#space archives

Last night I read Planet Sickness, @clonerightsagenda's first novel. Near-future climate collapse has pushed a boom in space exploration to find a new home. A research group sent to the Earth-like planet Tereus is studying its biosphere and prepping for a human settlement, but as they make contact with the local wildlife, things start to go wrong, tensions rise, and eventually the researchers start killing each other. Solid enough premise; I've read a hundred stories in this genre space

Except that's not really what the story is about. It's really set 70 years later, after Earth is saved and also a small population is established on Tereus. The main character, Xandra, is an archivist who uncovers the documents from that disastrous mission, which seems to have been covered up by the exploration company. She's also exposed to an organism the surviving researchers brought back, so now she needs to uncover what really happened to discover if she's in danger. It's a very different perspective for this kind of story, which is very cool

The first half of the book takes place on Earth. It's mostly going through the archives of the exploration company, and learning what had happened to the researches that way. Kinda found footage-esque, but a lot more spreadsheets. Then at the midpoint, Xandra actually heads to Tereus, because what she's found so far doesn't add up. I was honestly expecting the whole book to stay on Earth, since I had just assumed her chronic illness that prevents her from being a field researcher also meant she couldn't handle space flight at all. Thus far, I was certainly enjoying the book, and it was doing something pretty different than what I normally see, but it hadn't fully hooked me. But then on Tereus, as we approached the climax, there was a twist I never saw coming in a million years (although it felt totally fair in retrospect). I was fully engaged for the rest of the book and I think it was fantastic

Also I'm 99% sure there was a reference to this comic, and I laughed so hard at it

Sort of a sidebar on the mystery aspects:

If you've been reading my posts about #space archives for years, now you can learn what the fuss is all about! If you have not been reading my posts about space archives, here's the summary.

28-year-old archivist Alexandra Lawrence always dreamed of spaceflight, but her chronic illness left her grounded working in an archive for a defunct space exploration company. After she has an unsettling encounter with an alien specimen from the Tereus expedition, Xandra digs into the mission records and learns some of the crew never made it home. Xandra is used to being sick, so she can’t tell if the lingering effects of her exposure are something to worry about or one more way her body is letting her down. With multiple fatality notices in front of her, she needs to find out—fast. As Xandra explores the records, she discovers more secrets buried in the archive: betrayal, violence, and crewmembers’ growing suspicion that something about Tereus isn’t right. Between contradicting narratives and corporate redaction, records alone won’t be enough. Xandra has spent years accepting the limits of her sickness. If she wants answers, she’ll have to embrace her dream and visit the expedition site herself to learn the truth of the mission’s end—or maybe meet the same fate as the doomed crew.

Interested? Open the read more to learn how you can get a copy:

Yes! There is a lot of horror potential within archives with how they're a tool of hegemonic domination and knowledge control, and you could do that reading with TMA, but I don't think it was intentional, I think it was very much a case of 'hehe archives spooky'. I am working on my own thing using archives to talk about exploitation and objectification (one day… one day I will finish it and people will Realize).