Blurb
Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding…
Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI implant for companionship.
The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earth’s dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.
Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship. Skeletons are all that remain of the crew, and Iris’ religious rituals are met with bemusement by the scientists—and outright hostility by the engineer Yan Fukui. Determined to be more than just the curator of the dead, Iris tries to make himself useful to the team, desperate to form friendships.
But Nicaea’s plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI enhancement may be their only hope for survival. . .
Review
I’m just going to start out and say that this book broke me in all the good ways because it then picked up the pieces and put them together again. One should read a book about a death monk with so much repressed grief, but as a religious studies student the idea of Vessel Iris and the Starlit Order was too big a temptation to resist. And I am so glad I didn’t resist.
Part science fiction, part murder mystery, part ethical conversation about AI, technology, sentience, and our relationship to these things, this book contains a gripping narrative that kept me turning the pages long after I should have gone to bed. The characters are well drawn, fully realized, with just enough back story to make you understand their motivations and reasoning. The transformation over the course of the story is exquisite, and I worry about saying much more because I do not want to give a single thing away.
The Iron Garden Sutra is a book for those who want crunchy topics to think about with their science fiction, who are fans of lyrical writing that evokes all five senses, and for those who are thinking about the role religion and ritual play in our lives and in the case of funerary rites, for whom we perform these things and what responsibilities do we have to the dead.
One of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.
Copy of book received from NetGalley.
