Organic nOpE in The Stars Are Legion || BOOK REVIEW

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

1.5/5 STARS

Genre: Science-Fiction
Author: Kameron Hurley
Published: February 2017
Publisher: Angry Robot
Pages: 396 {paperback}

Review on Goodreads

Initial Thoughts Upon Finishing

Haha, welllll. I did not enjoy this. I’ve never been so determined in my life to finish a book I wasn’t enjoying but there we go. This book was just not for me. It has an unreliable narrator, a lack of anything *really* happening and just a confusing world construction. I don’t really know what to make of it. But yeah. I read it, so that’s that.

The Stars Are Legion

I’m finally getting around to doing this review. Right. Well. The weirdness of this plot is still very much so burnt in my memory despite the months in between since I read it. Yikes. That says it all, doesn’t it?

This book is a sci-fi story set on an organic planet. It was at this point that I should’ve put the book down. The stories follows an unreliable narrator – she has no memories. We understand that she has a mission, that the planet she’s on is exploring other planets in the hope that it will help save their own, dying planet (or relocate). We know that there are characters playing solely for their own game and we know that there’s a lot of weird ~~shit~~ going on.

The book basically starts off with a mission happening and failing and the character ends back in the same spot. Except she can’t remember previous missions; every time she’s, shall we say, resurrected, her memories are wiped clean. So we spend A LOT of time wondering what on earth is happening.

The organic planet has a lot more to it than first meets the eye and if that is your thing then by all means, go ahead. Personally, it made me feel sick the way it was done in this book. If you want to read more about the planet skip ahead to the spoiler section where I’ll tell you what to expect.

The Actual Game Play of the Story

As all the different planets are dying at their own paces it’s basically a game to try and fight to the death with others to win a planet that isn’t dying. Except it’s less exciting than that sounds because the plot is nonexistent.

But as this is organic sci-fi (ew) that allows there to be no men. It’s all women. And the women get asexually pregnant . . . okay sooo – that means that when the planet needs something, they get pregnant. Just, boom. Now you’re preggas.

I KNOW IT’S GROSS BUT STAY WITH ME.

So each woman is different. They all only ever give birth to the same thing. So very few give birth to humans. They’re not human but the characters. This one lady gives birth to a gross ass cog-thing – gods know what its function was. “Something the planet needs” – and she gets all lovey-dovey over it!! IT. IS. A. MEATY. COG. Eurgh. It’s all just too much.

But that means one of the main characters is fought over by multiple species because her womb (transferrable, yup) produces the humans. And for a declining population this is desirable. Welp.

Spoilers: Organic Planet

This is a discussion about how the planets functions and what we see of it. Basically why I didn’t like it. Some spoilers.

SKIP TO SUMMARY TO AVOID SPOILERS

I really hated this concept. It takes a while to get into the story where we actually explore what else is in the planet. The construction of it is that it’s layered — not just the one, external surface like on Earth.

There are references of these recycling shoots where unwanted people (!!) are thrown down and “recycled” . . . or what I assumed meant killed. Okay so what happens actually? When the MC is thrown down one of these eventually she falls all the way to the centre of the planet. It a gigantic, organic rubbish tip.

Firstly, she should’ve died from that fall. But secondly, ew. There are like, I don’t know, robot things down there that come along and eat the victims that fall down. Making them some sort of sustenance to the essence of the planet or some ~~shit~~ like that. So we watch a couple of really quite gruesome deaths as people are eaten — BUT LIKE don’t die straight away *gags* — and then we escape (miracle! *jazz hands*) and explore the other layers of the planet.

This was kind of a cool concept. Until it wasn’t. There were different civilisations on different layers of the planet. And quite a few layers (I could not for the life of me work out how big this planet was). And they were all ridiculously different from each other and had NO. IDEA. that the others existed ?!?!?!

I thought this was all mostly bullshit and was feeling extraordinarily uncomfortable by this point. We have “planets” and different ones at that, different species etc, all over the galaxy or whatever corner of space this was. And then, basically, different worlds within the planets — CAN WE HAVE JUST ONE PLOT? PLEASE. You just end up feeling like Olaf when he’s escaping Marshmallow.

So that’s how the planet worked. I did not like it.

Summary

So I didn’t like this. Like at all. I found there to be too many concepts happening and meshing together in gross ways. I hate organic stuff and unreliable narrators are INFURIATING. The plot was mega-meh, the LGBT+ was weak and the violence was too much. So yeah, maybe give this one a miss.