Far From The Light Of Heaven - Tade Thompson
This review contains spoilers.
Given that my biggest success as a writer is The Wretched, I think it's safe to say that "we're on a space ship and everything has gone catastrophically wrong" is one of my favourite types of stories. So I went into this primed to like it, and I wasn't disappointed.
Here's the blurb:
The colony ship Ragtime docks in the Lagos system, having travelled light years from home to bring one thousand sleeping souls to safety among the stars.
Some of the sleepers, however, will never wake - and a profound and sinister mystery unfolds aboard the gigantic vessel. Its skeleton crew are forced to make decisions that will have repercussions for all of humanity's settlements - from the scheming politicians of Lagos station, to the colony planet of Bloodroot, to other far flung systems and indeed Earth itself.
What's really interesting about Far From The Light Of Heaven is that it is, functionally, a locked room mystery. In his afterword Thompson says that it was at least partially inspired by The Murders In The Rue Morgue, and that definitely makes sense. It's science fiction, yes, but the SF elements very much take a back seat to the very human element of the investigation and the unfolding mystery. Although it's very clearly rooted in a clear understanding of the technicalities and concerns of long distance space travel, this doesn't read like hard SF. The technology is present and functions but Thompson doesn't dwell on it, and personally I'm thankful for that.
The mystery here is a good one. Shell, our main character, wakes up from a decade of induced sleep to find that 30 of the passengers in her care have been murdered, chopped into pieces and dumped into a chamber on the ship. As she investigates with the help of an investigator from a nearby colony planet, the plot thickens; some of the bodies are missing, the bots on the ship are trying to murder Shell and the investigator, and the ship's AI has gone rogue in ways that don't make any sense.
Each new revelation in the mystery feels like peeling back another layer. There are twists and turns that are impossible for the reader to predict, but Thompson delivers them in a way that never feels cheap or like a gotcha. There's certainly no way for readers to solve the mystery themselves, and that's often a feature of murder mysteries, but there's also never any real indication that the reader is expected to solve the mystery. We aren't really given any clues, because there aren't any clues - the solution is well hidden by design, and there's no real way for Shell and Fin to actually solve it themselves without being handed the answer in the same way that the reader isn't able to solve it themselves. This is a feature, not a bug.
What makes this work is that once the mystery is solved, we're still faced with having to deal with the reality of the solution. The enemy is known but is very present and is very much working against our protagonists, who are stranded inside the ship with no contact with the outside world and dwindling life support. The tension shifts from trying to solve the mystery to trying to liveong enough for the solution to be meaningful.
Parts of the middle section, but this is less to do with Thompson's writing that it is to do with the events of that act not really being to my tastes. An experimental section of the ship is breached, unleashing weird flora and fauna into the ship that turn it into a hellscape that's actively hostile to the characters. At the time I didn't particularly enjoy this section, finding it to be a little too chaotic and feeling like it was too disconnected from the mystery. Once the solution is revealed it all made more sense, though, and although this is still my least favourite part of the book the writing was strong enough and the mystery compelling enough that I was happy to keep reading (and I've written before about how I'm aggressively DNFing books this year). The chaotic nature of this middle section is my only real criticism of the book. The pace is so fast at times that it almost ricochets from one event to the next, and I would have liked to slow down a little and be given some time to breathe and take in what's going on. But ultimately the characters are in a race against time, and that breathless pace - while a little too much for me personally - certainly serves to highlight that.
What really seals the deal for me with Far From The Light Of Heaven is the fact that we don't get a nice, happy, neatly gift-wrapped ending. Things start bad and get worse and they don't ever stop getting worse, and the final notes are somber, subdued, and filled with regret and the need to keep trying to make things right again. Lots of people are dead, nobody fully understands what actually happened or why it happened (other than us, the readers), and the world the characters know may well have fundamentally changed as a result of the events of the book. I'm a sucker for a bleak, downer ending, and I honestly wasn't expecting it here, so I was delighted to see it.
Earlier in the year (or perhaps at the end of last year) I read Thompson's novella The Murders Of Molly Southbourne. Though I enjoyed it a lot, when I reached the end I found that I didn't really have the urge to read the sequel (mainly because it follows a different character. Sort of). That's not the case here. There isn't a sequel to Far From The Light Of Heaven, but if there was I'd read it tomorrow and I'll almost certainly be picking up Thompson's other novels.