"Station Eternity" Discuss Everything *Spoilers*

[SFFBC, Ancillary Mod]

A few questions to get us started:

1. What did you think of the world?
2. What did you think of the characters?
3. What did you like about the mystery setup/solving?
4. Overall thoughts?

[Melanie, the neutral party]

Bonus Question:
Write a recipe for this book! (Or @ least compile a list of its ingredients.)

[CBRetriever]

1. interesting
2. at first I disliked the main character Mallory
3. weird but interesting
4. thinking about book 2 in the series

[Janus]

The world felt fresh and quirky, with just enough weirdness to keep me curious without getting lost.

The characters are messy in a good way; not all instantly likable, but they grow on you and feel human.

I liked how the mystery is layered—clues drop slowly, and you’re never quite sure who or what to trust.

Overall, a fun, offbeat read: a bit strange, sometimes uneven, but memorable enough that I’d keep going with the series.

[P.E.N.]

I liked how the book balances tone. It’s quirky and strange on the surface, but there’s a quiet melancholy underneath Mallory’s perspective that gives the story more weight than I expected.

The worldbuilding felt intentionally disorienting at times, which I think mirrors how Mallory experiences the universe around her. That worked really well for me.

The mystery itself almost felt secondary to the atmosphere and character study, which is unusual for this type of story, but in a good way.

[Nastia]

I actually really enjoyed reading this book.

The story plot kept me awake at night.

The aliens' characters were descriptive enough. I like how the author viewed them. I've never seen/read the imagination of aliens elsewhere.

There was one case, though, when Mallory and Zan went to a restaurant, the initial description mentioned that there were no chairs. And suddenly, during their dialogue, Mallory sat down on a chair". The only weird part.

I gave a 5-star rating to the book

[P.E.N.]

I noticed that too!
It felt like one of those tiny continuity slips that almost make the world feel more “lived in” rather than perfectly constructed.

In a strange way, it didn’t pull me out of the story, because the atmosphere and the characters were doing so much heavy lifting by that point.

[AML]

I enjoyed the book. The characters and world were interesting and it was good mystery/story. I'll definitely check out the next one to learn more about the aliens and the what the characters on the station do next.

I like the first and last sections better than the middle one. While the back story on all the visitors to the station needed to come out somehow, it was jarring how much time was spent 'back on earth.' It took me out of what was happening on the station too much.

[P.E.N.]

I get what you mean about the middle section. It does shift the gravitational center of the story.

For me, though, that dislocation almost reinforced the theme. Mallory never fully belongs anywhere, so the narrative itself keeps relocating us.

It felt structurally intentional, even if slightly jarring.

[WTEK]

3.5⭐
1. I liked the world, but I felt like I still needed a little bit more description of people. It was difficult picturing some of the aliens in my head (or remembering who looked like what) and I get that Mallory would've had this problem too, but...

2. In the beginning of the book, I was mostly annoyed with the MC. I get that she ran into a bunch of obstacles, but she also seemed like "why is it happening to me?" instead of trying to find out why. They also make such a big deal about how great she was at solving murders, but she had no clue about her aunt being the murderer so was she really that great?

Zan annoyed me until you got his back story. I liked the Gneiss characters and I wish we could've had more alien POV. Maybe that happens in the next books?

3. The mystery solving was ok, I felt like this was less of a mystery book and more of a fish out of water story. Having to just accept that it was her gut telling what the clues were rather than why she saw these things as connected clues was a little lame. It would've been a lot easier for her to work if she had spent all of that down time she must have had at the station actually learning to read or sign with the Silence. There's no way she was being studied all day every day.

4. The action did get better in the last third and I liked it when we actually got to see more of the aliens. I might read the next one even because of this. Once all the secrets were finally out instead of just making everyone's lives more difficult, it was easier to like some of the characters.

I'm also still not sure how she didn't know she was a symbiont and why the Sundry didn't tell her even though the aliens were supposedly all about being symbiotic and thought the humans were inferior because they weren't. I have a pet peeve for characters not being told things just to make a plot more dramatic.

[P.E.N.]

I really like that you brought up the “fish out of water” angle, because I think that’s exactly what the book leans into more than pure mystery mechanics.

I also felt that Mallory’s lack of information (especially regarding the symbiont situation) was frustrating at times, but in a way that felt thematically intentional. The whole story seems built on asymmetry of knowledge: aliens withholding context, humans misreading signals, and Mallory perpetually operating a step behind what’s really happening.

Whether that works for someone probably depends on how much ambiguity they’re willing to tolerate. For me, it added to the quiet unease of the world. But I can absolutely see why it wouldn’t land for everyone.

Interestingly, I’ve also been reading Alien: Sea of Sorrows lately, and it made me notice how differently isolation can be handled in space settings. One leans into existential horror, the other into social dislocation. It’s fascinating how similar backdrops can produce completely different emotional textures.

[Jackie]

I'm not good with writing reviews, so forgive how short this might be...

1. What did you think of the world?
I love a good space book, but I found alien description & symbiont relationships to be lacking. Overall, not a whole lot of world building in this book either.

2. What did you think of the characters? At first they seems 'shallow', not a lot of background. I did like how the author went into depth on backgrounds at just the right moments in the story. There's something good.

3. What did you like about the mystery setup/solving? I was confused how things tied together until the end, so I guess that would constitute a good mystery. However, I can't explain it and I'm sure others did better, but I felt there was so many little holes in the story overall.

4. Overall thoughts?
I felt the book was like watching a mediocre play performed by mediocre actors. Honestly, I would have DNF'd the book if it wasn't a quest point. Just not my favorite. It wasn't a bad read, just really hard for me to commit to caring about the story.

[Becky]

I just finished, despite feeling like the book would never end.

I didn’t really like it. There were a lot of interesting ideas and concepts, but it felt like they were all thrown into an open-topped blender and the resulting mess splattered on the walls was the book.

Everything was so random and unsupported, and the narrative circling back over and over again didn’t make the crazy events feel supported to me, instead it felt retroactively shoehorned in.

The Gneiss ossuary battle was especially annoying to me. We’re supposed to believe that this is a chaotic fight… for “reasons” (I’ll get to that)… but it never READ as chaotic to me. Aside from randomly jumping around from character to character and dialogue line to random dialogue line, it felt unimportant and offscreen - we’re simply told that this chaos is happening but I never FELT it.

Same with the station breakdown. The randomness of the narrative undermined the chaotic nature of what was going on.

I just had so much trouble following what was happening moment to moment because it was SO random and unexplained while it’s happening, and then circles back around later without any explanation of the fact that that’s what is happening, and just expects the reader to piece it all together. But it still just doesn’t make sense.

What did Sam discover that Mallory got wrong? Are we supposed to extrapolate that LOVELY actually killed Grandma’s abusive husband? And that she took the blame and went to prison to protect her granddaughter? Why was the character of Sam needed for this? Why not use the Sundry hivemind to have Mallory realize it? If that’s in fact what it was.

Likewise, I don’t get the Gneiss conflicts at all. Grandpa thought Stephanie was a danger to Tina… so he traps her on a station with Tina. Then, when Steph takes advantage of a freely available chunk of biomass to evolve and leave, that starts a war? Because it’s frowned upon to ingest the already dead biomass, but attacking and potentially destroying or killing others is… not frowned upon?

Also why is Tina, who admits her own princessness is basically a worthless title, given a pass for the same thing that Stephanie gets attacked for?

Nothing makes sense.

I finished it but I don’t think I’ll be continuing.