Hardcover, 106 pages
English language
Published Jan. 5, 2012 by Immersion Press.
For generations Prsoper Station has thrived under the guidence of its Honoured Ancestress: born of a human womb, the stations's artificial intelligence has offered guidance and protection to its human relatives. But war has come to the Dai Viet Empire. Prosper's brightest minds have been called away to defend the Emperor, and a flood of disorientated refugees strain the station's resources. As deprivations cause the station's ordinary life to unravel, uncovering old grudges and tearing apart the decimated family, Station Mistress Quyen and the Honored Ancestress struggle to keep their relatives united and safe. What Quyen does not know is that the Honoured Ancestress herself is faltering, her mind eaten away by a disease that seems to have no cure: and that the future of the station itself might hang in the balance....
Ancestral memory implants and empire at war and family bonds strained... it helps to know this is a string of novellas, as much as this brings its characters to life and vivid inner conflict, there's a lot of setting for perhaps too many strands in this story.
Ignore the cover art, this work is a lot better than that.
This was an engrossing novella where you are basically just thrown in to a culture without familiar reference points, haunted by ancestors whose personalities are stored on chips, with some sort of complicated and deadly political struggle going on as a backdrop. The author does not pull punches when it comes to her two strong-willed female protagonists and the way their clash is dictated by their very different situations. The supporting characters are finely drawn as individuals as well including the one which serves as the nervous system of Prosper Station itself whose hidden weakness becomes manifested at the worst and the best of times.1
