I get a fair number of comments on my projects citing other franchises and works they're reminded of, or that may serve as further inspiration. This is one of the best ways for me to gauge how my posts are received and offer a great frame of reference!
In this new blog category, I want to return the favor and highlight some of the inspirations that go into my ongoing projects. These will also be recommendations of works that I believe may be of interest to anyone enjoying my projects here.
Today's first entry will be Kameron Hurley's 2017 novel "The Stars are Legion".
It is a story of great conquest, love, and vengeance, told from the perspective of Zan, a great general and warrior, who finds herself without memory amidst the legion of dying world ships, locked in a last desperate war to stave off the slow apocalypse.
"Visceral" is the word that comes to mind when describing this work as a whole. It applies to the existential dread of the setting, the rawness of the characters, and the vividly detailed descriptions of environments and actions bringing it all to life. The story plunges ahead at a break-neck speed and, too, makes for a visceral experience.
From the get-go, the story and action are right there in the moment, wasting no time on lengthy introductions or exposition and setting up the central mystery. While the path ahead is not without its twist and turns, the slow unraveling of that mystery, which the reader undertakes side by side with the protagonist, makes for the most enticing part of the story. This is greatly helped by the unwavering focus of the plot, all the while maintaining the freedom not to conform to any genre formula but changing fluidly from grand space opera to gritty survival, from psychological drama to body horror.
My focus here, of course, is set on the inspirations for worldbuilding to be found in this universe, and there is much to love there.
Scarcely have I found a work so evocative of truly immense scale, both in space and time. It is a scale never put into numbers, but explored through a journey across and deep into the legion of worlds. At every corner, these reveal new frontiers and hint at a deep history. These impressions, however, are as fragmented as the character's own memories, and never overtake the singular focus on her goal. The world isn't robbed of its complexities but is always shown through a narrow lens of the character's own perception.
Whereas the character's focus is the lens through which the world and its scale are explored, it is a similarly strong focus on a handful of motives that govern the depiction of environments and technology. Flesh, birth, death, and wounds are everpresent in every description, from humble cells to weapons of war, to the deepest innards of the worlds themselves. Repeating symbols and themes, paired with ever new facets of every sensation, create a strong cohesive language at the heart of the work. From it, an understanding of the technology, its origins, and capabilities, can be derived.
And, although the world is taken to outlandish and alien places, by setting everything in a direct relationship to the human body and experience, the strong impressions evoked by the text are never too far removed to follow.
In much the same way, the emotions and thoughts of the characters are approached in the same raw fashion, breaking down matters of world-ending wars and inter-world politics to matters of the heart and soul found in every relationship. The pains and pleasures explored are, above anything else, universally human, if not entirely relatable in the extremity of their circumstance.
It is here, however, that the visceral style comes to strain the story at times. At its height, the body horror and gore are pushed to the verge of the absurd, when entire landscapes of viscera, horrendous bloody warfare, and cannibalism try to outbid one another for attention.
Birth and life, injury and death are central components of the story, as is the immediate and brutal confrontation of them. It is when their appearance turns from character experience to what feels like wanton provocation, that these elements lose their bite. Whether or not this takes one out of the story entirely, will be a matter of subjective experience.
This puts the work in the tradition of Larry Niven, Stephen Baxter, and many other influential Science Fiction authors who displayed a tendency to stray into extreme territories with certain elements of body horror and biological eccentricities. To its credit, this puts any self-proclaimed "grim-darkness" of the likes of Warhammer 40k to shame. Here, you will find horror derived from a much more personal experience and understanding than the common reiterations of the same demonic tropes all over.
All in all, the world of "The Stars are Legion" lives from its thematic clarity and the focus on the emotional core of the story. Rather than creating lots of puzzle pieces to neatly fit a grander picture, the world is a fragmented mosaic, each little glimpse of which reveals a different aspect. By the end of it, the picture revealed is still far from complete, but more than enough to fill in the gaps.
The result is fascinating, not just for the world itself, but the unique way it is tainted by the strong lens of its respective characters.
At just shy of 400 pages filled in an engaging style, I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a twisted, dark adventure with quite a unique angle on science fiction body horror. Fans of the likes of Dark Souls, Dead Space, Metro 2033, and the Resurrectionist will recognize both similar themes of horror and existential dread, with a slightly different outlook and surprising contrasts of emotional highs and lows within the story. It will also be great fun for anyone looking for a nice space opera mystery world to unravel. While this universe certainly wasn't made to be picked apart in terms of hard science fiction, it is well sophisticated and complex enough to propose some interesting questions and concepts to any worldbuilder.
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