Lost in the worldbuild. [Machine by Elizabeth Bear]

Meet Doctor Jens.

She hasn’t had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years. Her workday begins when she jumps out of perfectly good space ships and continues with developing treatments for sick alien species she’s never seen before. She loves her life. Even without the coffee.

But Dr. Jens is about to discover an astonishing mystery: two ships, one ancient and one new, locked in a deadly embrace. The crew is suffering from an unknown ailment and the shipmind is trapped in an inadequate body, much of her memory pared away.

Unfortunately, Dr. Jens can’t resist a mystery and she begins doing some digging. She has no idea that she’s about to discover horrifying and life-changing truths.

Written in Elizabeth Bear’s signature “rollicking, suspenseful, and sentimental” (Publishers Weekly) style, Machine is a fresh and electrifying space opera that you won’t be able to put down.

I'm the first person (probably the second or third) to recognize that I am a procrastinator. That in general, if I perceive I have ample time, I tend to push otherwise easily completed tasks to the back of the priority line. Sometimes that's the right call because why not give more pressing deeds, those with a more heavily urgency, more attention now to take away future stress? But that attitude regularly reflects in my reading. For the most part I've been quite on top of my reading, but when I get into reading slumps so books are casualties of that mindset. All this to say, I started reading this book late into my archive period, had it expire, requested it from the library as an eBook, and likely about three months later, once I finally received the loan, was finally able to finish it.

In fact, once I finally started reading Elizabeth Bear's Machine what really stood out were the details of the worldbuild. Yes, a good worldbuild can save any sci-fi or fantasy story, but because it also lays the foundation for the story it's crucial to its success. And while the worldbuild details are what hooked me before I continued reading on library loan, they were also what I hated and continued hating as I read on. Dr. Jens, are protagonist, is such a future human and she embodies a lot of these details. People are so much better than how they used to be, now that they've given up certain freedoms of emotion. Rage? Atavistic. Vengeance? Atavistic? Religious belief systems? Atavistic. 

The story was hyping up this big conspiracy only to dole out sparse details of it and rush through events for an ending. And the idea of this moral high-ground didn't come off consistently. Yes, humanity has evolved and we don't call aliens aliens anymore, we call them systers. But apparently humanity is also the root cause of everything that goes wrong in the story's events? Evolved and edited peaceful humanity, but also species-centric. To its credit, as I read Machine I wasn't super aware that I was reading the second book in a series (White Space). So, it reads quite well as a stand-alone entry. Conversely, is it not super obvious that it was the second book because the exposition felt more first entry rather than continuation? Maybe the books aren't that connected. Who knows. Nothing in this story was offensive or outright terrible, but nothing was so fantastically good. A middle of the road 3 stars from me.

Machine (ISBN: 9781534403017) was published October 2020.