Borrowed from CLP on 9/16/24 to read for the Amazing Book Club of Doom on 9/21/24.
Favorable Kirkus review: Ambitious, heartbreaking, and out-of-this-world awesome. For 13 & up:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/amie-kaufman/illuminae/
Fandom wiki:
https://illuminae-files.fandom.com/wiki/Unipedia
https://illuminae-files.fandom.com/wiki/ILLUMINAE
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminae
The deaths of so many civilians is horrible.
I miss the more standard narrative format (even with post-modern features like shifting points of view) but this technique allows for some interesting perspectives that couldn’t be shown otherwise, like psych reports and interviews.
HARD CHOICES:
Are Syra and AIDAN good guys, or bad guys?
Both AIDAN and Syra kill civilians. Syra decides to flush the survivors from the Alexander into space when one of them showed symptoms of the Phobos virus, and AIDAN orders the shooting down of the Copernicus with many civilians onboard to prevent the devastating spread of the Phobos virus, and also decides to release from quarantine those infected with the Phobos virus onboard the Alexander, infecting and killing many people, in retribution for being thwarted by humans.
The Phobos virus carries a lot (too much) of the plot weight, motivating the destruction of the Copernicus, AIDAN’s retributive release of the quarantined on the Alexander, but it’s a cheap and blunt instrument, untethered from biology, it infects and kills, but before they die they also chase.
“Get the word out” - reminds me of James Holden ‘s self-imposed mission in The Expanse
Vocabulary:
glacieosaur
hermium
Artificial Intelligence Defense Analytics Network (AIDAN)
neurogramming staff
spanner monkeys
chipheads
stellarcorp
Codewyrm
snaffled
verse (= universe)
real black (= actual outer space)
interface leech
Nancy liked this
