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The Stars Are Legion Paperback – November 7, 2017
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“One of the most unusual and powerfully disturbing space operas we’re likely to see this year.” —Chicago Tribune
Set within a system of decaying world-ships travelling through deep space, this breakout novel of epic science fiction follows a pair of sisters who must wrest control of their war-torn legion of worlds—and may have to destroy everything they know in order to survive.
Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. Here in the darkness, a war for control of the Legion has been waged for generations, with no clear resolution.
Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say there are her family. She is told she is their salvation, the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan’s new family is not the only one desperate to gain control of the prized ship. Zan finds that she must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion’s gravity well to the very belly of the world.
In the tradition of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels and Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, Kameron Hurley has created an epic and thrilling tale about tragic love, revenge, and war as imagined by one of our most celebrated new writers.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherS&S/Saga Press
- Publication dateNovember 7, 2017
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-101481447947
- ISBN-13978-1481447942
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"One word will do it: Badass." -- -- John Scalzi, ― bestselling author of The Old Man's War series and The Collapsing Empire
"With mind-bending betrayals, heart-wrenching loves, souls and bodies driven to frenetic motion by war and hope, THE STARS ARE LEGION is a profoundly moving tale of self-discovery and self-construction in a world as wondrously layered as its unforge able protagonist." -- ― Ken Liu ― , Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus Award winner and author of THE GRACE OF KINGS
“So, this is chock full of action and fights and battles and betrayals and political intrigue. And those world-ships? They are all biological. Nothing in this fleet is built, it’s all birthed, and there are tentacles and blood and mucous and body fluids everywhere. It’s kind of awesome fun. You should totally read it." -- -- Ann Leckie, ― Hugo award-winning author of Ancillary Justice
"A sweeping epic about a squad of starships—one that just happens to feature a cast of all female characters." -- -- Charlie Jane Anders, ― Wired
"Grabs you like a gravity well and won’t let go. This is a dark, haunting, recursive tale, unlike any other space opera with which you’re familiar. Discovering Kameron Hurley’s work is like finding a whole new galaxy, and she is the star at its center." -- ― Chuck Wendig, ― NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath & the Miriam Black series
“Kameron Hurley has done it: She’s written a true space opera with no men in it. In a genre filled with generic portrayals of space, Hurley’s take is one-of-a-kind: equal parts love story and revenge tale, mixed with adventure science fiction and body horror.” ― -- The Washington Post
"One of the most unusual and powerfully disturbing space operas we're likely to see this year.” -- -- Gary K. Wolfe, ― The Chicago Tribune
"The Stars Are Legion is like a magnificent storm tearing through the genre." ― -- Popular Mechanics
"Thought provoking space opera." ― -- Kirkus Reviews
"Hurley takes the reader on an exciting and at times breathtaking journey through the world of her creation. This novel is highly recommended for anyone looking for an inventive and engaging science fiction experience." ― -- Booklist
"A mesmerizing read.” -- -- Adrian Lang, ― Omnivoracious
"A visceral, optimistic mash-up of new, weird, and grimdark science fiction that is a cracking good read. Hurley has really leveled up." -- ― MaryJo Schimelpfenig ― , Powell’s Books
"The Stars Are Legion is poised to be Kameron Hurley's mainstream breakthrough, but apparently no one told her. It's unlike any space opera you’ve ever read—a bizarro blend of New Weird adventure, political thriller, and body horror; and an intimate examination of two deeply damaged women. It’s as visceral and violently angry as anything she's ever written, a ragged scream from the heart of a broken world—but one not past mending, if there are people brave enough to build a better one." -- ― Joel Cunnigham ― , B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
“THERE IS NOTHING I FEAR MORE THAN SOMEONE WITHOUT MEMORY. A PERSON WITHOUT MEMORY IS FREE TO DO ANYTHING SHE LIKES.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
1 ZAN
I remember throwing away a child.
That’s the only memory I know for certain is mine. The rest is a gory blackness. All I have, then, are the things I’ve been told are true:
My name is Zan.
I once commanded a great army.
My mission was to destroy a world that does not exist.
I’m told my army was scattered, or eaten, or blown apart into a thousand twinkling bits of debris, and I went missing.
I don’t know why I’d ever want to lead an army—especially a losing one—but I’m told I spent my life pushing hard to get to the rank and skill I attained. And when I came back, spit out by the world or wrenched free of my own will, I came back wrong. What wrong means I don’t know yet, only that it’s also resulted in my lack of memory.
The first face I see when I wake each period in my sickbed is full-lipped and luminous, like looking into the face of some life-giving sun. The woman says her name is Jayd, and it is she who has told me all I know to be true. When I ask, now, why there is a dead body on the floor behind her, she only smiles and says, “There are many bodies on the world,” and I realize the words for world and ship are nearly identical. I don’t know which she used.
I drift.
When I wake next, the body is gone, and Jayd is bustling around me. She helps me sit up for the first time. I marvel at the dark bruises on the insides of my arms and legs. A broad scar cuts my belly in two, low near my groin, and there is something strange about my left hand; it’s clearly smaller than the right. When I try to make a fist, it closes only halfway, like a tortured claw. When I slide to the floor, I discover that the bottoms of my feet are mostly numb. Jayd does not give me time to examine them as she pulls a porous, draping robe over my shoulders. It’s the same cut and heft as hers, only dark green to her blue.
“It’s time for your first debriefing,” Jayd says as I try to make sense of my injuries. She takes my hand and leads me from the room, down a dark, pulsing corridor. I squint. I see that our entwined hands are the same tawny color, but her skin is much softer than mine.
“You were gone for a half-dozen turns,” she says, and she sits me down beside her in a room off the corridor. I stare at my palms, trying to open and close my hands. If I work at it, I can get the left to close a bit more. The room, like the corridors, is a warm, glistening space with walls that throb like a beating heart. Jayd smooths the dark hair from my brow with comforting fingers, the movement as reverent and well practiced as a prayer.
“We thought you dead,” she says, “recycled.”
“Recycled into what?” I say, but the wall blooms open, the door unfurling like a flower, and an older woman beckons us inside, and Jayd ignores my question.
Jayd and I go after her and sit on a damp bench on one side of the great plain of a table. The woman sits across from us. Patterns move over the surface of the table, though whether they are writing or purely decorative or something else entirely, I don’t know. The more I look at them, the more my head throbs. I touch my temple, only to find that my fingers come away sticky with viscous lubricant or salve. I trace my finger along the ridge of a long scar that runs from the edge of my left brow to the curl of my left ear. I have still not seen my own face. I have encountered no reflective surfaces. There is indeed something very wrong here, but I don’t think it’s me.
“I’m Gavatra,” the older woman says, her voice a low rumble. Her black hair is shorn short against her dark scalp, revealing four long scars like scratch marks on the side of her head. She wears a long, durable garment of shiny blue fabric, like something excreted from the walls. It’s all held together with intricate knotted ties. She peers into my face and sighs. “Do you know who you are?”
Jayd says, “It’s the same as all the other times.”
“Other times?” I say, because how many times can one lose an army and get eaten by a ship and come back with injuries like these and live?
Jayd gazes deeply into my eyes, desperately searching my face for something. She has a broad, intense face with sunken eyes, and a bold beak of nose. I feel I should know or understand something from her look, but my memory is a hot, sticky void. I intuit nothing. I flex my hands again.
“Eight hundred and six of your sisters have tried to board the Mokshi,” Gavatra says, tapping her fingers across the surface of the table. The patterns change, and she scrutinizes them as if scrying. “You’re the only one who ever comes out, Zan. This appears to be why Lord Katazyrna keeps sending you there, despite the fact that you’ve never successfully led an army inside. Only yourself.”
“The Mokshi,” I say. “The world that doesn’t exist?”
“Yes,” Jayd says. “You remember?” Hopeful or doubtful?
I shake my head. The phrase means nothing to me. It has simply surfaced. “How many times has this happened to me?” I say. My left hand trembles, and I gaze at it as if it belongs to someone else. It occurs to me that maybe it once did, and that chills me. I want to know what’s happened to my memory, and why there was a body on the floor in my sick room, and why I threw away a child. But I know they aren’t going to be pretty answers.
“You are blessed of the War God, sister mine,” Jayd says, but she is looking at Gavatra as she says it. It’s like being a child again, stuck in a room with people who have a deep history between them; too deep and complicated for a child to fathom. Even more curious is that if Jayd is really my sister, then the feeling that stirs my gut when she twines her fingers in my hair is entirely wrong.
I lift my gaze to Gavatra and firm my jaw. A grim purpose fills me. “I wish to know what happened to me,” I say. “You can tell me or have me wrest it from you.” I can make both hands into fists now. That action feels more natural than anything I’ve done so far.
Gavatra barks out a laugh. She swipes at the table and pulls a nest of dancing lights from its surface and into the air. I watch them tangle above her, fascinated. She swipes them back onto another part of the table.
“You’re fulfilling your duty to your mother, the Lord of Katazyrna,” Gavatra says, “as are we all. But perhaps Jayd is right this time. Perhaps it’s time we retire you.”
“I feel you owe me a memory,” I say.
“Then you must retake the Mokshi,” Gavatra says. “We don’t have your memory here. That ship ate it. It seems to eat it every time. You want your memory, you take the Mokshi . . . and get a squad in there with you this time.”
“I will go again, then,” I say.
“Mother can’t afford to risk another squad,” Jayd says, “not with the Bhavajas lying in wait for us in orbit around the Mokshi. The Bhavajas have taken another ship since you’ve been gone, Zan.”
“What’s a Bhavaja?” I say.
Gavatra rolls her eyes. “These cycles get tiring,” she says.
“They are the greatest enemy of our family,” Jayd says. “A family we have been feuding with since Mother was a child. It’s only a matter of time before they take the Mokshi out from under us too. Maybe even all the Katazyrna ships.” This time, I am sure she says ship and not world, because taking an entire world seems impossible.
“The Mokshi has destroyed a good many people,” Gavatra says. “Your mother will just steal more from some other distressed world. If Zan is ready to assault the Mokshi again, I won’t deny her.”
Jayd slumps in her chair, defeated. Am I something to be fought over and won? “This is a foolish enterprise,” Jayd says. “It’s just as likely that Zan will die as it is she’ll retrieve her memory. Some of it comes back without you going to the Mokshi, Zan. If you stay—”
“No,” I say. I press my finger against the long ridge of the scar on my face again. “I would like to finish what’s been started.”
Gavatra waves her hand over the table, and the patterns of light fade, revealing the table surface for what it is: a smooth, stitched-together canvas of human skin.
I jerk up from the bench. The trembling in my arm becomes a spasm, and I lash out and smash the wall. The wall gives under my fist, as if I’ve mashed it into a lung. When I pull my hand away, it is moist. My body begins to shake; my breath comes hard and fast.
Jayd wraps her arms around me. “Hush, it will pass,” she says.
I feel as if I’m watching my body from a great height, unable to contain or control it. The panic is a monstrous thing. My body is trying to fight or flee, and I can’t allow it to do either until I understand what’s happening here. The attack is so sudden, so consuming, that it terrifies me.
Gavatra snorts and stands. “She’s going to pop again,” Gavatra says, and she scratches at the scars on her head.
My heart hammers loudly in my chest. A dark and twisted impulse seizes me; an uncoiling of everything I have held back while pushed and prodded in my sick room.
I leap across the table and take Gavatra by the throat. We collide with the wall and fall into a tangle on the floor. Gavatra writhes beneath me, gasping like a dying woman, and perhaps she is. As I straddle her and look at my hands, I fear my weaker left is not up to the task of strangling a woman to death.
I bare my teeth at Gavatra. “I do not believe a word of what you have told me,” I say.
Gavatra twists my weaker arm. Pain rushes through me, blinding my panic. She head-butts me in the face, so fast and unexpected that I reel back in shock as much as pain, clutching at my face as blackness judders across my vision.
Jayd rushes between me and Gavatra. She slides across the floor to wrap me again in her arms, as if I am a prize animal gone feral.
Gavatra uses the table to lever herself up. She rubs at her throat and gives a wry grin. “Perhaps there is something of the old Zan in this one,” she says.
“My memory!” I say.
“You fool,” Gavatra says. “You have no idea what a gift that loss is for you.” And then Gavatra smiles, her wrinkles deepening, her face cavernous in the dim light. “The truth is worse than you can possibly imagine.”
“Get me out of here,” I say. The panic is subsiding now, but the pulsing walls feel closer, as if the room itself is going to swallow me whole.
Jayd presses her cheek to mine. I take a fistful of her hair and squeeze gently. “Who are you, really?” I whisper.
I feel her mouth turn up at the corners. “I am your sister, Zan mine.”
And I smile in turn because my face is throbbing, and a trickle of blood runs from my nose, and I remember my other injuries. I have two choices here: to fight them and risk being recycled—whatever that is—or to go along with it, to give them what they want, and figure out where my memory has really gone and why these people are going to so much trouble to pretend I am their kin.
“I’m afraid,” I say, and that is partly the truth. I am afraid of what I am going to have to do to this person who claims she is my sister, but who I want to take into my arms and fuck until the world ends.
Product details
- Publisher : S&S/Saga Press; Reprint edition (November 7, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1481447947
- ISBN-13 : 978-1481447942
- Item Weight : 10.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #227,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,120 in Exploration Science Fiction
- #4,171 in Space Operas
- #6,691 in Science Fiction Adventures
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Kameron Hurley is the author of The Light Brigade, The Stars are Legion and the essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, as well as the award-winning God’s War Trilogy and The Worldbreaker Saga. Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Locus Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. She was also a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nebula Award, and the Gemmell Morningstar Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Popular Science Magazine, Lightspeed and numerous anthologies. Hurley has also written for The Atlantic, Writers Digest, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Bitch Magazine, and Locus Magazine. She posts regularly at KameronHurley.com.
Get a short story delivered to your inbox once a month here: patreon.com/kameronhurley. Or, sign up to be notified of new releases here: bit.ly/hurleysheroes
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Top reviews from the United States
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Zan is a very strong main character. The amnesia trope is handled pretty well even if the revelations around her origin did seem predicable. Jayd is a character I distrusted and hated very early on and that didn't change throughout the work. I think the reader is meant to both understand her motivations but also disagree with them, but honestly I was just hoping she would get killed off. The secondary characters are all very strong, and that may be one of the greatest strengths of this book. They really flesh out the world and provide a great deal of color and alternative perspectives on the society, its practices, and its cultures. Having an all female cast was also very brave and well executed, and completely suited the themes of the story.
My major complaint with the book was the some of Zan's surprise and repulsion at the cruelty of the setting felt very anachronistic. I couldn't tell whether this was meant to imply that the society she grew up in was less harsh than the one she has found herself in, or whether this was a conceit of the author to try and make it easier for the reader to identify with her. Either way, it really pulled me out of the story at several points because it just felt so out of place.
Overall, I was very surprised how much I grew to like this book in the end, and how long the story stuck with me afterwards. This is unlike anything I've read in the genre in a long time, and definitely worth checking out if you're not too squeamish.
the book won't be for everyone. Aside from the above-mentioned lack of clear answers, the author doesn't ever shy away from the gross stuff, to the point where it borders on body horror. The ship/world- and every world in their galaxy- is ALIVE...the walls pulse, the skin of the surface rots with disease, everything is "recycled" - so desks made of human skin are common sights, and it's heavily implied that their food is made of reprocessed human waste, and human beings. There are levels to the ship- the surface has more of a traditional sci-fi feel, while lowers levels are superstitious and more tribal, and the lowest level has monstrous "recycler" creatures. But it's beautiful too- the imagery is surreal but fascinating, and the world the author has woven is so original and unlike anything I've really seen before.
The book is also super neat in that the world is inhabited only by women, and it's extra enjoyable in that the author certainly does not shy away from female relationships - from friendship, to explicitly lesbian love, and even to the bonds enemies can have for each other. It was a delight reading a story with so many diverse, complicated female characters. The author has no interest in putting women on a pedestal or pretending that an all-female society would be a glorious utopia, but she writes women of incredible depth, nuance, ambiguity, and ambition. Fair warning though: the main characters, Zan and Jayd, are NOT especially likable people. Zan- the more *main* of the main characters, is a little more likable then Jayd, by virtue of her compassion, but she's still violent, aggressive, and hot-tempered. Jayd is intriguing, but calculating, cruel, and ruthless. She also gets less and less sympathetic the more you get to know her history and her many betrayals of Zan.
The author also touches on some really cool themes- what freedom means, bodily autonomy- especially pertaining to control of reproduction, abusive love, and the symbiosis and/or parasitic relationship between the ships and the people onboard. However, while the book certainly tackles these themes head on, it's never feels like it's preaching to the reader.
If the body horror and the unlikable leads don't sound like your cup of tea, then you probably won't enjoy this book that much. But if you're cool with that, then PLEASE give it a read. It's captivating, engaging, and yes, horrific at times. But so worth it.
Top reviews from other countries
Intenta dar valores "femeninos" a las protaganistas, en lugar de la típica agresividad masculina. Se trata de crear mundos nuevos y de presevar la vida, no de destruir.
The two interlocking protagonist's stories come together reasonably well. There's a nice air of mystery about the entire book. Perhaps the only disappointment is that more about the Legion and its purpose isn't revealed.