Station Eternity

<spoiler> I almost never DNF but I just really wasn’t enjoying this. For something that was billed as a science fiction murder mystery series similar to Midsomer Murders (or if that wasn’t the intent, calling the series Midsolar Murders was a huge misstep) there was a distinct lack of on-page murder mystery solving or intrigue. Instead it’s just backstory, 1/3 of a book spent  freaking out about humans moving to the space station, and then after the halfway point new backstory for new point of view characters. It felt like the entire book was basically being used as setup for the intended series without including enough plot or forward movement to make me at all interested in continuing. Or even finishing it, obviously. 

The aliens really bothered me too, they kept making throwaway comments about how humans are fragile bags of water walking around and then themselves turning out to be full of blood also?? Blood is liquid, yes? It implies a liquid vascular system? Or just sentient versions of earth animals like wasps or chameleons, or straight up “just the rock biters from The Neverending Story.” Plus how do we all have the same type of ear canal and eardrums that the translator devices work the same, yet again we keep hearing how wildly different and fragile humans are? </spoiler>

And for me the biggest, and this honestly probably biased me against the rest of the book: you can’t have a throwaway joke about authors arguing about using “singular they” and then have a strictly binary gender system and zero characters that use singular they or other non-binary pronouns without sounding like you come down on the bigoted side!! There aren’t even any acknowledged binary trans characters! Yikes yikes yikes. I mean I’d say it’s just crap anyway not having trans characters at all in your near-future science fiction, but that just rubs in the salt. Will not be reading more by this author. 

A quirky whodunnit space opera where the red herrings matter more than the actual murder under investigation. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to think, but as I got further and further into the book, the characters started to grow on me and I found myself unable to put the book away.

The writing, though, is not what makes this book stand out. Frankly, I found the prose a bit verbose and clunky, with too many repetitions. More than once, one of the characters would make a statement, either in dialogue or thought, that would then be repeated almost literally a few paragraphs on. It’s quite a hefty book, longer than your average sci-fi novel, and I feel it could have been condensed here and there to increase the pacing to a more exciting level.

What made this book enjoyable to me were the story lines and the odd and diverse cast of people and aliens, all being very human in their interactions. From the big alien teenagers, the snobby buzzing insect hivemind and the sentient space station.

The cast is big, overwhelmingly so at the beginning. At first, the relevance of some of the characters seems to be minimal. When, then, those characters would reappear much later in the book, I found myself scrambling to remember who they were. But in the end, it does all tie together beautifully.

The first of a series, I’ve put book 2 (due out in November 2023) of The Midsolar Murders firmly on my to read list.