Book Review: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
This is one of those books that was always destined to succeed. The publishing company wouldn’t have allowed anything else. Most writers hide themselves, plugging away solitarily, swallowing the loneliness until finally a book is produced. And then a select few people assist in polishing the manuscript before it is finally accepted or rejected. There are over one hundred people listed in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. Ergo, this is one of those books that was always destined to succeed. Whether the readers liked it or not. Thankfully, it does have some merits. But maybe not as many as we would have preferred.
The story is told through a series of transcripts of web chats, interviews, camera footage surveillance reports by uninvolved analysts, official testimony from military officers, diary entries, memorandums, emails and – from about halfway through the book – the thoughts of an artificial intelligence named AIDAN. While I imagine people brought up in the digital age won’t find anything unusual about this, I did struggle with the mostly non-prose format until I got used to it about half way through the book.
Set over 500 years in the future, teenagers Kady and Ezra – who’ve just ended their relationship – live on an illegal mining planet. For reasons that are unclear, a corporation has launched an all-out attack on the colony. The United Terran Authority rescues as many survivors as it can and then three ships – the Alexander, the Hypatia and the Copernicus – try to outrun the Lincoln, the operators of which seem determined to kill them all. The Alexander is a huge military ship but its jump gate generator was damaged in the battle. If they can make it to Jump Station Heimdall, they can all use a wormhole to get to safety.
But the jump gate generator wasn’t the only thing damaged. AIDAN, the Alexander’s artificial intelligence computer, has been shut down after malfunctioning with deadly outcomes. The ship’s command team doesn’t want to turn it back on until they’re sure it won’t malfunction again but they’ve got zero chance of getting away from the Lincoln without it.
In the meantime, they begin conscripting civilians into crucial jobs. Ezra shows an aptitude for flying and becomes a pilot. Kady is an IT expert but refuses to be conscripted, instead spending an inordinate amount of time hacking the ship’s systems and trying to find out what they aren’t being told. There’s a lot they aren’t being told.
This book falls into a lot of genre categories – young adult, sci-fi, romance, action, thriller and even a few more (I saw it described in one place as a space opera). It’s most successful at the young adult and sci-fi elements, less so at the romance, which felt a bit unoriginal to me. There’s a lot of swearing so it’s probably meant for older teenagers but because it’s portrayed as an official report after the events, most of the swearing is blacked out. Literally. There are a lot of black blocks concealing the swear words. Anyone with a bit of imagination will be able to figure out what it says but at least if younger teens want to read the book, they won’t be scandalised.
My favourite character in this book isn’t even a real character; it was AIDAN, the artificial intelligence. When AIDAN is eventually turned back on towards the middle of the book, it begins not just narrating but influencing a significant portion of the story’s events. The poetry of AIDAN’s words and the way it thinks are the best things about this book. I know I was supposed to be invested in Kady and Ezra – they’re on different ships so they spend a lot of time chatting online and rekindling the relationship they ended just before the invasion – but I just wasn’t. There was nothing particularly interesting about them or their interactions until the very last pages of the book and by then it was a little too late.
There are two more books in this series (so far) and I’m not inclined to read them at this stage. I feel this way a lot about book series. Unless the first one blows me away or has characters that I just have to know what happened to them, then the sequels are pretty far down on my To Be Read list (and it’s a pretty enormous list right now so the prospect of me getting to Gemina or Obsidio any time soon is almost zero). But I might get there eventually because AIDAN is just so intriguing.
I will say that for a book written by two people, there was no sense of disjointedness so that’s a plus and the graphics are a treat if you like that sort of thing. Overall, it was enjoyable enough. Good but not great. It’s exactly the kind of book you might imagine when publishers try to guess what is on trend for teens. Somewhere in the vicinity but not quite there.
3 stars
*First published on Goodreads 1 October 2018
