TBR Review: The Last Gifts of the Universe, by Riley August

A dying universe.

When the Home worlds finally achieved the technology to venture out into the stars, they found a graveyard of dead civilizations, a sea of lifeless gray planets and their ruins. What befell them is unknown. All Home knows is that they are the last civilization left in the universe, and whatever came for the others will come for them next.

A search for answers.

Scout is an Archivist tasked with scouring the dead worlds of the cosmos for their last gifts: interesting technology, cultural rituals—anything left behind that might be useful to the Home worlds and their survival. During an excavation on a lifeless planet, Scout unearths something unbelievable: a surviving message from an alien who witnessed the world-ending entity thousands of years ago.

A past unraveled.

Blyreena was once a friend, a soul mate, and a respected leader of her people, the Stelhari. At the end of her world, she was the last one left. She survived to give one last message, one final hope to the future: instructions on how to save the universe.

An adventure at the end of a trillion lifetimes.

With the fate of everything at stake, Scout must overcome the dangers of the Stelhari’s ruined civilization while following Blyreena’s leads to collect its artifacts. If Scout can’t deliver these ground-breaking discoveries back to the Archivists, Home might not only be the last civilization to exist, but the last to finally fall.

My Review

Not really a TBR pile book since I bought it on Monday and finished it today. I was in Waterstones after swimming and decided to try it. I also got a paperback copy of Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky while I was there.

This novella is about grief and loss and carrying on anyway. It just happens to use two youngish people, siblings working for a non-profit in an intensely capitalist society, and a cat, in space looking for information about why the galaxy is empty of other advanced sentient species, to do that.

Scout is a non-binary archaeologist, Kieran is an engineer, Pumpkin is a big, fluffy, orange cat. They are travelling around space in a small ship called Waning Moon, looking for the signals of information caches from a long gone alien civilisation. Every time they get close they are beaten by Jane and Gunner, two mercenaries from one of the controlling companies in their civilisation, Verity Co., which controls access to life-saving technology behind paywalls and contracts that enslave the people who work for them.

Scout and Keiron work for The Archivists, a non-profit organisation that shares open-source information. They have limited resources and cannot compete with the big, for-profit companies for speed or technology, but they do their best. The pair of half-siblings are grieving the death of their mother and the possible destruction of their whole civilization if the entity that destroyed every other advanced civilization their own species has come across turns its attention to them.

When they reach the first cache they come across, they get a partial recording before they are attacked by Jane and Gunner, who take the cache. There’s enough data from the partial recording to get them to the next one. Both groups are racing each other across space to collect the caches, as the information revealed in the first tells them that there may be a way to fight the unknown enemy.

In the course of studying the data they do have, Scout processes their own grief for their mother and finds a new perspective on life and death. I cried reading this book, for the main characters, who are clearly struggling, and for Blyreena, a character we only meet through diary entries found in the partial cache that Scout manages to recover. It’s not a long book, but it did hit all the feelings. It takes me a long time to process grief and strangely enough I felt a bit of relief about something causing me grief right now, after I had a good cry – triggered by Blyreena recounting the loss of her Soul Bonded in a ship malfunction.

The cover gave me the impression that it was a book for younger adults, or teenagers, and the main characters definitely feel like they’re in their early 20s, while Blyreena is probably in her middle years. Hard to tell with aliens. It’s marked as ‘adult’ on GoodReads and ‘LGBT’, but really, it’s YA and the LGBT/Queer tags are because Scout is non-binary, I think. The story is about universal issues, not Queer-specific ones, although I enjoyed reading an LGBT labelled book that didn’t focus on the gender or sexuality of the character; Scout’s non-binary gender was just a ‘fact of life’, no one made a fuss. The only time it came up was when the Verity Co. operative used Scout’s deadname to try to get some leverage on them. It doesn’t work and is clearly signalled as a disrespectful power move. The tags are useful if people are searching for Queer Adult Sci Fi, but I think they might also give the wrong idea of the nature of the book, given other books with the same tags can be a lot more adult and people tend to assume ‘LGBT’ = sex scenes.

The author tells the reader a lot in a short space. Without having to spell it out, the reader can see that the civilisation Scout, Kieran, Jane and Gunner come from is multi-star system, hyper-capitalistic, and controlled by corporations, where almost everything is behind a paywall. There is advanced technology that allows people to live two hundred years and travel across the galaxy easily, although it still takes time, but the benefits of this are unevenly and unfairly distributed. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The writing is really polished, the planets Scout, Keiron and Pumpkin visit are vividly described and the emotions of the characters are poignant.

Also, SPACE CAT! IN A SPACE SUIT!

Phoenix would never tolerate the amount of handling Pumpkin puts up with. Also, she sat on my lap for a whole 15 minutes this afternoon while I was reading. This is new Phoenix behaviour.

Anyway, back to the book. I liked it. It’s not what you’d call hard sci fi, but it’s a fun novella with a message. Recommended.