I loved the heck out of Tade Thompson's stupendous Wormwood Trilogy, aka the Rosewater books, which are the coolest slow-motion-invasion/metamorphosis narratives since Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis series, so my expectations for Far from the Light of Heaven were exceptionally high. And I was definitely in the mood for the blend of gumshoe detective fiction and space opera that it offered. Especially since it's basically, for a good while at least, a locked room mystery in space! I mean, come on! Who's been peeking at my Christmas list?"It's strange that space is at its most beautiful when it's trying to kill you."
Far from the Light of Heaven takes place mostly on board a long range passenger spaceship of the kind that brings colonists on one way trips, in suspended animation, to settle planets in other star systems. The Ragtime is controlled by an artificial intelligence during the long crossings, but by company policy (for it is a commercial vessel) it also has a human captain as a fallback in case something goes wrong with the A.I., its army of service robots, or the hibernation pods. On this voyage, that captain is a second generation astronaut named Shel Campion, who is on her first assignment but will sleep through most of it, just like the passengers. So far, so good.
But it wouldn't be much of a story if the Ragtime were to make its way from Earth to the Lagos system with its routine undisturbed, right? So when Shel is done recovering from the wake-up protocols, we can probably expect that Something Has Gone Wrong.
Boy, has it.
As Shel soon discovers, she's been put in charge of a spaceship-sized crime scene, in which a massacre of a whole bunch of her sleeping passengers has occurred. A stickler for rules and protocol the way the best rookies usually are, she immediately notifies the local authorities -- for at least the Ragtime reached its destination! Soon both the company she works for, which has offices on the Lagos space station, and the governing body of the planet whose future colonists are -- or were -- aboard Shel's ship are responding in ways that... could be more helpful, maybe?
Enter Rasheed Fin and his android partner Salvo, a crime solving duo from the planet Bloodroot, who board the ship to investigate the multiple murders that have left a pile of neatly dismembered but jumbled body parts in a big gruesome heap! Except some of the body parts are missing! Unless some of the dead colonists did not go into hibernation with the standard human complement of limbs!
Oh, and one of the dead a) totally broke the rules by sneaking a cybernetic pal aboard and b) was the richest human being in the entire universe. But no, the cybernetic didn't do the killings; all the cuts are clean and precise and, as Fin and Salvo start finding out the hard way, were made by the ship's service robots, who have somehow been reprogrammed to want to tear humans to pieces. But they were fine when Ragtime left Earth! Honest! Nonetheless, Shel looks like the only possible culprist for the killings!
DRAMA BUTTON
Then, complicating matters even more, along comes "Uncle Larry" - famed astronaut on the wane Laurence Biz, the ceremonial Governor of the Lagos space station, who was Shel's late father's best friend, and Uncle Larry's mysterious daughter Joké, who seems to have tagged along mostly because she's developed a crush on her imaginary version of Shel. At least Shel has somebody on her side now, though, right?
But, as with any good problem, adding more people to the equation just magnifies the complications. In this case, the homicidal robots just have more targets for their sharp edges and then somehow a bunch of secret experiments are let loose and look, this is a short book that is crammed full of incidents, all right? Especially since we're not done adding characters! There are more! Each time, Thompson braids the new people and their agendas quite deftly and cleverly into the overall narrative, ratcheting up the tension, augmented by a whole new strand of social justice/revenge, until you can hear it TWANG.By the time the locked room mystery is solved -- which is much earlier than is customary with such things -- the reader will barely notice the customary sense of relief that usually accompanies that solution, because even more lives are even more on the line by this point! Arrrrrrrgh!
Clifford Samuel's smooth voice and Caribbean-inflected British diction lends all of this madness a touch of sanity even though he pauses at strange points in sentences. It sounds like he had fun narrating this, which is something I do look for in an audio book narrator, and I will look forward to more of his work as well as Thompson's. Even better if they continue to collaborate on driving me crazy via my earholes. Well done, gentlemen!
