SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Architects of Memory by Karen Osborne: https://t.co/ejBWuNnSlY
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) December 16, 2020
Short Review: 6.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): A SciFi story featuring ideas of memory, corporate power, and freedom as a young indentured woman comes across an alien weapon that everyone wants. Really interesting at times, but often confusing in its prose to diminish its effectivness.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) December 16, 2020
2/3
Architects of Memory is the debut novel of SF/F author Karen Osborne (who has previously written short fiction). It's an idea-filled short science fiction novel featuring a universe in which human space is run by corporate entities, who each have their own versions of citizenship and who force those who wish to obtain it into forms of indenture. It's a common theme/concept that I've seen a bunch in science fiction published recently (for examples, see Martha Wells' Murderbot or Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigades or Emma Newman's Planetside series) and Osborne adds to it a war with a seemingly unknowable alien species to create a book that was getting a little bit of buzz before release.
The result is a book with some interesting ideas, and some decent characters...but with a writing style that often left me confused as to what exactly was going on. This isn't helped by how I read books - reading fast often means that I miss aspects of detail-oriented prose and while this isn't that, it's possible that some of my confusion was due to how terse the explanations really were. It still mostly works, but the result, and the sheer amount of ideas that it's trying to deal with - about freedom/corporate ownership, about coexistence, about war and vengeance, etc. - kind of diminishes a lot of its effectiveness.
-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Ash has just a few years left till freedom - corporate Aurora citizenship. It's something she never dreamed possible years ago, working for in an indenture for a now defunct corporation in mining, where every cost added years of servitude, and her family and fiance were killed - but now, under Aurora, her indenture contract is such that it might actually one day be completed. All she has to do is do her job with her team on the Salvage Ship Twenty-Five, and of course try not to think too much about Captain Kate Keller - the woman who saved her, the woman who she loves, the woman who can't quite fully commit to their relationship.
And Ash needs to somehow get through these few years without letting anyone know she has a fatal illness, caught in the mines. An illness that is already causing her tremors and hallucinations.
But when Ash and Twenty-Five salvage a strange piece of alien tech, her plans for the future go badly awry. The tech belongs to a race that has waged war on humanity with seemingly impossible technology, who has killed so many, including the mines and Ash's former corporation - and it seems like the tech might be the key to understanding them, a key that could change the course of human technology forever. But even worse, the tech seems to have a strange effect on Ash, and so when every faction in the universe comes to claim it, Ash and her team find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy of corporate intrigue that threatens to kill them all....at best.
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Architects of Memory is told for the most part from Ash's perspective - with occasional shifts once every three-four chapters or so to the story as told from Keller's perspective, once the two become separated by the plot. And yet, I wouldn't characterize the plot as being focused around either character its core - this is what I often call, "Idea-based Science Fiction" rather than my preferred "Character-Based" storytelling. So for example, though Ash and Keller are in love and you might think their romance might be of big emphasis, it's just kind of there (because for the most part the two are separated and think the other dead for much of the plot).
This is not to say the characters are shallow or that there isn't some character development - as the plot reveals the truth about this universe, both Ash and other characters (although not so much Keller) do grow and change their priorities for example. Ash is a particularly strong lead - a young woman who grew up in a world that took everything from her, that never showed any signs of being anything but unjust, but has not seen a light in the darkness - a chance at freedom...if she can survive just long enough to grasp it. And so Ash at first is willing to do seemingly anything for that shot at freedom...but as things develop, she begins to realize that there are some costs that are too high, and that her supposedly more benevolent new corporate masters aren't much better than her old ones. The rest of the crew also features some interesting characters - particularly ex-soldier Natalie, haunted by the losses of those killed by the aliens, and barely older, but far more wise though irreverent Len. Keller by contrast is just kind of there - she loves Ash and wants to get justice for what happened to her ship and to figure out the truth, but otherwise there really isn't much to her or her development.
These characters are used to showcase a world and plot that is rich on interesting ideas, even if pretty much all of those ideas has been done elsewhere (again, as I say over and over, nothing is really original). You have a universe where humanity is really ruled by corporations, who grant freedom and citizenship only to those of elite classes from birth or for those who manage to somehow fulfill contracts for indentured servitude - with those contracts naturally being far from fair and often impossible to fulfill. To the extent that anyone resists this state of humanity, we discover that the group doing so also thinks only of themselves and not of any beings other than the humanity it might be trying to defend. And then you have the Vai, the mysterious aliens no one has ever seen with seemingly impossible technology, who have since first contact seemingly done nothing but attack humanity, but may be more than they seem (spoiler, they are). The intertwining of these concepts leads to some interesting ideas and an interesting if dark conclusion, as our characters must make choices of what costs are truly worth paying for freedom and humanity and how much others' lives are worth - and whether cycles of vengeance borne from misunderstandings can ever be stopped.
But this plot and its ideas are often muddled by the prose, which moves at a good pace but often confused me as to what was happening - our protagonists would black out quite frequently and wake up in new situations, and I often found myself confused as to what those new circumstances quite were...just in time for them to shift again (one change in status quo is literally blown up within 4 pages of it being setup for example). What exactly is happening as the alien devices are activated, or whether they are actually being activated, often required me to double back to reread to try and figure it out, throwing me out of my reading rhythm. Some of this problem might be me, but the result was that I was often kind of confused as to what was going on, even up to the point of the ending at first. And given the emphasis on ideas over character development here, that only hurts more.
As such, Architects of Memory didn't really work for me as much as it should - there's a lot of interesting stuff here, but the confusing prose and lack of great character development prevented it from having as big an impact to me as I'd hoped. I might be back for the sequel to see how this improves, but well, it won't be high up on my list.
These characters are used to showcase a world and plot that is rich on interesting ideas, even if pretty much all of those ideas has been done elsewhere (again, as I say over and over, nothing is really original). You have a universe where humanity is really ruled by corporations, who grant freedom and citizenship only to those of elite classes from birth or for those who manage to somehow fulfill contracts for indentured servitude - with those contracts naturally being far from fair and often impossible to fulfill. To the extent that anyone resists this state of humanity, we discover that the group doing so also thinks only of themselves and not of any beings other than the humanity it might be trying to defend. And then you have the Vai, the mysterious aliens no one has ever seen with seemingly impossible technology, who have since first contact seemingly done nothing but attack humanity, but may be more than they seem (spoiler, they are). The intertwining of these concepts leads to some interesting ideas and an interesting if dark conclusion, as our characters must make choices of what costs are truly worth paying for freedom and humanity and how much others' lives are worth - and whether cycles of vengeance borne from misunderstandings can ever be stopped.
But this plot and its ideas are often muddled by the prose, which moves at a good pace but often confused me as to what was happening - our protagonists would black out quite frequently and wake up in new situations, and I often found myself confused as to what those new circumstances quite were...just in time for them to shift again (one change in status quo is literally blown up within 4 pages of it being setup for example). What exactly is happening as the alien devices are activated, or whether they are actually being activated, often required me to double back to reread to try and figure it out, throwing me out of my reading rhythm. Some of this problem might be me, but the result was that I was often kind of confused as to what was going on, even up to the point of the ending at first. And given the emphasis on ideas over character development here, that only hurts more.
As such, Architects of Memory didn't really work for me as much as it should - there's a lot of interesting stuff here, but the confusing prose and lack of great character development prevented it from having as big an impact to me as I'd hoped. I might be back for the sequel to see how this improves, but well, it won't be high up on my list.
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