Illuminae Review

This week's novel is Illuminae, YA sci-fi by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff.  You may recall that I really liked These Broken Stars by Kaufman and Meagan Spooner, so I've had this one on my Kindle for a while and held back because the file makes it look really long.  Turns out this is an illusion arising from the file format, and I read the whole thing in about a day and a half.

This is in the form of a dossier, and the story is presented as a series of e-mails, After Action Reports, Wiki pages, chat logs, audio transcripts, and descriptions of surveillance videos.  Through these, we see the tragedy of [PLACE], an illegal mining colony on the outer rim of the universe.  They are attacked by a rival corporation, massacring thousands of men, women, and children.  They are rescued by a military cruiser that happens to be in the area, but instead of retreating when the military shows up, the rival corporation ships decide to fire on the military. The now damaged and overpopulated military ship rescues about 5000 refugees, and without faster than light drive, they have to travel six months to the nearest jump gate with the (also damaged) last rival corporation warship chasing them to eliminate all witnesses. 

I'm always impressed when epistolary stories manage to convey tension, and boy howdy, this one was intense.  The hits just keep coming and as soon as one problem gets a band aid on it, another problem crops up, usually within the same section.  The AI is broken and starts making questionable decisions, then there's a virus that breaks out, and then another thing and another.  The hits just kept coming, making it difficult to put down.  There's always a conflict and always a countdown clock. 

Another reason I think this works is that every section has a strong voice from whoever's writing the e-mail or writing the descriptions of surveillance videos.  Sometimes it's almost too strong.  But there's rarely a point where information is given without an obvious human filter, and that emotional connection makes a difference during tense evacuation procedures.

It's also surprisingly formatted.  E-mails from different ships have different headers and type faces.  There are illustrations and schematics.  During the space battles, when I suspect it would be the hardest to tell what's happening while also maintaining tension, it just doesn't try and instead turns it into a cool artsy moment, where you get the mood of the battle without the authors having to do a blow by blow.  It's really great, so I don't want to get too into it so you can be impressed if you want to read it.  It technically breaks the found-document format, but I was invested and it had a cool factor, so I didn't care.

Of course, this meant there were times that it was hard to read on my ancient Kindle.  I read the whole thing rotated 90 degrees so the text would be bigger, and there are times when the AI is talking that the gray scale doesn't work, so this might be a good one to read from a hard copy.

But A+.  Will read the sequels.

***

Next week: ???