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A review by one_womanarmy
The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
In The Stars Are Legion, Kameron Hurley brings us a queer, all-female space opera in the style of Ancillary Justice and David Cronenburg's body horror to create a world that blends violent war and birth through the use of giant sentient world-ships and a multigenerational lense on forgetting, hoping, and pursuing a better family life. It is the story of two enemy lovers, Zan and Jayd – the story’s two narrators – and their attempt to rebirth a world-ship, the Mokshi, that is capable of leaving their dying, deep-space Legion of world-ships at the Outer Rim of the galaxy.
Biopunk to its core, Legion spins the reader through a hands-on dark and barbaric narrative that takes the reader through the core of a world and the core of the main character's memory and soul, exploring what it means to understand ourselves, our families, and the world around us, and forgive and accept the mistakes we make, the triumphs we share, and the parts that we cannot understand or change.
Unlike most sci-fi that I have read, the world of The Stars are Legion is almost entirely organic. The world-ships, of which there are primarily three in the story, are gigantic floating, tentacled living worlds with a seemingly unknown number of levels from the bottom, where people are recycled by terrifying monsters, all the way to the top, where the elite and powerful live and conspire. The entire world-ship is organic, made of some kind of fleshy substance that can be cut through to form new passageways, and eaten, if entirely necessary. It is alive with tubes like umbilici, and growths, and blood, and on the outside, a blackening cancerous rot, evidence that the worlds are dying and will continue to do so.
The intertwining first-person narratives of Zan and Jayd make for an extremely compelling and entertaining story, and Hurley’s use of present tense adds an extra level of suspense to the tale’s unfolding of a variety of interwoven plot types: quest, revelation, voyage-and-return, etcetera, all of which are thrilling by turns.
One of the main reasons I loved this book is how Hurley doesn’t separate war and childbirth as two distinct stories that can never meet. Before The Stars Are Legion I’d never really read a science fiction story that included childbirth other than as a form of tragic death for mothers, or procreation as a central narrative for the "arc of humanity." Birth as ritual is cited often. Birth as factual rite of life is not.
Birth is an integral part of the world, not in a clichéd version of the miracle of life, but as one of the many parts of human experience and a necessity for the world-ships survival. All the characters have different feelings about birth and children, some going through with pregnancy for the good of the world-ship despite their disinterest in it, some terminating their pregnancies for a variety of reasons, others wishing for human children and crying when the world-ship takes the creatures they’ve birthed from them.
I also loved, quite simply, that this book was all women. Violent women. Flawed women. Selfish women. Ugly women. Women who birth, women who grieve, women who sacrifice with courage.
I often struggle when listening to a book to retain all of the characters' arcs and storylines, and feel this was true for my experience with Legion. With an eye to reading a physical copy in the future, I can strongly recommend this book as a unique queer feminist sci-fi body horror. Deduction of overall points for dragging out the plot line at time with a bit too much voyaging through unknown lands.
Biopunk to its core, Legion spins the reader through a hands-on dark and barbaric narrative that takes the reader through the core of a world and the core of the main character's memory and soul, exploring what it means to understand ourselves, our families, and the world around us, and forgive and accept the mistakes we make, the triumphs we share, and the parts that we cannot understand or change.
Unlike most sci-fi that I have read, the world of The Stars are Legion is almost entirely organic. The world-ships, of which there are primarily three in the story, are gigantic floating, tentacled living worlds with a seemingly unknown number of levels from the bottom, where people are recycled by terrifying monsters, all the way to the top, where the elite and powerful live and conspire. The entire world-ship is organic, made of some kind of fleshy substance that can be cut through to form new passageways, and eaten, if entirely necessary. It is alive with tubes like umbilici, and growths, and blood, and on the outside, a blackening cancerous rot, evidence that the worlds are dying and will continue to do so.
The intertwining first-person narratives of Zan and Jayd make for an extremely compelling and entertaining story, and Hurley’s use of present tense adds an extra level of suspense to the tale’s unfolding of a variety of interwoven plot types: quest, revelation, voyage-and-return, etcetera, all of which are thrilling by turns.
One of the main reasons I loved this book is how Hurley doesn’t separate war and childbirth as two distinct stories that can never meet. Before The Stars Are Legion I’d never really read a science fiction story that included childbirth other than as a form of tragic death for mothers, or procreation as a central narrative for the "arc of humanity." Birth as ritual is cited often. Birth as factual rite of life is not.
Birth is an integral part of the world, not in a clichéd version of the miracle of life, but as one of the many parts of human experience and a necessity for the world-ships survival. All the characters have different feelings about birth and children, some going through with pregnancy for the good of the world-ship despite their disinterest in it, some terminating their pregnancies for a variety of reasons, others wishing for human children and crying when the world-ship takes the creatures they’ve birthed from them.
I also loved, quite simply, that this book was all women. Violent women. Flawed women. Selfish women. Ugly women. Women who birth, women who grieve, women who sacrifice with courage.
I often struggle when listening to a book to retain all of the characters' arcs and storylines, and feel this was true for my experience with Legion. With an eye to reading a physical copy in the future, I can strongly recommend this book as a unique queer feminist sci-fi body horror. Deduction of overall points for dragging out the plot line at time with a bit too much voyaging through unknown lands.