A Jupiter-sized ship is discovered heading into the galaxy. Humans land first and take command, converting the ship into a vast home to thousands of alien races as it moves through our galaxy. But there are secrets waiting to be uncovered at the heart of the ship that will reveal the ship’s long history and determine its future.
Marrow succeeds in portraying both immense stretches of time and a vast sense of scale. The captains are effectively immortal, their robust bodies able to rebuild and recover from almost any injury, reminiscent of Asher’s Spatterjay virus. But living for thousands of millennia comes at a cost – perfect regeneration necessitates a resistance to mental change that means they’re psychologically frozen, coupled with an arrogance that leads to their downfall.
The ship’s sense of scale, and its mysteries, are revealed layer by layer, and made relatable through an alien fecundity that reminded me of Valerian – a vast alien meeting place, a refuge, a transport. Reed succeeds in making the big dumb object more than just big, it’s a place; dense, and populated. He births cultures in the offstage space between chapters, keeping the pacing snappy while bridging huge swathes of time, all without sacrificing the personal intimacy of the main characters and their development. Reed doesn’t just recount the ship’s history; it’s lived.
While enjoyable for its sense of wonder, Reed’s immortal captains allow him to spotlight the ethics of generational and civilisational manipulation to achieve necessary goals. When we become gods, possessing a perspective of deep time, how should our ethics adapt? In the same way that novels such as Cherryh’s Foreigner posit colonial exploitation of aliens to human ends, Reed makes it more personal as the captains manipulate their offspring to escape their predicament, and in turn find themselves exploited by something bigger than themselves as we reach the novel’s inevitable existential crisis. This is a hugely enjoyable hard SF epic, that also manages to present thoughtful human-scale questions.
