My ship continues onward to that farthest star, understanding the generation ship genre. My next stop for the resources that would help me along the journey is Emily Devenport’s Medusa Uploaded.
Oichi is flushed out an airlock on suspicion of being an insurgent. She manages to survive the initial moments through her tenacity and awareness. Soon, she is rescued by a Medusa suit piloted by an AI. With the help of this AI and a secret technology implanted in her brain by her dead parents, Oichi begins to discover the truth of her generation ship’s mission. Through subterfuge, coercion, and eventually cooperation, Oichi reveals more and more of the plot. But it isn’t long before those in power start to catch on to her schemes. Can Oichi stay ahead of her enemies long enough to see her revolution through?
Medusa Uploaded is a book that lines up with what I want out of a generation ship novel. It recognizes that it takes place within a specific context and serves as a snapshot in time. The book goes through the necessary motions of setting up the purpose of the journey while shrouding some of it in mystery. Class divisions are on full display; here, they are centered around executives and laborers. Powerful families have long histories that detail their struggles for that power and what they specialize in providing to other families to maintain their relevancy. The Olympia is a system designed to maintain this balance, and it only gets thrown out of whack as those in the laboring class start to foment some dissent. That dissent questions the story they’ve been told about where they come from and where they are headed. Much of the plot and intrigue revolves around the actual reason for the ship, and it kept me hooked.
Quick content warning on this one: There is talk of group sexual assault in this review
I really like Oichi as the focal point. Her parents were killed in the destruction of Olypmia’s sister ship, Titania. She is a worm, someone who lives in the tunnels that connect the various sections of the ship. She works service jobs and sometimes manual labor. Oichi is a chameleon, blending in where she needs to, shedding identities like a snake sheds its skin. I liked most that she was someone who was totally honest with herself, despite her ability to deceive. She’s a killer, something she admits upfront. She recognizes that killing is for a purpose (“revolution”) and that her targets are more than deserving (ruthless billionaires that shove anyone annoying in an airlock) are somewhat excuses, but she chooses not to hide behind them. Instead, they are just facts about the nature of her killings. She’s also adaptable as hell, changing her strategies and tactics as new information is discovered or when her plans are foiled.
As Oichi digs deeper and deeper into her own plot, more of Olympia’s mission is revealed. It gives Medusa Uploaded propelling intrigue that ends on a vague cliffhanger. Luckily for the audience, the series is only a duology, but the ending of this first book caught me a little off guard. Part of this, I think, is attributed to reading it on an e-reader as the book actually ended around the 90-91% mark, so as big plays were moving, I thought there was a lot more to be going on (another 40 to 50 pages worth at my estimate). But in retrospect, the ending does land nicely as a setup for the second book. The slow burn of the reveal was well handled, too, both from a plot and a character perspective. It gave Oichi and her small group of dissidents time to learn about each other (there is a large secondary cast) and talk about their goals and position within society. The mystery forced the characters to meander a bit because they didn’t actually know what they were uncovering. Was it a conspiracy by the executives? Are they being hunted by another enemy clan? Where the hell are they going anyway? The narrative emulated the feeling of being lost within something so deeply, you couldn’t quite see the forest because you didn’t know what a tree was. This might pose a problem for some folks who want that mystery to be a little more streamlined, but for me, it really highlighted the strengths of a generation ship story. Davenport used this meandering freedom to explore just what the fuck Olympia was outside of its final mission.
Where I struggled with Medusa Uploaded was in its tone. It starts off particularly dark with Oichi cataloguing several of her murders, both mass and individualized. She goes through step by step how and why she killed particular people. There are some pretty heavy details about the gruesomeness of their deaths, especially around the exposure to the vacuum of space. A lot of these murders, the reader finds out early on, are all tied to the ritual gang rape of teenagers from a particular powerful family who are seen as carrying pure genes from the home world. These gang rapes are recorded and used as blackmail against the victims to remind them that though their blood is pure, their spirits are not. It’s incredibly brutal, and personally, I bought into its incorporation within the story given the power structures on display. But after that incredibly bleak introduction, there are sections of the book that slide into silliness. I’m not saying you can’t have both, it’s just that the shift was a little weird considering that you have ritualized gang rape of minors on one side, and then a robot that talks like it thinks a cat would talk. On top of that, there are a lot of pop cultural references scattered throughout. This ties into a particular theme regarding access to culture, who controls it, and what people can learn from stories. But while some worked, a lot of them had to have time spent explaining them, and I had to push through them. I’ve made it known that references like these usually annoy me, and while it didn’t stop me from reading the book, it did slow down my pace when they started to stack up, reducing my overall enjoyment of the book.
Thematically, Medusa Uploaded really hit the sweet spot for me. Revolution and subterfuge? Check. Dark investigations into the work that must be done to change a brutal system? Check. Inclusion of children in the imagining of a new world? Double check. It’s a shame that I feel like this book didn’t really get much attention. It recognizes the complexities within its own world and tries to deal with them accordingly. Sure, there are moments where that reality is black and white; everyone has their lines. But Oichi recognized that some of those harder lines wouldn’t get the world she wanted to win, that they would make her job harder or make that new world less worthwhile. She had to include people who may jeopardize her personal plans, and had to manage their involvement to test their loyalties. And while the inclusion of children into the plan wasn’t particularly complex or deep, it brought me a lot of joy. I know this is going to be a weird sticking point for me, but what kind of world can we build if we don’t also include the ones who will be closer to seeing it? It’s a detail that will stick with me, and I hope it’s explored further in the second book.
Medusa Uploaded, by Emily Devenport, is a special little treat within the genre. It hits the high points and follows through on a good story about why a project like that would exist. It goes into who makes decisions and the webs of power that hold shitty systems together. The characters are well-realized for the story and the size of the cast. It has its moments of levity, but mostly sticks to its darker tone. It also just has some really good moments that remind the reader that this whole thing is happening within the void of outer space. I didn’t even touch on the AI and the medusa suits a whole lot because that would just be a whole other paragraph about collaboration and seizing the means of production. But I can get into that after reading book two, because I think that’s where the real meat is going to be for that conversation. So if you’re looking for my kind of generation ship novel, Medusa Uploaded is a good place to start.
Rating: Medusa Uploaded Install this patch to your copy of Generation_Ship.exe
-Alex
