Thursday, December 8, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

 




Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 4, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Station Eternity is the latest novel by Hugo Winner (for her podcast) and nominee (for Best Novel) Mur Lafferty, whose Six Wakes was a really tremendous cyberpunk-y/space opera/locked generation ship murder mystery, and earned her the aforementioned nomination for Best Novel. Lafferty's works sometimes touch serious themes, but often also are light and fun - like her Shambling Guide series which detailed a human working for a travel guide for monsters in New York and New Orleans. Her writing is very enjoyable and she often has protagonists who are very easy to root for, even in Six Wakes which again was dealing with a lot more serious stuff amidst its incredibly creative murder mystery setup. So I was super excited to see this book show up on NetGalley, which was basically her first new novel since Six Wakes, even more so after one of my friends loved it.

Unfortunately, I'm a bit more ambivalent about Station Eternity, due to really the book trying to do in my mind too much at the same time. As the series title (the Midsolar Murders) suggests, the novel is in some ways a SciFi take on the British Murder Mystery genre (or the Murder She Wrote version we had in the US for sometime), but the twist is that the protagonist is haunted by the fact that she is somehow always right around a murder that only she can solve, and has come to the conclusion that she is somehow causing the murders to happen, causing her to run away into space to stop it from continuing. This is a very clever idea (a twist on the Jessica Fletcher is the real murderer theory) but Lafferty combines it with an alien space station where every alien is bizarre and works in symbiosis with another alien species, with a human government conspiracy plotline, and a potential conflict between humanity and aliens to go along with some inter-alien conflict over freedom and lifestyle choices (kinda). And it's a lot all at once, and while the book starts on a really strong note up through its first third, the second third features a mass introduction of characters through flashbacks that really lost the momentum and made it harder for me to care, and I didn't feel the conclusion really worked to make all that sudden setup payoff in the end.


-----------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------
Mallory Viridian is one of three humans on Station Eternity, a space station filled with advanced aliens - all of whom look upon humanity with confusion ("Why are their bodies so wet and filled with liquid"?) and bafflement ("how do they live without some sort of symbiotic relationship with another race?"). Mallory doesn't really care - she asked the Station for asylum because she was tired and traumatized from all the murders that seemed to happen around her, murders that she would inevitably solve, but which she knows could only be possible if she was somehow causing them by being a supernatural murder magnet. So she figured that with the only humans on board being 1. the annoying human Ambassador Adrian; 2. her old friend and murder suspect/army refugee Xan, and 3. herself, well, there was little chance of that occurring here...even if it did mean she had to let a sentient swarm of alien bees examine her body for research or have to figure out what alien foods she might possibly even be able to eat.

So when she discovers that the Station has suddenly allowed a new shuttle FULL of humans to arrive, she is panicked for she knows that her curse will soon strike again. But it does so worse than she could have imagined - not only is there a murder, but the entire Station falls into panic and chaos as the Station's own symbiont is seemingly the victim, and the shuttle of humans winds up colliding with disaster, resulting in multiple deaths and only a few survivors. The aliens onboard have little interest in the murder investigation, and soon Mallory has her hands full with connections and conspiracies that only she can figure out, which will eventually hopefully lead her to the killer...assuming the trauma she wanted to escape, and the secrets held by even her friends on the station don't get her killed physically or mentally first....
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So I portrayed this novel in the plot summary as one that is Mallory's story, and it is somewhat, but it also really isn't, as the novel jumps often between various points of view. So the plot summary above describes Mallory's story, but there's also Xan's story of why he seemingly is AWOL from the Army and the military conspiracy that he discovered and became apart of, as well as the alien Stephanie's story about searching for freedom....as well as a number of smaller stories as we jump to perspectives of the various murder suspects and other alien individuals who have things going on during the chaos on the Station.  There's a lot more going on here than just a murder mystery set in space amidst aliens, as you might imagine from the tagline.  

And for much of the book, especially the first act, this works really well.  Mallory is a lot of fun as a subversion of the classic cozy murder mystery heroine: Sure she can wind up in the right place to uncover the connections between possible suspects and victims and to unravel murder mysteries of all kinds...but the fact that murders constantly occur around her has caused her to be watched by the government and has caused her so much trauma, as she comes to the only conclusion: that she is somehow responsible.  It isn't helped by one crime she couldn't solve being of a person close to her...resulting in her being traumatized and desperate to escape, even if that meant running into space.  Mallory's a fun and quirky and impulsive person, who is driven once she gets a mystery into her head to try to solve and a clue that she needs to follow up on, even if that takes her away from anything else, and her struggle between her fear and trauma and her need to help makes her a tremendous character.

The other main characters are also pretty good.  Mainly that's army refugee Xan, who struggles with the conspiracy he discovered between militant humans to try to fight with aliens through horrifying means and his lack of ability to do anything...and his horror at what might occur when he realizes other humans, including some with connections to his past, might be coming to the space station.  Then there's the alien Stephanie, a granite being from a species that transforms into other forms somehow, who is trapped on the station by her grandfather's deal with the Station, and is desperate to take heretical actions in order to escape.  These characters are a lot of fun to follow, even if unlike Mallory you're often left hanging by the plot omitting details at first to let you realize what they're actually doing and plotting.  And the aliens around them of various species are really fascinating in their own ways, and some of them also have their own microplots (like a station security agent) which work pretty well too.  

The problem is that the book's second act features the calamitous arrival of the other humans on the Station, and decides to introduce them by featuring something like 80 pages and 7 chapters worth of flashbacks back to back to back to back....And it just ruined the plot's momentum to me by introducing a whole bunch of characters at once all in plots that don't feature our protagonists (well, except a little bit in a few cases), with those plots just feeling completely different from the rest of the story and coming out of seemingly nowhere.  It's like Lafferty wanted to introduce all the possible suspects of a murder mystery but forgot to include them into the book was 1/3 the way through.  And the problem is that I had no reason to care about any of these characters who hijacked the plot midway through for way way too long, and I did care about the main characters like Mallory who disappeared because of all their flashbacks.  And yes this introduction allowed these characters to sort of serve as suspects for the final third of the book, but even then the murder mystery isn't really that interesting or that good, especially since the resolution and the culprit is just kind of underwhelming, as is how the protagonists discover who that is.  

And there's so much else going on alongside the resolution of the murder mystery which just undercuts the mystery for me entirely, which is kind of disappointing given the book's series name makes you expect the mystery to be largely important.  And the other stuff that's going on ranges from zany, crazy fun - everything to do with Stephanie and her fellow alien friends, which just gets absolutely nuts - to eh I guess - Xan's plotline with the conspiracy aiming to fight off the aliens or the counter-conspirators aiming to stop them from fucking up humanity's standing in the galaxy.  But it all just is thrown together to resolve alongside the murder mystery in the final arc, so that it's honestly just a lot in a small page-length, without really enough time for any of it to be really satisfying (the potential romance between two main characters is done so so so poorly, with one of them changing their mind about the other so abruptly it just seems out of nowhere).  

It's a shame because again I liked this book's setup, and the characters are fun, and the ideas are funky and cute and clever and a lot of what I liked from Lafferty.  But I just felt kind of nonplussed after the flashbacks through me off, and the book never got me back.  This is supposed to be the first in a series (I think, unless the series title is meant just to be another joke), so I hope that the sequels manage to integrate the murders with everything else a lot better,  because Lafferty is really talented and this book can be really enjoyable and entertaining, so I know she can pull this off in a sequel.  And I do like the main characters enough to want to see if Lafferty can improve on the plot around them.  

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