Title: The Stars Are Legion
Series: N/A
Author: Kameron Hurley
Genres: Sci-fi
Publishing Date: 7 February 2017
CW: Body horror, Gore, Death, Cannibalism, War, Child death, Miscarriage
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Read if you’re looking for:
- Sci-fi with amazing world-building & an all female cast
- Living planet-ships that are slowly dying & trapped in place around an artificial star
- Weird symbiosis between the worlds and inhabitants, where women birth the things needed to sustain the world
- Interesting characters & vivid imagery of the layered cultures & landscapes
- Exciting action, political intrigue, & mutants
I loved, loved, loved this book! It’s the best sci-fi I’ve read in a long time. The story is complicated, so it’s difficult to give a simple summary, but it’s not too confusing when you’re reading it. There are only women in this universe, and I love that it’s neither mentioned nor explained in the book. There is a system of living planets around an artificial star, and these world-ships are decaying and dying, causing the millions of people who live on them to be at risk. The big arc of the story is about one of these world’s finding a way to travel beyond the system and break away from the star, to save themselves by traveling to somewhere new. There are two POV’s, Zan and Jayd, who are former lovers and sometimes enemies, but they need to work together to save everyone. Along the way Zan travels deep into the bowels of one of these living planets, where she finds whole civilizations, hordes of mutants, strange fungal forests, and has bizarre encounters, while also discovering her found family. There are so many creative and interesting ideas in this story, and well written characters, that I can’t describe it all here. But I 1000% recommend this book to anyone who enjoys sci-fi, political intrigue, bizarre worlds and cultures, and rumination on the destructiveness of war and obsession.
“The secret to leadership is not to be a particularly intelligent person. It is to surround oneself with those far smarter than oneself. And try not to kill them.”
