Braking Day

Oyebanji, Adam. Braking Day. Daw, 2022.
Adam Oyebanji is one of several promising new anglophone writers with Nigerian roots. Oyebanji combines Scottish and Nigerian heritage and now lives in Pennsylvania. He describes himself as “an escapee” from the University of Birmingham and Harvard Law School. When reading writers from the Nigerian diaspora, I look for echoes of the traumatizing Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) and the subsequent political and cultural turmoil. In Braking Day, Oyebanji does not deal with the subject directly, but it’s there symbolically. The novel is a coming-of-age story set in the Archimedes, a generation starship approaching Tau Ceti. The youngest generation of its crew can expect to spend their mature years show more colonizing a new world, but some crewmembers are not willing to give up their shipboard home for the perils of an unknown planet. Our hero, Ravi MacLeod, is a midshipman training to be an engineer. His life gets weird when he sees a young blonde woman floating outside an airlock without a spacesuit. She seems alive, and Ravi understandably worries that he is having a mental breakdown. But the truth is stranger than that, and the Archimedes is in more peril than he knows. He, his coding genius cousin, and her illegal AI drone are soon involved in a complex multicultural political drama that threatens to destroy the ship. Oyebanji is a writer I will follow. 4 stars. show less

It's great to read a hard science fiction book and I have John Scalzi's blog to thank for finding this book. Don't think I would have run across it otherwise.

One hundred and thirty-two years ago three massive space ships (Archimedes, Bohr and Chandrasekhar) set out to cross space to reach Tau Ceti. Each ship was designed to hold ten thousand people and provide everything they needed for their multi-generation voyage. All of the people aboard are connected to the ship's communication system through implants in their brains. Now they are getting near to Tau Ceti, the Destination Star. The drives which have been shut down for much of the voyage will be firing up again to bring the ships to a stop. It's the job of the engineers aboard each show more ship to make sure everything will function when they do so. Trainee engineer Ravinder MacLeod on the Archimedes is sent down to the drive compartment to check things over. As he is deep inside the drive hold he hears a banging from outside of the vessel. He thinks it might be his friend, Ansimov, or maybe his cousin, Boz, who have suited up and gone outside the ship to trick him into thinking there is an alien causing the noise. What he sees when he gets to a place where he can see outside is a blonde-haired girl with no space suit hovering outside the hull. He knows that people cannot exist in space without suits but he worries that he is having some kind of breakdown. That concern is exacerbated when he starts having strange dreams with this same woman in them. Although Macleod and Ansimov are training to become officers, they are from working class (or worse) families and thus are excluded by the rest of their classmates. However, Sofia Ibori, related to the Captain and the Chief Navigator, approaches Ravi for help with homework and they become friends. Sofia has a boyfriend so Ravi knows there isn't any hope of more but that doesn't stop him wishing. Interestingly, Sofia's boyfriend is part of a faction on the ship that doesn't want to land on the Tau Ceti planets. Ravi is probably closest to his cousin Roberta/Boz MacLeod but that sometimes gets him in trouble because Boz, while brilliant, is continually flouting the rules. Nevertheless, it is Boz he turns to when the unsettling dreams turn out to be actual messages from someone on another generation ship, the Newton, that left Earth at the same time but her crew had a plague outbreak and the other three refused them help. Since then Newton has been following the same course as the other three but far enough away that they can't be detected. The girl from Newton, Lisette, warns Ravi that her ship has weapons that they intend to use against the other three once they are braking and she is worried that the other three will retailiate with weapons of their own. She wants Ravi to help her prevent war. No big thing, right?

This story hinges on the concept that Lisette is able to communicate telepathically with Ravi across huge distances of space. It's a little far-fetched for me although I find the brain implants that allow instant communication between the people aboard Archimedes easier to accept. It's interesting that these implants are anathema for the people on Newton but they have artificial intelligence beings whereas the people on Archimedes, Bohr and Chandrasekhar left earth to get away from such creatures and have strict rules against using them. I guess "one man's meat is another's poison" applies in deep space as well. show less

Does a good job of balancing the low stakes plot ('does she like me?') with the high stakes plot ('the ship is at risk!'). Manages to develop multiple characters with varied motivation while staying focused on the central protagonists. I'm surprised in the modern world of YA trilogies that this is a stand alone!

Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji is a pretty fast read and doesn't bog down with a ton of scientific jargon that can sometimes drag the storyline in my opinion.
The story is about Ravi, an engineer in training, that starts having headaches and visions of a girl in a place he's never been before. His cousin Boz is a hacker who is always inches away from getting "mulched", their term for getting recycled/executed.. Together they start piecing together the mystery of his visions and the conspiracies that are floating around the ship. Not sure if there are going to be more books following this one but this book does well on it's own. Overall a good read for science fiction fans.

I can believe this is supposed to be YA. Our library had it in the adult section, but I feel many of the aspects could have been deeper. Okay for a light read.

This story works very well as YA, with most of the characters interesting and likeable for sci fi readers 14 & up. The rebellious group reminded me of Leigh Bardugo's cast of characters in Six of Crows: committing misdemeanors & more to further their own ends while still reflecting a moral compass.

2022 book #51. 2022. The three great generation ships are about to arrive at their destination star after a 130 yr journey. But a 4th ship, long forgotten about is about to intervene. Classed as YA but not juvenile. Decent ideas and a good story.