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language: English
country: USA
year: 2023/2025
form: two novels
genre(s): sci-fi
dates read: 1.4.26 (Peace in the Sky) // 1.4.26-2.4.26 (Station in the Sky)
Caye Marsh’s Station in the Sky is technically an omnibus of two books, Peace in the Sky and its sequel, Station in the Sky. as they’re both short and I read them both in less than 24 hours, I’m opting to review them together.
Peace in the Sky begins when its at the time nameless protagonist awakens from a severe head injury in a cage with a girl, threatened with (sexual) violence by a group of men who appear to have captured them. the protagonist, identified as “a Peace-in-the-Sky”, calls down fire from the sky, killing their captors and allowing the two of them to escape. Peace-in-the-Sky, troubled by amnesia and lost in an apparently strange world, agrees to bring the girl, Anissa — who says she is Peace-in-the-Sky’s daughter — back to her home among the Tribes-under-the-Dome. together they navigate a strange, hostile world, traveling by night to avoid the searing radiation of the sun, enlisting the reluctant help of one of the Inthas — those who live outside the Dome — and finally making their way to the Dome itself. as they do this, Peace-in-the-Sky begins to remember more and more, allowing the reader to slowly piece together something of the world’s history.
the highlight of Peace in the Sky is, for me, the management of world-building information: Marsh does an excellent job of slowly filtering more information to the reader through Peace-in-the-Sky’s perspective without simply spelling everything out. I really liked the fact that much of this new information is unremarked; over the course of the book, Peace-in-the-Sky just slowly comes to have more information, in that more information is dropped into the narration without being explicitly flagged as newly-remembered or as new to the reader. it’s very cool — both the management of information and the information itself.
the novel’s focus is on its characters and relationships, especially the relationship between Peace-in-the-Sky and Anissa. I was, I must say, rolling my eyes a bit at how much the plot was driven by Peace-in-the-Sky having Maternal Feelings™ towards Anissa, though it didn’t significantly detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. Marsh does, I think, a good job of keeping the plot moving — which is to say, keeping the characters literally moving across the world towards the Dome — even as she emphasizes character interactions and periods of waiting.
there were a few places where I wished she’d spent more time on externally-driven plot. at one point in particular, as Peace-in-the-Sky is escorting Anissa through a hostile Intha settlement by threatening the Inthas with incineration, one of the Inthas yells out: “Dictum 3! […] I remember! Even if you don’t.” Dictum 3, we learn, is one of the mission parameters that are meant to guide Peace-in-the-Sky’s behavior. what we don’t learn — what Peace-in-the-Sky shows no interest at all in — is how this Intha came to know the mission parameters. (Station in the Sky does not explain this, either, which I found strange, because it seemed to me like an obvious loose thread on which to pull.)
overall, though, I think Peace in the Sky is a really strong first book, and I especially loved its ending (the very end; the end of the Anissa plot I was lukewarm on).
Station in the Sky proper begins when Peace-in-the-Sky — real name revealed to be Donna — completes eir transfer to a new body (or “shell”) on a station orbiting the irradiated Earth. Donna and the other stationers are not technically immortal — they have a finite number of shells — but they have lived for more than a millennium already, and in that time they have grown deeply weird, perhaps (this is certainly the novel’s thesis) even inhuman.
here we can extremely see the influence of The Locked Tomb — the stationers have a lot in common with the lyctors, locked into maladaptive routines under a veneer of politeness and a profound aversion to honest emotions, physical touch (they abandoned gender and sexuality a long time ago, ostensibly for the good of the mission, and all use the pronouns ey/em/eir), and really anything that isn’t their various personal obsessions — from self-isolation and meditation to robotics to painting to astronomy to scarification (and rules). unfortunately, this is not especially conducive to continuing their mission of safeguarding life on Earth and assisting (some) humans in rebuilding Civilization. even more unfortunately, Donna, the last active Surveyor who conducts field studies on Earth, has come to believe that this mission was, itself, a mistake from the very beginning. more to the point, Donna suspects that the head wound ey awoke with on the surface — which ey only survived because Surveyor shells are modified to be sturdier than normal — was not an accident, and begins investigating what ey believes to be, in effect, eir murder.
I liked a lot of this. the extremely dysfunctional relationships between the stationers, the long timescale on which they live and work, the slowly building horror as Donna begins to grasp the scope of what eir companions are planning to do on/to Earth — all of this works really well. again there were some threads I would have liked to see developed in more detail, but overall I was satisfied by both the plot and the character writing. the careful attention both to the various stationers’ mannerisms and to the station environment was particularly strong.
that said, there’s a certain human triumphalism that runs through Station in the Sky. the stationers are certainly both weird and callous, but I’m not convinced by the novel’s fundamental claim that they are inhuman on the basis either of their long lifespan or of their turning away from certain aspects of human experience — touch; love; sexuality; most egregiously to me, having children. the last is key because so much of the novel sees Donna grappling with eir feelings about Anissa and about having left Anissa behind on Earth. I get that Marsh has children of her own — the duology is dedicated to “my two children, who taught me what it feels like to be a mother” — but as someone who does not want and has never wanted kids I simply can’t relate.
nonetheless, I think Marsh does a very good job with the mystery while, again, keeping the narrative grounded in characters and character interactions. if some aspects of the ending felt a little (but only a little!) anticlimactic, it nonetheless compelled me, and it’s certainly thematically fitting.
all told I raced through both of these books and would highly recommend the omnibus (which is only about 250 pages in hard copy) — really solid, high-concept sci-fi.
moods: adventurous, dark, mysterious, tense