Tales from the TBR: Ascension

[owlmoose]

The book: Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi



The summary:

Alana Quick is the best damned sky surgeon in Heliodor City, but repairing starship engines barely pays the bills. When the desperate crew of a cargo vessel stops by her shipyard looking for her spiritually advanced sister Nova, Alana stows away. Maybe her boldness will land her a long-term gig on the crew. But the Tangled Axon proves to be more than star-watching and plasma coils. The chief engineer thinks he's a wolf. The pilot fades in and out of existence. The captain is all blond hair, boots, and ego . . . and Alana can't keep her eyes off her. But there's little time for romance: Nova's in danger and someone will do anything--even destroying planets--to get their hands on her.

How I found it: My first Tales of the TBR title that I read as an ebook. I don't actually remember the details of why I bought, but it was at least a few years ago, when the book was fairly new. I think I was probably embarking on a trip and I wanted to have an ebook ready to go if I finished whatever else I was reading. Then it disappeared into my iBooks library, out of sight and out of mind.

What inspired me to read it now: My reading goals for 2018 include reading books I already own, writing more posts in this series, and reading new-to-me authors of color, and this book helps me meet all three goals.

The verdict: Overall, I enjoyed this book very well. The story undergoes a few drastic shifts in tone, so it took me a little while to get my footing, but the adjustments were worthwhile. This might be an artifact of how I read it: since I waited so long to start reading, and ebooks don't have blurbs on the back to set my expectations, I essentially went into this book cold, with no information beyond "this is a story about a woman of color in space." Maybe that's why I found the first few chapters to have such tonal whiplash. It starts out as a story about a working-class spaceship mechanic with a chronic illness struggling to get by but dreaming of more, then morphs briefly into to a fun space adventure when she stows away on a spaceship, the Tangled Axon, before taking a dark and serious turn into dealing with tragedy, loss, and grief.

At its core, though, this is a story about sisters.

This next section contains significant spoilers.

Alana, the protagonist, has long struggled with feeling like her sister Nova looks down on her. Alana also has a chronic illness, a degenerative disease that is controlled by medication, but she's been saving up for a cure. Meanwhile, Nova is a professional practitioner of the spiritual arts, and her dream is to transcend her physical body, or ascend to a higher form. This desire sets up an interesting tension between the sisters, as Alana resents what she sees as Nova's disregard for her healthy human body, while Alana has to fight just to function. Then their home planet is destroyed, along with their parents, and their shared grief works to put a wedge between them rather than bringing them together.

But Alana is forced to question everything about their relationship when she finally meets the Big Bad, who turns out to be Alana herself, but from another timeline, where she has the spiritual powers and Nova the illness; her Nova has died, and she's been scouring the multiverse for a way to bring Nova back to life. Encountering her doppelganger forces Alana to question herself, her motives, and what she might be capable of doing in a way that really worked for me.

Spoilers end here



So if you're looking for a space adventure with a queer disabled protagonist of color, some steamy F/F romance, love triangles effectively solved with polyamory, a lady who falls in love with a spaceship, and you don't mind some dark turns, it's hard to go wrong with Ascension. I either didn't know or had forgotten that the book was on the 2014 Tiptree Honor List, and I would say it was a worthy honoree. (Hmm, maybe someday I should make a project of reading more Tiptree winners.) This book is billed as the first of a series; it looks like no other titles have yet been published. Fortunately, this book stands alone just fine, although I can also see it as the set-up for more tales of this spaceship crew and their adventures. And if Koyanagi ever decides to bring us back to her universe, I'm happy to come along for the ride.

Comments

[susanhatedliterature.net]

I read this one a few years ago and quite enjoyed it. I'd read more in the series f they ever came out, but found that the supporting characters weren't as well developed as the main character. Understandable given its a first person narrator, but I do like characters.