Continuing my quest into the deep reaches of space, I stumbled across this next book deep in a Reddit thread. Marrow, by Robert Reed, is the beginning of what I assume to be a strange journey into the hell that is the infinite cosmos. I mean this with love and respect, as I adored this book and have a burning curiosity to discover the universe of The Great Ship series.
Nobody knows how old it is, where it came from, or where it was even planning on going. The Great Ship appeared out of nowhere, spotted on the edge of our galaxy as it entered the Milky Way. Some intrepid and enterprising explorers dared to board the ship, later discovered to carry enough mass to rival the largest of gas giants, and found no one. Not a single cell’s worth of life on the ship. There was no history to be discovered, only more and more empty rooms. As the human guardians of the ship became immortal, the ship gathered billions upon billions of inhabitants of all species great and small. The Master and her cadre of captains kept the ship running, making repairs and solving the unending list of problems that got in the way. But one day, the Master gathers all of her best and brightest captains to tell them of a secret, a secret that hadn’t been discovered for millennia until now. Deep at the heart of the ship lies a planet, and she wants them to discover it.
I fell head over heels for Marrow in its introductory chapter. The book is split into five parts, each with its own introduction, told in a way that suggests it’s from the ship’s point of view. The language is dense and poetic and really sets the stage for what is to come. It immediately pulled me in and did not release me until the book’s final pages. The writing, in general, is very dense, but the language shifts during the main sections of the story. It doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi of the interludes, but there is a bit of magic in Reed’s prose. It’s more than functional and gets a lot of ideas across in very short sentences. It forces you to take it slowly and learn the geography of the ship and its denizens. Because the scope is so massive, it doesn’t bog the reader down with intimate details but tries to encapsulate the mental space of its characters over millennia. It’s a weird style to get used to, but once it clicks, it really clues you into how to read Marrow.
The characters are fun and vivid in weird ways. I appreciated that the main cast is led by competent women with very different skills. The Master is relegated to a background role after the initial chapters, but her presence is felt everywhere. Her right-hand woman, Miocene, is the kind of exacting quartermaster everyone expects. She basks in the light of the Master while having the understanding that the Great Ship would be nothing without Miocene. Her twists and turns are harrowing and dig deep into the psyche of someone who feels they have it all figured out (because they have a lot of shit figured out to be honest), but cracks when aspects of her world don’t line up. Then there is Washen, who to put it bluntly, comes off as a manic pixie dream girl version of Cordelia Naismith from Vorkosigan. Don’t worry the manic pixie sheen immediately evaporates revealing a brilliant, natural leader who leads by example more than a sense of hierarchy, despite her introduction riding whales within the seas of the great ship. She’s observant and knows how to play the odds but is still blind to the manipulations of others. Don’t worry, she is not the manic pixie dream girl, she just appears that way upfront. These two women bolster each other as much as they butt heads, and their relationship and divergent journeys were a real treat in the final sections of the book.
The world of Marrow is tough to describe. There is a sense of time and scale that is unfathomable but well realized. Centuries whiz by in sentences as grand projects are executed in decades. Characters are immobilized in their development by their immortality and the sheer enormity of their tasks. But where the character development truly shines is that, over time, their internal contradictions begin to heighten before major breaks occur. The pacing, coupled with Reed’s writing, lets the slow revelations of where a character might be headed percolate before their heel turn or glorious moments burst through. It gives the story and the characters the feel of an epic in the ancient sense. I got the distinct feeling that I was watching gods wrestle with morality and practicality in an environment that was both of their domain and completely alien to them. The ship manages to feel claustrophobic and infinitely explorable at the same time. The sections on the planet feel equally huge as the geography and people’s relational distance to each other is accounted for. The various alien species and human types that are detailed are wonderfully weird and starkly beautiful in their physique and cultures.
The story of Marrow is both bombastic and plodding. The best metaphor I can think of is it’s like watching the big bang on a time-lapse. So many things are happening that it’s hard to catch the small details, but on a large enough scope, the big picture is exciting, even knowing it’s happening over billions of years. I mentioned in the Generation Ship primer that the subgenre is a thinly veiled microcosm of society, but Marrow takes it to the extreme. Not just in the sense of the commentary it tries to provide, but one of the subplots is literally the rebuilding of society by immortals. It’s the kind of science fiction that really takes the “genre of big ideas” to heart and then wears that heart on its sleeve. I don’t want to detail any of the story just because it’s the kind of story that really should be experienced on its own to appreciate the epic feel of it all.
If I have one major critique of Marrow, it’s that it’s so big in its scope that one might get lost in the plodding nature of the story. Each of the five sections is almost a vignette unto itself. Hell, they don’t even get to the planet until about a third of the way into the story. Some character moments feel small compared to the grand timeline of events. There are some weird sections where it’s hard to tell just where you are in the timeline, and likable characters disappear for whole sections. A lot of the time, I didn’t even know where the hell Marrow was even headed as a story. But for me, that was the charm; for you, it might not be. If you’re willing to give it the space to lay its cards on the table and accept that Marrow is telling its own story, you’re sure to have a blast. Go in as blindly as possible, and just let it take you to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
Now why I state that this is the beginning of a wild and weird journey is that Marrow exists as part of a trilogy and an insane amount of short stories. Trying to find the timeline on Goodreads or internet forums has been a nightmare. But in due time, I want to figure it out, and really steep in the soup Robert Reed has been cooking this whole time. I’m sure every bite won’t be as delicious as the appetizer that is Marrow, but goddamn I hope it’s got flavors I’ve never tasted before.
Rating: Marrow -Crack open that femur, go to town, and don’t waste a single morsel.
-Alex
