An Unkindness of Ghosts
One of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the past decade, selected by NPR
One of the 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time, selected by Esquire
One of the 100 Most Influential Queer Books of All Time, selected by Booklist
A Best Book of 2017: NPR, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bustle, Bookish, Barnes & Noble, Chicago Public Library, Book Scrolling.
CLMP Firecracker Award Winner
A Stonewall Book Award Honor Book
Finalist for the 2018 Locus Award, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the Lambda Literary Award.
Nominated for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Novel
"What Solomon achieves with this debut--the sharpness, the depth, the precision--puts me in mind of a syringe full of stars. I want to say about this book, its only imperfection is that it ended. But that might give the wrong impression: that it is a happy book, a book that makes a body feel good. It is not a happy book. I love it like I love food, I love it for what it did to me, I love it for having made me feel stronger and more sure in a nightmare world, but it is not a happy book. It is an antidote to poison. It is inoculation against pervasive, enduring disease. Like a vaccine, it is briefly painful, leaves a lingering soreness, but armors you from the inside out."
--NPR
"In Rivers Solomon's highly imaginative sci-fi novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, eccentric Aster was born into slavery on--and is trying to escape from--a brutally segregated spaceship that for generations has been trying to escort the last humans from a dying planet to a Promised Land. When she discovers clues about the circumstances of her mother's death, she also comes closer to disturbing truths about the ship and its journey."
--BuzzFeed
"What Solomon does brilliantly in this novel is in the creation of a society in which dichotomies loom over certain aspects of the narrative, and are eschewed by others...Hearkening back to the past in visions of the future can hold a number of narrative purposes...The past offers us countless nightmares and cautionary tales; so too, I'm afraid, can the array of possible futures lurking up ahead."
--Tor.com
"This book is a clear descendent of Octavia Butler's Black science fiction legacy, but grounded in more explicit queerness and neuroatypicality."
--AutoStraddle
"Ghosts are 'the past refusing to be forgot, ' says a character in this assured science-fiction debut. That's certainly the case aboard the HSS Matilda, a massive spacecraft arranged along the cruel racial divides of pre-Civil War America."
--Toronto Star
Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.
Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
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Community Reviews
Unfortunately, this book seems to have a lot of that. Vestigial organs include:
• gender identity - Solomon creates a structure where children on one deck are all referred to as girls (until they did something to indicate that they weren't actually a girl) and on another deck all children are referred to gender neutrally. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, except that it doesn't seem to matter in terms of the plot, or anything else in the book. It just sits there, like the proverbial gun that is introduced in Act One, but fails to go off by Act Three.
• religion - Solomon seems to be trying to set up the system on the ship as being driven by a very strict theocracy, except aside from mentioning that leaders of the ship are supposed to given their power and authority by their god, religion doesn't actually seem to play much of a part of the story. Except one character engages in some ritual self-flagellation. There was that.
• neuroatypicality - Our main character, Aster, is an interesting person, who displays symptoms of something along the lines of Asperger's Syndrome. Whether that's the diagnosis Solomon intended Aster to have is neither nor there, because the question is why Aster is portrayed in this at all. The only plot point for which her symptoms seem relevant is to create tension when she can't understand the motivations of the Surgeon, and to therefore create wholly unnecessary and artificial tension between them.
To say that all of this detracted from the story as a whole is an understatement. If only the plot were strong enough to bear the weight of all that, but it's not. I could never quite figure out what was supposed to be driving the plot. Was it the plight of the people on the ship altogether, or specifically Aster's search for answers about her mother? Or was the latter supposed to inform the former in the task of pushing the story forward? I don't know, and by the time the book wrapped up, I didn't much care.
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