Review of Machine by Elizabeth Bear

Last year I read Ancestral Night, and it totally transformed my appreciation for Elizabeth Bear’s writing. I was eager to get my hands on the next book in the series, and of course my library came in clutch. Machine is a standalone sequel, so you can read it without reading the first book. There’s only a couple characters in common, and you don’t need to know anything that happened in Ancestral Night to make sense of Machine. I love how accessible Bear has made this space-opera universe of hers. I’ll speak more on that in a moment. For now, I’ll say I liked this protagonist and the overall pacing of this story better than Ancestral Night, though I think the former’s mystery was more compelling.

Dr. Brookllyn Jens is a rescue specialist. She works alongside several other highly trained people aboard a sentient ship. They go places and rescue people in trouble, treat them or bring them back to the Core General hospital hub near Sagittarius A*. Jens and her crew have been sent to rescue a newly rediscovered generation ship that left Earth a long time ago. But the ship is weirdly deserted, and the syster ship that found it is similarly silent and docked to the generation ship. Somehow, this mystery is connected to another mystery involving sabotage, both on Jens’s vessel and back at the hospital. It’s up to Jens, who was in the Synarche’s military/enforcement branch prior to becoming a rescue specialist, to investigate.

Once again, I am stunned by how much I love Bear’s Synarche. As I observed in my previous review, it’s a clever take on a space-opera utopia because it isn’t post-scarcity. Indeed, that’s an important plot point in this story, which ultimately illustrates that even in a civilization as advanced as the Synarche, there can be corruption and malignancy of spirit. In many ways, it reminds me of the Federation of Star Trek, circa the thirty-second century: no one should want for anything, yet people do because sapients can be awful to each other sometimes.

Jens is a great protagonist. She’s a fine balance of cool and capable yet also full of flaws and quirks. I don’t want to compare her too much to Haimey from Ancestral Night, for I don’t think that’s fair, but I did say above that I like Jens better, and it’s true. It’s also neat to see Bear’s take on physical disability in a universe where you can regrow people’s limbs. Jens has some form of chronic pain and mobility issues, so she wears an “exo” (an exoskeleton) to assist her with movement. It’s so important, even as we write futures with technology that can help people, not to erase disabled people from those futures.

It was a delight to see Cheerilaq again too. It doesn’t have quite as prominent a role as it did in Ancestral Night, but it was cool, especially to see it interact with a male Rashaqin.

As far as the plot and mystery goes … eh, I was kind of confused at times? There are a lot of moving parts, and a lot of conversations between characters about how much they don’t know and still need to figure out. I think I understood everything by the end. More importantly, Bear does an excellent job creating action sequences—worthy of an expensive AppleTV or Prime budget, I would say—that help to break up those more intellectual mystery-solving moments. Machine can be heavy, but it can also be fun, and I was never bored.

Beneath it all, Machine ponders the same existential ideas that lie at the heart of the first novel in this series: what is freedom, and is absolute freedom worth it? Bear’s concept of “rightminding” is scary to anyone—including me—who is not, you know, rightminded. Whereas Haimey has to confront this very personally in Ancestral Night, Jens confronts it in a different way here, where she realizes that rightminding does not automatically mean people won’t do bad shit. The conspiracy she stumbles across is fascinating, for what does it mean to dissent in heaven if not seek to fall?

I don’t know if this is a very good review … this book was basically candy in space opera form, and if you like that, read it. A disabled gay woman teams up with a giant praying mantis to solve a mystery and save thousands of sentient beings on a hospital orbiting the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Like, what else do you want?