Dust

[sawyl]

Today's novel was Elizabeth Bear's Arthurian space opera, Dust, set on the decaying ruin of the generation star ship, Jacob's Ladder, endlessly orbiting an increasingly doomed star.

Raised as a servant to the Lords of Rule, Rian finds her life suddenly changed when she is assigned to look after an imprisoned knight. Unable to endure the suffering of her charge, a young woman called Percival, Rian rebels against aristocratic employers and the pair make a bid for freedom. En route to safety, they find themselves up caught up in a complex series of plots involving necromancers, long lost relatives and host of angels who behave rather less than seraphically.

But if that makes the book sound like a high fantasy, it really isn't. The blue blood of the humans lords comes from nanotechnology in the blood, not aristocratic breeding; and in place of swords and shields they carry unblades, which can inflect unhealable wounds, and wear powered suits of armour. The angels, too, are more prosaic than they seem. Not so much divine beings as components of a vast artificial intelligence called Israfel, which was forced to separate itself in order to survive.

Of the angels, the two best realised are Jacob Dust, the keeper of the archives, and Samael, the keeper of life. Neither exactly conforms to the expected stereotype — it took me a while, but eventually I came to suspect that Dust had modelled himself on Dracula — and both are determined to be the last angel standing. Of the humans, both Rian and Percival are particularly well drawn and well matched. Percival is, perhaps not unexpectedly, honourable and pure and incorruptible even when doing so causes her great pain; Rian on the other hand, is the more intense and more impulsive of the pair, but also more practical, partly because she has absorbed the personality of the former Chief Engineer of the Jacob's Ladder.

Overall, I rather enjoyed Dust. Particularly the way that it blended Arthurian myth with the rather more Abrahamic angels. I very much enjoyed the setting, which reminded me of a more gothic version of the Fastness in Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn. I was also reminded of Earthsearch, if only because it too features a knackered generation ship and a couple of Machiavellian AIs called angels — I wonder if Bear might be a covert James Follett/BBC 7 fan?

I'm definitely going to snag myself a copy of Chill when it comes out in a few weeks time.