl' is too lovey-dovey.
No one dies!!!!! Everyone and everything has the happiest ending possible. The last line of the book might as well have been 'And they all lived happily ever after.'
I know that last bit sounded pretty negative but I would say it was more disappointing than anything else. Like I said, I did enjoy it. And yes, I will read the sequel, Machine, since I've already bought it. I just hope we get some bad stuff happening, characters that die and stay dead! Please!
My copy of this novel
Saga Press hardback edition.
Published in 2019
499 pages
ISBN 9781534402980