Review: Architects of Memory, by Karen Osborne

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sun Feb 28 19:31:16 PST 2021


Architects of Memory
by Karen Osborne

Series:    Memory War #1
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2020
ISBN:      1-250-21546-3
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     350

Ash is an Aurora Company indenture working as a salvage pilot in the
wreckage of the Battle of Tribulation. She's been on the crew of the
Twenty-Five and indentured to Aurora for about a year. Before that, she
was an indenture in the mines of Bittersweet, where her finance died in
an attack from the alien Vai and where she contracted the celestium
poisoning that's slowly killing her. Her only hope for treatment is to
work off her indenture and become a corporate citizen, a hope that is
doomed if Aurora discovers her illness. Oh, and she's in love with the
citizen captain of the Twenty-Five, a relationship that's a bad idea
for multiple reasons and which the captain has already cut off.

This is the hopeful, optimistic part of the book, before things start
getting grim.

The setting of Architects of Memory is a horrifying future of corporate
slavery and caste systems that has run head-long into aliens. The Vai
released mysterious and beautiful weapons that kill humans horribly and
were wreaking havoc on the corporate ships, but then the Vai retreated
in the midst of their victory. The Twenty-Five is salvaging useful
equipment and undetonated Vai ordinance off the dead hulk of the Aurora
ship London when corporate tells them that the London may be hiding a
more potent secret: a captured Vai weapon that may be the reason the
Vai fled.

I was tempted into reading this because the plot is full of elements I
usually like: a tight-knit spaceship crew, alien first contact full of
mysterious discoveries, corporate skulduggery, and anti-corporate
protagonists. However, I like those plot elements when they support a
story about overthrowing oppression and improving the universe. This
book, instead, is one escalating nightmare after another.

Ash starts the book sick but functional and spends much of the book
developing multiple forms of brain damage. She's not alone; the same
fate awaits several other likable characters. The secret weapon has
horrible effects while also being something more terrible than a
weapon. The corporations have an iron and apparently inescapable grip
on humanity, with no sign of even the possibility of rebellion, and
force indentures to cooperate with their slavery in ways that even the
protagonists can't shake. And I haven't even mentioned the organ
harvesting and medical experiments. The plot is a spiral between humans
doing awful things to aliens and then doing even more awful things to
other humans.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but I will say that it was far less
emotionally satisfying than I needed. I'm not sure this was
intentional; there are some indications that Osborne meant for it to be
partly cathartic for the characters. But not only didn't it work for me
at all, it emphasized my feelings about the hopelessness and futility
of the setting. If a book is going to put me through that amount of
character pain and fear, I need a correspondingly significant triumph
at the end.

If that doesn't bother you as much as it does me, this book does have
merits. The descriptions of salvage on a disabled starship are vivid
and memorable and a nice change of pace from the normal military or
scientific space stories. Salvage involves being careful, methodical,
and precise in the face of tense situations; combined with the eerie
feeling of battlefield remnants, it's an evocative scene. The Vai
devices are satisfyingly alien, hitting a good balance between sinister
and exotically beautiful. The Vai themselves, once we finally learn
something about them, are even better: a truly alien form of life at
the very edge of mutual understanding. There was the right amount of
inter-corporate skulduggery, with enough factions for some tense
complexity and double-crossing, but not so many that I lost track. And
there is some enjoyably tense drama near the climax.

Unfortunately, the unremitting horrors were too much for me. They're
also too much for the characters, who oscillate between desperate
action and psychological meltdowns that become more frequent and more
urgently described as one gets farther into the book. Osborne starts
the book with the characters already so miserable that this constant
raising of the stakes became overwrought and exhausting for me. By the
end of the book, the descriptions of the mental state of the characters
felt like an endless, incoherent scream of pain. Combine that with a
lot of body horror, physical and mental illness, carefully-described
war crimes, and gruesome death, and I hit mental overload.

This is not the type of science fiction novel (thankfully getting
rarer) in which the author thinks any of these things are okay. Osborne
is clearly on the side of her characters and considers the events of
this story as horrible as I do. I think her goal was to tell a story
about ethics and courage in the face of atrocities and overwhelming
odds, and maybe another reader would find that. For me, it was lost in
the darkness.

Architects of Memory reaches a definite conclusion but doesn't resolve
some major plot elements. It's followed by Engines of Oblivion, which
might, based on the back-cover text, be more optimistic? I don't think
I have it in me to find out, though.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-02-28

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-21546-3.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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