Lightless

Okay, so right up front: this book is not perfect. But it is tense (oh god so tense; I had to take breaks to get through this) and suspenseful and good, and if this is truly a first novel, someday Higgins is going to write something great. I will watch her career with interest, is what I'm saying.

In any list of the things I liked about this, the characters have to be the first entry. And that's interesting, because the male characters in this book are pretty flat, kind of dull, sort of ciphers; it's like Higgins had only so much rendering energy and she burned it all on the female characters. I'm for this. The dudes can fade unimportantly into the background while the ladies are fascinating. That works for me, especially when so many show more of them are my favorite kinds of characters. (Key among them: the woman who loves machines and would much rather not deal with feelings. Spacetoasters, you remain true perfection in fictional form. Never leave me.) This did have the kind of weird side effect of making me side with a terrible person for about half the book, just because she was so much realer and her opponent was so chintzy (and also he was manipulating my spacetoaster, which is Not Okay). But, hey, these things happen. I got it sorted out eventually.

I loved the convolutions of the plot -- to be honest, they're somewhat predictable, especially if you're genre aware, but it doesn't matter if you've seen the roller coaster's curves before you ride it. The ride is the point, and this ride is fun. Higgins didn't quite stick the landing, but it's the first book in a series, apparently, so I'll wait and see how that plays out before I judge it.

And Higgins knows how to make suspense work. I was struck, reading this, about how sparse it is, how little she needs to drive the tension engine. I kept mentally comparing it to Illuminae, a genuinely bad book that attempted to accomplish roughly the same thing as Lightless. Illuminae's authors threw everything they could think of at the book to ratchet up the tension and only managed to be irritating. Higgins succeeds using only computer malfunctions and a creeping sense of dread.

If you like spaceships and intrigue and suspense and robots and thieves and plots and lots of fascinating women, this is the book for you. And I love all those things, so this was most definitely a book for me.

Warning: animal harm offscreen. show less

Pulled me in right from the start - my reading is mostly here and there these days, something I do while waiting for other stuff. Lightless kept the other stuff waiting instead. Plus I'm still not sure exactly what happened - not because it was obscurely described but because it's complex - and for me that's a bonus.

For people who've already read it:


For me this is a key passage:

"There is a degeneracy," Ananke said. "A scientific degeneracy. The two stories produce the same data, and which one is true and which one is false cannot be determined with the data we have. We need more information. ... A second source."

That applies to everything that Ivan and Mattie do and say through the whole book. Including Ivan's explanation of what and show more "who" Ananke is. There are certainly flags raised in their final exit from the ship. Is Ananke really "alive"? Was the whole spoonful o' chaos bit just another con? When we know that Mattie didn't just have minutes but days to make modifications?

What if someone told you that you weren't really conscious, you just thought you were? Is that a distinction without a difference?

I love that we have nothing but unreliable and misinformed viewpoints in this little world. It felt like a stage play at times. "OFFSTAGE: Sound of Earth being destroyed"

This is another case where a sequel might clarify things, and I don't know if that would be better or not.
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The spaceship Ananke is a ‘miracle of engineering, a miracle of physics, a miracle of computing’. Despite its size, the ship requires only three crewmembers, Domitian, its captain and two maintenance crew, Gagnon and Althea. Althea knows and loves this miracle ship as if it was her child but it soon becomes clear that something is wrong with Ananke. The ship should be impenetrable but two intruders manage to somehow make their way onto it. One of them is caught but the other manages to escape. Intelligence officer Ida Stays arrives to interrogate the prisoner who may or may not be aligned with a terrorist group known as the Mallt-y-Nos. Then the ship begins to malfunction and no matter what Althea tries, she can’t seem to find the show more source of the problem – she is losing control of her beloved ship.

Lightless by author C.A. Higgins seemed to start out slow at least for me and I almost gave up on it. But then, somewhere near the middle, without even realizing it had happened, I found myself completely engrossed in the story and couldn’t put it down. The narrative for much of the book is split between Stay’s interrogation of the intruder and Althea’s efforts to discover what is causing all of the ship’s malfunctions. The fact that the entire story takes place on the ship within narrow corridors, windowless rooms, a makeshift cell and maintenance shafts gives the story an overpowering sense of claustrophobia. Add to this the tension which is strengthened by the chaos that takes over Ananke and is magnified by the physical limits placed on it – the visual and auditory sensations created by lights flickering, alarms wailing, and the very loud tantrums of a very powerful teenaged computer counterposed with Althea’s frantic attempts to save her ship and Stay’s interrogation- and the impact on the reader is almost visceral.

Lightless is a very well-written, intelligent, and compelling scifi novel. I didn’t realize until after I finished it but this is the first in a series - if this first book is any indication, this series is shaping up to be one hell of a ride. show less

So. Another case of the boring protagonist. Not just boring but entirely defined by one feature: her love of the onboard computer. That is the extent of her characterization (Okay, so she likes blue eyes too). It is mentioned often, loudly, in almost every line of her POVs. Plus, I literally didn't even know what she looked like until the author finally mentioned her appearance about 3/5 of the way in. I still harbor a niggling suspicion that the reason she's so bland and faceless is that she's meant to be a reader-insert. This works in visual novels...but I've yet to read a regular work of fiction that does it right.

So. Why three stars instead of none? Because there was another POV character who was far more interesting to me. I note show more some mixed opinions on Ida Stays, but I rather enjoyed her. Relatedly, I like reading non-fiction about psychopathy. I simply like the way these kinds of minds work. Fascinating, callous aliens, they are--although, in the case of Ms. Stays, I don't find her to be at the extreme end of the psychopathy spectrum. She does have the ability to think long term and also to deny herself instant gratification in pursuit of lofty goals. Simply telling us someone has an emptiness behind their ribs =/= hard evidence of such. Don't get me wrong--she is a cold bitch. I just happen to think she's not nearly as bad as she could be. And certainly no worse than Ivan, Mattie, and Constance. I mean, look what they did. Helloooo moral ambiguity re: just who is the bad guy here?

The technology twist actually caught me off guard. I was busy blaming all the problems on a different character. For that reason and the end parts, I look forward to the sequel. show less

The Ananke, a top-secret experimental spaceship, is boarded by a couple of pirates/con men/thieves. One of the criminals escapes, but not before doing something to the ship's computer. The other is captured and questioned at length by a ruthless interrogator who is convinced he has ties to a high-profile terrorist, but she's so focused on getting the truth out of him that she's clearly not paying as much attention as she should to the increasing computer malfunctions, or to the ship's mechanic's protests that something is seriously wrong.

It sounds like a good, interesting setup, and the plot is clearly trying to be clever and twisty. But it just failed to work for me on far too many levels. The pace was slow, with almost nothing show more happening for much of the book, until a bunch of plot revelations -- many of them far too easy to guess in advance -- get dumped on us all at once at the end. The writing, while not bad, exactly, felt slightly odd or awkward to me, in a hard-to-pin-down way that had me double-checking to see if it had been translated from another language. (It hadn't.) Too much important world-building stuff is left entirely too vague and underdeveloped, while a lot of other story elements, from the minor to the plot-critical, felt implausible or just plain wrong. It ends on an not-very-satisfying note, too, presumably to induce us to buy the sequel (which I am not going to do). Most damning of all, I never felt, from the first page on, that I had any reason at all to care about these people, their ship, or their solar system.

Rating: 2/5, although it does occur to me to wonder if I'd be less harsh on it if my expectations were lower going in. I'd heard some good buzz about this one that steered me very, very wrong. show less

I don't get the publisher's hype about the book being like Alien and Gravity, but as any number of others have done a better job of explaining what the book is about, giving away the plot, and all the other wonderful things people do to “review” a book, I will leave that alone. My review will be limited to this man's opinion that it is science fiction; and good sifi at that. Like good sifi it is a commentary on the future state of civilization. It appears the author believes terrorism in the name of equality will be with mankind for a long time to come. Also, and not one of the reviews I've read mentioned, the birth of AI, an explanation of how it happened, and some foreshadowing of what may be in store for its creators is integral show more to the plot, and I hope the basis of any sequels.
I enjoyed reading the book, the plot was unique, especially in explaining the creation of AI, and should leave the author with several starting points for sequels should that be her wish. Thanks for the chance to read your work, I'll be recommending it to my contacts. show less

A lovely friend put this book in my hands and told me I had to read it. I picked up the sequel at the same time based on the cool-sounding premise -- a state-of-the-art space vessel with an artificial intelligence and a scientist/mechanic who cares for her, even when faced with sabotage, terrorists, and an evil government interrogator. I don't read tons of straight-up science fiction but I would read a lot more if it was all like this! It was tense and exciting and so smart without trying to prove it is smart, if you know what I mean.

http://webereading.com/2017/08/a-big-stack-of-books-fantasy-and-sci-fi.html