PREDATOR MOONS

In Ramsay’s debut SF novel, explorers venture to distant planets to exploit life-forms who may have a few tricks of their own.

Near the end of the 21st century, the invention of “Drag Engine” spaceship propulsion (which is effectively teleportation) grants humanity access to countless worlds, but it also reveals hidden “glitches” in the universe—leading to the disturbing conclusion that reality is a vast software simulation engineered by forces unknown. Despite this existential blow, mankind plods on, following base instincts of greed, power, lust, and self-gratification. Liquid, shape-changing artificial intelligence machines called “ancillaries” are used as servants, sexual partners, pets, and even repositories of human memories. Everyone who could afford it has already fled Earth for other planets while the moon is now a huge library for universities devoted to new sciences. Mercury is home to greedy “clans” eager to exploit alien invertebrates: “We learned the entire universe was actually overflowing with life—arthropods, arachnids, cephalopods, crustaceans, cnidaria and insects in a trillion incredible varieties.” The curious absence of vertebrates leaves humanity as the cosmos’s apex predator. In this milieu, one-time refugee Isaiah Erickson, a Columbia University anthropologist who’s also a prosperous, high-tech arms dealer, ventures to the distant planet of Conrad in search of valuable, hallucinogenic alien wasp venom, to which he’s addicted. Meanwhile, Chloe Keating, an idealistic grad student hoping to explore and investigate endangered species, gets tricked into following a previous, doomed expedition to the muddy planet Hobbes to harvest enormous centipedes. Her mission and Isaiah’s fatefully intersect.

Ramsay crafts brisk, edgy prose that splits storytelling chores across three first-person narrators: Isaiah, Chloe, and a somewhat anguished ancillary who has the memories of an adventurer who perished while on insect safari. Readers may be able to detect influences from Pokémon cartoons as well as Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, although other worlds described in Herbert’s fiction, such as the lethal Pandora in The Jesus Incident(1979), might make for more apt comparisons. Overall, Ramsay offers a work that’s a feat of considerable imagination and attitude—a stimulating tale of interplanetary intrigue and monsters, human and otherwise. Some genre connoisseurs may say that the future humanity he invokes—with its betrayals, obsessions, and sham replicas of animals, people, perhaps even the material world itself, seems like something out of Philip K. Dick’s realm of paranoiac dystopia. A semiderelict New York City that’s down to its last 50,000 people, for instance, would seem right at home in the film Blade Runner. Readers will want to know more about this strange future in which the sexes seem strongly segregated, suggesting that ancillaries have replaced domestic partners everywhere. At the same time, they’ll quietly dread whatever answers Ramsay conjures, and that’s quite an accomplishment, in accord with the credo of one of the duplicitous characters: “Space is dark and full of wonders. Wonders and horrors.” The author includes a “Bestiary” of creatures referenced in the text, illustrated by Sonntagbauer.

A memorable voyage through a brutal human society, bizarre alien environments, and elastic realities.