#arkhangelsk

Camp near Arkhangelsk, Russia

Traditional August walk with the camera (I should probably take it for walks more often than once a year, yep)

I just finished Arkhangelsk by Elizabeth Bonesteel. Very good science fiction. 400 years ago, the Russian generation ship Arkhangelsk fled a collapsing Earth; 200 years ago, their descendants established a precarious colony on a desolate ice planet; and today, an FTL ship has arrived from Earth to build an FTL communications relay in their star system. Both groups are equally shocked that there are other humans still around and have to figure out what that means for their respective futures

The story primary follows two main characters. The protagonist, Anya, is the head peace officer for the colony (Novayarkha). Outside the city is a frozen, toxic hellscape, and they don't have much food but plenty of strange illness, and the government is kinda authoritarian, but the people are generally content with survival for survival's sake. It's not that much different than Siberia. The deuteragonist, Maddie, is the captain of (what's left of) the visiting ship. This is the first time the colonists have even considered there might still be humanity outside themselves, and it creates a huge crisis in the colony now that the stakes are no longer "survival at any costs so that humanity doesn't go extinct"

The meat of the story starts out fairly simple. The governor of the colony initially wants nothing to do with the ship, fearing "contamination" with the ways of the Old World. She's convinced to negotiate with them at least somewhat, primarily to take advantage of the technology they brought with. Anya, as part of the governor's council, befriends Maddie and remains in contact with her. As things become worse politically in the colony, Maddie and Anya have to figure out how to lead these people out of their slowly-revealed dystopia and into a future that actually has hope

I really liked the book, like I said. I'm not quite sure how to describe it. It was more of a suspenseful mystery than an action story, although there are plenty of fast-paced scenes. It opens with Anya investigating a missing persons case that is almost certainly a murder, and they know who and how, it's merely a matter of why. They keep going back to that case throughout the book. There are a bunch of other "obvious" mysteries that are easy to predict (why do the parts the colony manufactures for the ship keep failing? Obviously someone is sabotaging them. What's the deal with the Exiles group who raid the colony occasionally? Obviously they're going to be even hungrier and sicker than the main colony, but serve as a good boogeyman), but the story spends a lot of time trying to really understand why these things happen, not just how, and it's very good

The biggest mystery is revealed at the very end, though, and I never in a million years saw it coming. That one goes way off the horror deep-end. (I think even giving the content warning would spoil basically the whole book. Edit: the author has a list of content warnings here.) I wasn't sure how the author was going to come back from that, but I think she managed it

Overall I got a lot of similar vibes to the Children of Time series, actually. There wasn't any of the time skip stuff like Children, thankfully, although individual documents from Arkhangelsk's archive are presented like flashbacks between chapters, which fills you in with enough pieces that you can figure out the important beats of their history. There's a similar conflict with Kern and the governor choosing to protect "their" colony and telling humanity to go fuck itself, but the real answer is that we're only humanity together. This was a much more human approach to that though (for obvious reasons)