Rivers Solomon: An Unkindness of Ghosts

[bibliogramma]

Stories about multigenerational starships and the ways societies develop in them over these many generations are almost as old as stories about space travel, and as varied. From Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky to Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder trilogy to Stanley Kim Robinson’s Aurora, it’s a rich environment for all sorts of speculations on how closed societies function.

In Rivers Solomon’s debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, the ship is called the Matilda. As is common in many such stories, society aboard the Matilda is stratified by deck. The divisions between decks are rigidly enforced, resulting in different dialects, adaptive technologies, even ideas about gender identity, varying from deck to deck.

This is a society which recapitulates the plantation culture of colonies built on slavery. The upper decks belong to white people, who enjoy comfort and relative material wealth. The lower decks are the places where brown and black people struggle to survive, their existence policed by overseers, their environment set to minimum standards for survival, their labour coerced and exploited for the benefit of the upper decks. Matilda is a world of great cruelty, like the historical period of chattel slavery it reproduces. It’s also a world full of courage and resistance, of secret accomplishments away from the eyes of guards.

The protagonist, Aster, is an outsider among outsiders. Orphaned at birth, darkskinned like the other lowdeckers, Aster is neurologically atypical, and presents as intersex while identifying as a woman. She has some medical education and moves more freely between decks than most, healing where she can, operating with some protection from one of the members of the elite, Theo, the white-passing Ship’s Surgeon - though it’s not enough to free her from field labour, or the cruelties of overseers and guards.

Aster has secrets. She has a botanical and pharmaceutical lab hidden on a deserted deck, and she has her mother’s notebooks. Lune Gray was a mechanic, who worked on the maintenance of Baby Sun, the source of Matilda’s energy, heat and light. Before she killed herself, Lune had discovered more secrets - something was wrong with Baby Sun, and something was going wrong inside her.

Twenty-five years later, Baby Sun is having energy blackouts again, and the Sovereign is dying from an unknown illness that sounds very much like what was happening to Aster’s mother. In the midst of the casual horror that is the fabric of life on Matilda, Astor, with Theo’s help, must unravel her mother’s secrets to find a path toward freedom.

This is a book that I had to read without stopping, and one that left me breathless at the end. Solomon has created a story that keeps the reader deeply invested in these characters and their fate. I am eager to see what they create next.