So good.
This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing she’d have to do. This afternoon, her planet was invaded. The year is 2575, and two rival megacorporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than a speck at the edge of the universe. Now with enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to evacuate with a hostile warship in hot pursuit. But their problems are just getting started. A plague has broken out and is mutating with terrifying results; the fleet’s AI may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a web of data to find the truth, it’s clear the only person who can help her is the ex-boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again. Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, maps, files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more—Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.
Dear authors,
I once again saw this book mentioned in the discussions at “File 770” where I lurk on a pretty regular basis, and I should probably stop because my wallet is not thanking me, but I cannot find the strength yet. I loved this book, but readers beware of several things which may stop you from enjoying it.
First and foremost, as blurb tells you the story is not written in the regular narrative style. It is mostly a linear narrative, but in a sense it is an epistolary novel. We have emails, diary entries, description of the security footage on the space ships where action takes place. We also have the diagrams of the ships in the story, pictures of the civilian casualties, communications from one of the ship’s AI which look very weird, but I guess it works as computer communications. There are also some blank pages. I could have done without them, but I get what they were supposed to reflect in the story, so consider them a visual aid I guess? There are also some pages with very few words on the page – same thing. Those pages with no or very few words are not many amongst almost 600 page book. So if this style is something you know you cannot enjoy, I cannot state it strongly enough – skip the book.
If this is not something which will scare you away on its own, keep reading and see if the rest of my review may help you make a decision J.
Blurb gives you the setup, but I am going to elaborate on it just a tiny bit – basically one of the corporations decided that it would be a good idea to put the illegal settlement of regular people on the tiny planet called Kerenza so they could do mining work there and they had been working there, studying, living their lives, till one day ships of BeiTec corporation appeared near their planet and attacked them, killing tons of people, destroying their ships (sadly this was only the beginning of the horrors they inflicted). Illegal? Let’s bomb them all, instead of going to whatever Judicial Body that governs this federation of planets (is it called Federation? I don’t think so, but it is certainly something that governs the planets in this system) and making sure that Corporation that started this illegal settlement gets fined a lot.
One of the entries in this ‘Illuminae files” is the entry from “Unipedia” J. So let me quote from it some.
“The Battle of Kerenza IV was the opening salvo in the ongoing and bafflingly unreported StellaCorp war. Initiated by BeiTech Industries the assault targeted illegal hermium mining operations owned by the Wallace Ulyanov Consortium. United Terran Authority vessel Alexander answered WUC distress calls, resulting in a three way throwdown between BeiTech, WUC and UTA forces”
Sadly, the battle did not go to well for Alexander and at least some of the Kerenza ships that had many civilians on board. They were uncapable of jump travel now and that meant that assistance would be months away and their employer obviously was not too eager to report illegal settlement to whatever authorities. Oh and there was nuclear confrontation involved too and Bei Tech ship was firing at Alexander and completely destroyed another civilian ship with the thousands of refugees on Board.
Two Kerenza ships “Coppernicus” and “Hypatia” escaped after that battle and “Alexander” escaped as well. They are pretty sure BeiTech ship “Lincoln” will catch with them soon and attack them again.
I think this is all you need to know about the set – up. Remember I described the way this book was written? I was actually very surprised when I started to read it because irregular narrative or not, the story moves at a very fast speed, pretty much *all the time*. Usually when I read epistolary novel of some sort, even the best of them, I still feel a little bit distanced from the events in question. Not so here – we do get a chance to catch a breath here and there, but mostly it is a very fast moving action.
The ships, both civilian and military are trying to deal with the situation to the best of their abilities and it feels like the situation is getting worse and worse, not better. The death count in this story is extremely high – not gratuitous at all, and I would not say that the violence is very graphic, but the authors do not shy away from what war is all about.
I thought the book combined love story and fast paced science fiction very well. Kady and Ezra are wonderful characters – after their escape from Kerenza they end up on different ships, and Ezra is conscripted in the army same as many other civilians per the directions of “Alexander” command and they really did need help a lot. However that means that they can only communicate by email and yes, a lot of their emails are written in a slang form, but not all, and I had no trouble understanding at all, and *not* everything in the story is written like that. I had a misfortune of glancing at couple of the reviews and one of them suggested that unless you look in your phone all day, or live in your phone skip the story. I do not agree at all – there are plenty of documents written in very nice English J.
Kady is brilliant and this could have make me roll my eyes a lot, because she obviously plays an important role in turning the situation for the better. I mean, she and Ezra are seventeen when the story begins and I guess they are both eighteen when the first book ends, so I get that her IQ is 147, but everything that she did? All of that? Anyway I think story pulled it off, because we saw so much of Kady’s uncertainty and fears and despair – she did not come off as caricature to me at all, I ended up loving her. I liked Ezra too, but his actions did not raise this issue for me .
Read this book, it is awesome. I just hope the second book will be as good.
B+/A-
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