They’re almost immediately attacked by someone, probably pirates who also seem to be interested in the artifact. On this salvage run, they’re way out in one of the far arms of the galaxy investigating an anomaly that turns out to be a highly valuable artifact as well as a horrendous crime scene. Their ships look like they’re wearing hula hoops, girdled by rings that generate the white space effect of … folding spacetime around the ship somehow. White space is Bear’s construct by which the members (“systers”) of the Synarche defy the limits of light speed and flit about the Milky Way galaxy and even beyond it. Both Haimey and Connla live nearly full time in zero gravity, so of course their bodies have been modified in many ways, including replacing their feet with “aft hands.” The three of them make their living in the vastness of interstellar space by going to the rips in spacetime caused by unsuccessful transfers out of white space back into Newtonian space, and salvaging the wrecks they find there … if there’s anything left or worth salvaging. Cherryh and Iain Banks in her Acknowledgments, and I definitely see traces of both those space opera forbears in this book’s themes and accoutrements.Īncestral Night is the tale of Haimey Dz, a nominally lesbian engineer on a little salvage tug whose ship mind is named Singer and which is piloted by her friend Connla Kurucz.

I love a good space opera and Ancestral Night is a very good one. I certainly hope that centuries from now, whether we’re traveling through interstellar space or still hunkered down here in Sol System, we’re not arbitrarily dating things from the supposed birth of some supposed prophet whose followers started a cult after his death.Īnyway, that’s pretty far afield of the matter at hand, which is this first entry in Bear’s new (as of 2019) White Space series. She doesn’t tell us, just has one character mention in passing that it’s been centuries since humanity first leapt off the homeworld – and I think that’s great. Also, welcome to … whatever “century” this White Space series takes place in. It’s also the first ebook that I’ve reviewed, so, welcome to the 21st century, Gary. Elizabeth Bear is one of our favorite and most reviewed authors here at GMR, so I’m a little chagrined to admit that Ancestral Night is the first book of hers that I’ve read.

Elizabeth bear ancestral night