technically, all bags are bags of holding.

(1) While her writing is aggressively not for me, I appreciate that Rebecca Thorne is a well-meaning writer who draws a fanbase that's craving queer cosiness and queer joy, and that's not something I want to denigrate. It's why I've named the author and the book as little as possible in these posts. If these books make you happy, that's genuinely great.

(2) I may have found it an infuriating read, but it's kept my brain occupied, so there's that. It's not so-bad-it's-good, but it was, weirdly, for me, so bad it was a good distraction during chemo treatments. It's been hard to find books I can focus on for an extended time during treatment, so while this might seem like a backhanded compliment, it was a real plus for me.

Anyway here are some more of my mean notes on this nice book.

OH MY GOD. I joked about the hivemind alien species reading more like streamers but THEY ARE LITERALLY TELEPATHIC LIVE STREAMERS: "We only have a limited number of emissaries, remember. If my hive stream drops in popularity, they can recall me and send someone else to a better location."

So the characters have decided to build a settlement on the space station that the genius immortal aliens abandoned a millennium ago, and they're like, 'this will be a good thing, considering how overcrowded the human stations are'. I'm sorry, what? Overcrowding is an issue? When there's a half-abandoned Party Station practically begging for a hostile takeover and a Rich People Planet courting resentment with their ample resources and their regular stream of deportees being dumped on the colony stations? Why aren't these people at war with each other?

Anyway, they're revitalising the space station and have conveniently all forgotten that it's inside a "nebula" (not a nebula, nebulae do not spontaneously form around planets, that is not what the term "planetary nebula" means, a planetary nebula is formed by off-gassing from a late-stage star and is solar system-sized, WORDS MEAN THINGS REBECCA) inside a pink cloud of space gas considered to be the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system because no ship that goes in ever comes out again. Docking at the station requires them to pass through a graveyard of inert spaceships, but yeah let's not worry about that until whoops Torian's love interest's ship is being attacked by giant space snakes.

but it's okay, the space snakes are sentient because everything in this fucking book is sentient and nobody is ever surprised about it. Like apparently plants all have self-awareness and I would have thought that would be a slightly bigger thing, like can your salad feel distress, but yeah not even one person has a single follow-up question.

“Maybe we should try and talk to them,” Torian said. Moss seemed tense. “There is no indication that is possible.” “You’ve proven there’s lots of ways to communicate, Moss”

This might feel like actual payoff if every form of intelligence in this book—human, humanoid alien, plant, computer, hive mind—didn't functionally communicate the exact same way, through perfectly humanlike dialogue, plus or minus the ability to grasp figurative speech. And obviously the space snakes are no difference, and obviously they become friends instantaneously.

(Though not before Torian makes some wild zigzags between 'we should talk to them' and 'can you kill them', and Moss chooses this life-or-death moment to decide to be petulant and risk its BFF's girlfriend's life because it refuses to work with its former owner. Respectively a dumbass and an asshole to the very end.)

Former Owner, trying to make amends, builds a mobile unit that Moss can use to explore off ship so it won't be stuck there. It takes the form of an obnoxiously cutesy fox-dragon robot with moss fur. Moss, immediately hating it, is like, 'what do I want with a dumb robot when I can access every computer in the space station.' The response to this: 'welllllll, we want people to actually live here and they might not feel great about being surveilled, especially not in private spaces like the doctor's clinic.'

Yes, fair, we should talk about surveillance ethics. However. (1) Human station dwellers have all grown up under constant surveillance, to the point that Moss was able to extract archived surveillance video showing practically Torian's entire life from childhood. The implication is that this is a thing people have been cultured to expect. (2) And if privacy was such a concern to the morally superior immortal genius aliens, why are there omnipresent cameras for Moss to access? Why would it even be possible for Moss to spy on patients' private health conversations in a doctor's clinic, especially when the clinic in question is being built inside a private residence

The debate continues: "Or we compromise. Limit the camera access to public spaces." Again, implying there are cameras all over private spaces. What?!

Let's go back to the cutesy fox robot. Moss decides to try it, and the author forgets that Moss is an advanced computer capable of performing multiple tasks simultaneously, so piloting the cutesy robot means immediately losing access to the ship's interior. (Does this mean it's also no longer monitoring life support?)

And Moss, who viscerally hates the sensation of fingers stroking its leaves, discovers that when it's inside the cutesy robot, it not only likes being petted, it desires it. SHUT UP. SHUT UP. BAD WRITER.

There's also a bunch of scenes where everyone's like 'wow torian you're so great, you're the best person to revitalise this space station and show everyone what's good about humanity' and like. I cannot emphasise how mediocre this character has been throughout the entire book.

Plants can "snake through" energy barriers that are impermeable to all other organic and inorganic matter. Howwwww.

Anyway then Torian, dumb as fuck to the end, steps inside a space elevator pod thing and activates it, sending her and her girlfriend and buddies hurtling down to the planet, in a hook for a sequel I will absolutely not be reading.

me: oh god.

book: the hyper-advanced immortal aliens who disappeared from this solar system a thousand years ago? They were the ones who made first contact with the humans in this system.

me: hold on, humans have inhabited the system for over a millennium?! Can we talk about the time scales in this book because-

book: AND they were the ones who terraformed the Rich People Planet for the humans!

me: The unsustainable meritocracy-by-deportation has been in place for a thousand years?

book: The other terrestrial planets were not viable candidates for terraforming, so the hyper-advanced immortal aliens said they could hook up wormhole transportation to a viable planet in another system, but the humans said no.

me: why w-

book: they said give us your planet instead.

me: They said this. To the most advanced, most revered alien species ever known to exist. Why?

book: idk greed I guess. Anyway obviously the aliens were so alarmed by this that they retreated to their planet and established advanced defences.

me: yes, naturally the immortal guys who are the best at absolutely everything would be shitting themselves over the mediocre humans and their substandard spacefaring tech. It must have been like being attacked with a cardboard sword.

book: that's right, they were cornered! The space confederation had to send some ships to protect them and force humanity to back down.

me: Just checking, we are still talking about humans, right? The uneducated losers of the space arena?

book: correct! And it's for this grave offence of threatening another sentient species that humans are banned from joining the space confederation.

me: That's... you realise that's like enforcing ongoing sanctions for acts of aggression committed by Rome under the emperor Tiberius.

book: and then approximately one thousand years ago, the immortal aliens all decided to leave the system for ~reasons unknown~ and in the centuries since all of humanity has completely forgotten they or their planet ever existed.

me: And... nobody in this spacefaring society knows how to work a space telescope or has any interest in pointing one at the mysterious cloud of planet-obscuring gas in their own system from which no spaceship has ever emerged.

book: why would they do that?

me: [grinds teeth]

book: so that's how come human leaders manufactured the widely believed story that the space confederation terraformed the Rich People Planet, but only the one planet so that humans would be too engrossed in fighting over it to try fighting anyone else.

me: They— but nobody is fighting over it! You told me none of the human settlements even has a military force! And humans are still space losers with vastly inferior tech! And— why would human leaders be pushing a propaganda narrative against the confederation they're desperate to join?

book: hey you wanna see this cute robot I made? It looks like a lil fox (˵◝ ⩊ ◜˵マ

me:

(Context: for nonsense handwavy reasons, Moss's code has leaked into the ship's non-intelligent, non-self aware auto-navigation system and made it sentient. Because every single nonhuman intelligence in this book develops and thinks and talks exactly like a human, plus or minus the ability to parse figurative speech, this means Auto-Nav is now a goddamn child.)

[Auto-Nav]: Moss. We’re flying! Are you watching? I’m flying so good. So fast. [Engine]: Moss. Moss. A: Engine is excited too! So exciting! Flying! Yay! [Moss]: I don’t care. I want you to fly in silence. Can you fly in silence, Auto-Nav? A: Silence? Silence is when a ship isn’t flying. When a ship is flying, we are loud! M: You’re loud when we land, too. A: To get us flying again! M: I am going to write a virus to infect every code you have. A: What’s a virus? Is it fun??

The Destitute drifted slowly through the energy barrier [to dock at the station]. A mechanical … giggle…? sounded through the speakers when the ship passed through it. “That is my favorite part,” Auto-Nav said. Torian had no idea where Auto-Nav found a sound bite of a giggle, but it was both creepy and hilarious. 

“We’ll be here for a couple days. Can we talk with you later, Auto-Nav?” “I will be alone?” It did sound like a child. Torian’s heart wrenched. “Not if—” “I will stay with you,” Moss said. Auto-Nav replied, “Yay!”

I don't think I can overstate how unbearable Moss is. Every time a human reacts to it/the spaceship in a manner it interprets as impressed, it observes that this is "appropriate" because it's the absolute shit and deserves admiration. This happens three times in the space of a chapter, which tells you something about the level of editing in this book.

While we're talking about editing: the author repeatedly uses words that are just definitionally wrong, e.g. "reputation" when she means "demeanour", "truce" when she means "treaty", "equated" when she means "translated". There's also a memorable sentence where Torian observes that her sister's scent is comforting, but she feels comforted by it.

Torian has returned to the Stinky Crime Station for her sister and finally, nearing the three-quarter mark, we get a description of the damn place. Except, bizarrely, it's the kind of description an outsider would give as opposed to a person who has lived there from birth: "She skirted a group of clearly drunk folks, one of whom was staring hungrily at her. Torian glared back, moving at a brisk pace. ... But it wasn’t all bad. Amidst dodging the locals, she saw hints of families making a life here ... Despite the environment, there was hope here." This is the neighbourhood she grew up in.

book: yeah, it's a meritocracy. Anyone can take the test, but they only give citizenship to the best and brightest. You know, in theory, at least.

me: Right, I'm guessing it's a lot more discriminatory than that in practice. Like the dictation tests under the White Australia Policy, yeah? Deliberately impossible to pass for anybody deemed undesirable?

book: goodness, no! It's very academically rigorous!

me: but-

book: they just refuse to test anybody over the age of eighteen. Have done for decades.

me: but... why would the MC not know about the age cutoff?

book: also, every single person on the planet has to take and pass the exam every single year in order to retain their citizenship. It takes two months to test everybody and the university spends the entire year working towards it. Anybody who fails to pass gets deported.

me: I-I'm sorry, what? How does this society function?

book: they use it as a form of population control.

me: but you said the test is academically rigorous, how does that-

book: oh, they rig it.

me: WHAT.

book: yeah, Exiled Love Interest actually passed the test, but she was a farmer's daughter, so they switched her paper with that of the rich kid who failed.

me: and she knows this because...

book: oh, naturally they make everybody's results public. They're highly academically rigorous!

me:

book: okay! So this is the Party Station. The people there realised that if every day was a holiday, they'd never have to work, so now they do nothing but invent holidays and party as the station falls apart around them!

me: b-but it's a capitalist society, how do they eat?

book: TODAY IS SNUGGLING DAY lmao they're so silly.

me: So there's virtually no governance and deteriorating defences, correct? That must mean those powerful crime syndicates you mentioned are muscling in, trying to seize control, if one hasn't already.

book: nope! they agreed to leave it as neutral territory!

me: but... it's a space station! A giant floating megacity in a space-dwelling society where real estate is a finite and presumably ever-dwindling resource!

book: oh nah actually the population here is tiny and huge swathes of the station have been abandoned for years.

me: Book, are you just saying that to justify the squat that Love Interest left a decade ago being preserved like a time capsule?

book: It makes sense! There's virtually no crime here!

me: NO CRIME. ON THE LAWLESS PARTY STATION. NO CRIME.

MC meets another alien character who is a member of a hive-mind species, except she's written more like a live streamer who broadcasts through her eyeballs and carries on a constant out-loud side conversation with the chat that's scrolling in her head. (A better writer might be able to make this humorous or satirical, but this one...)

It's low-key irritating the way every single character in this book—set in a galaxy of many varied intelligent species—uses the word "alien" to describe all non-humans and it's not in any way regarded as political. The aliens refer to themselves as aliens. (And again, there's an interesting kernel in that choice of language, in the idea that humans still commonly think of non-human species as the other and what that says about human society and its relationship with the rest of the galaxy, but... nope. Just a mindless word choice here.)

LOL LOL LOL the universal translators everybody uses have somehow been engineered to convey accents so the MC worries that everybody on the Rich People Planet will know she's a poor.

Like, what, the device registers words in Language A, converts them to Language B in the user's ear... but overlaid with a stereotypical Region A accent?? I don't understand.

The MC's driving goal is to save her sick sister, who is slowly dying from the poor air quality on the Stinky Crime Station where they live. That means she needs to find a way to get to the notoriously exclusionary Rich People Planet and convince them to let her, a Stinky Crime Station girl, sit their citizenship test. The likelihood of success is slim to none and the cost of failure is devastating.

Obviously, we know she's going to be denied, just like we know there's going to be another way and she's going to find it and the sister is going to live. But if the author's done their job, if they've built up a rich and developed world and characters and society, then that doesn't matter. When the MC finally reaches her sought-after destination, it should feel tense. When she's met with indifferent refusal—it should be heartbreaking, enraging.

It shouldn't feel perfunctory.

Like, 'My sister and I are good people who work hard, can you help us?' 'Ah, I'm terribly sorry, but you see, we're all bigots.'

"They’ll stop you at their fancy planet’s terraformed atmosphere."

"Rhymarra won’t even let you land."

"Going to Rhymarra is a fucking fool’s errand."

Torian just arrived at the Rich People Planet.

I'm gonna paraphrase a bit.

'Stop right there, criminal scum, we don't want your type around here... What’s that? You're not a smuggler? You’re a specialised scientist who has essential business with the university? No, no, please don’t trouble yourself with showing us any credentials, come right in.'

this fucking book.

Anyway, Moss tells Torian that eleven percent of colony humans are citizens of the Rich People Planet, and therefore she has an eleven percent chance at gaining citizenship, which is... not in any way how probability works.

"I was not programmed with simple human emotions."

"After twelve minutes of analysis, my conversational awareness subfunction identified it as awkward."

So here is a thing I'm struggling to make sense of in this book.

Moss is an intelligent, self-aware moss colony that sent its spores into a spaceship, because it wanted to explore.

The pilot artificially integrated the moss that grew there into a physical server. This involved engineering some kind of organic sensor that over time replicated through each of Moss's gametophytes, bridging plant and computer.

Thus Moss can experience, conceptualise and communicate things as an artificial intelligence might.

Except. Moss's intelligence isn't artificial. It's a self-aware plant that communicates with other plants through emotions. And that communication looks, as written, pretty much indistinguishable from human conversation.

So like.

??????

And I think the problem is, you've told me what Moss is, but not what that means beneath the surface level. It was originally an entirely different kind of consciousness, one with at least some spectrum of thought and emotion, but one with a vastly different relationship with and ability to perceive the world around it.

The interaction with the asshole tree was a missed opportunity to give us a window onto what Moss used to be. Lose the puns. Have them communicate the way you've told me they communicate, through an abstract exchange of limited concepts and emotions. This is the place Moss started, and that's important to properly convey.