My ADHD demands a low-level background stimulation in order for me to focus, so I will listen to audiobooks as I work, and oh-boy did my book interrupt my focus today.
I’m only halfway through so I don’t think it could be considered a spoiler, but:
!spoiler spoiler there’s a part where one of the characters is unexpectedly stabbed by a tentacle while studying a seemingly harmless alien species (not the kind of shokushu zeme i’m into personally) and is infected with a foreign organic organism. The guy almost dies from it, but they discover that the organism found a way into his brain and has literally replaced his corpus callosum. The next chapter from his perspective slowly starts replacing first-person pronouns with ‘we’ and ‘us’, and then he has a tense confrontation with his crew member that end with him/them sticking a syringe through his tear duct and into his brain, and attempting to inject the crew mate with the parasite!<
There’s no reason for me to share this except it has clearly disturbed me and when I tried telling my partner about it they weren’t thrilled with my trauma dump.
I guess let this be a warning about this book: the first one of the series is pretty chill but this one really sneaks up to you with the body horror.
My curiosity is pulling me back in wish me luck
Edit: oh my god it gets worse, but it’s over now
Carry on
I gotta say, I really love Avrana Kern. I’m a sucker for any story with AI, and oh man is there no other character quite like her. Usually you get either cold, calculating murder-machine or naive little blorbo. She’s definitely not the latter, but she’s not quite the former either. Like, she’s got a truly galactic ego. No qualms assigning herself the title of God. Yet at the same time, god will come down and say, “Er, oops, my bad”. Half of what goes wrong in the second book is because she’s lonely and desperate to feel alive again, to the point where she’s ignoring the more logical or tactical decision. That’s so much not what we get from typical AI stories. The only other character that comes close is GLaDOS.
Anyway, I think you’ll really like Children of Memory. It’s more the first books speed and tone.
I’m really enjoying the thematic symmetry with her and the parasitic alien species
The last book touched a bit on continuity of self and consciousness, but I’m really intrigued with how this one is exploring those boundaries more. I like the parallels between space colonization and terraforming and the parasitic species colonizing hosts and Kern doing the same through neural implants…
It’s horrific and great
The octopi kinda freaked me out more than the slime mold. A mind that can take up a political position, probe the edges of reality, or come to a conclusion without ever really understanding what its doing… bugs me.
I’m not sure i’ve gotten far enough to appreciate the octopi just yet.
My fear of the slime mold reminds me a lot of my revulsion for the Alien movies with the Xenomorphs and face huggers. Which makes sense, because the intent of those aliens was to horrify via a kind of sexual violation. It forces a spawn into an unwilling host and compels them to carry something not-of-them. But the slime mold is scarier to me, because it isn’t just a physical violation but a cognitive/psychological one. It brings self-determination into question (at least more than human nature already does). How much of your thoughts are yours? How much of your subjective experience is yours? Do you have any choice in resisting the alien, or could you even decide to resist at all?
That’s why I think Kern and Meshner’s storyline strikes me as very similar, but it’s still absent that slight physical component of the slime mold physically living in the host brain. That, to me, is just beyond-the-pail terrifying.
I’ve just gotten to the part where the portiads are about to meet the slime molds and I’m just as anxious as I was the first time lol. It definitely reminds me of Alien, now that the setting is an actual derelict space station. Wish me luck