Far From The Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson

I would like to thank Nazia from Orbit for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Orbit

Published – 28/10

Price – £8.99 paperback £4.99 Kindle eBook

The colony ship Ragtime docks in the Lagos system, having travelled light years from home to bring one thousand sleeping souls to safety among the stars.

Some of the sleepers, however, will never wake - and a profound and sinister mystery unfolds aboard the gigantic vessel. Its skeleton crew are forced to make decisions that will have repercussions for all of humanity's settlements - from the scheming politicians of Lagos station, to the colony planet of Bloodroot, to other far flung systems and indeed Earth itself.

Space travel is very cool but its also terrifying. You’re separated from an immense endless vacuum that would freeze you in seconds by just a few thin walls of metal and a pile of electronic systems with immense redundancy. For those who work in space, and I don’t mean just have ten minutes of weightlessness you’ve paid millions for then you need to have the mindset to deal with anything the universe throws at you. In Tade Thompson’s exhilarating space thriller Far From The Light of Heaven we have a supremely capable astronaut deal with multiple mysteries and doesn’t get a moment’s rest until the final page.

Ragtime is a colony ship sending 1000 colonists form Earth to a new colony as Earth starts to spread its wings. Ragtime is pretty much controlled by it’s sentient AI and the mission will take a decade but just in case a human deputy must be ready. In this case it’s the extremely driven Sarah Campion; herself living with the legacy of her father who was one of Earth’s famous space adventurers; Campion in peak condition, she knows everything about the ship but for Campion this is just a chance to get some easy space miles under her belt while she sleeps making her eligible for many more deep space missions. It is well paid drudge work but…just ten years out from Earth Campion is awakened by the AI and finds the ship missing a lot of passengers; its many many robot servants are now hostile and there has been a lot of blood spilt. Plus did I mention there appears to be a wolf on the ship only she can see? Campion manages to get sent an investigator from the nearest colony Fin who has a past he needs to atone for, an android named Salvo plus an old friend of her father who loved the action and his strange daughter. They are the only people who could stop an immense disaster in space and find out what the hell is going on.

This is a massively enjoyable rollercoaster of a science fiction thriller that will not let go of you until the end. As soon as you are told AI ships are infallible and nothing ever goes wrong you know exactly what will start happening. This is like being led up to the tunnel and knowing very shortly you’ll be plunging high speed in the dark making seriously scary turns and corkscrews. Thompson delights throwing strange images at us – bots, wolves, neatly dismembered bodies and that’s just the few opening chapters. Dear reader I promise it will all make sense, but Thompson has laden Ragtime with all manner of nasty surprises for Campion and her crew to make sense of. We learn we cannot trust anything at face value from our friendly all seeing AI to our demanding bosses in space. The thrill for readers is knowing that there is no one who can warp in and rescue the ship plus the remaining sleeping passengers unaware their lives hang in the balance makes the stakes feel so high. They’re all alone with just their own skills and intelligence to get them out of it all.

To help us get invested we have a small yet fascinating cast all alone in the night. Campion is all about the mission and saving her ship. The murders are for her an inconvenience but she is relentless, focused and prepared to put her life on the line for others. Thompson allows us to know her the best early on so that we know that while she can appear super driven this is a woman who just wants to live her dream and honour the memory of her father. It is great to see a character who is so cool in a crisis and the book constantly tests her abilities. Fin is an absolutely great intuitive crime investigator but is a dreadful astronaut so useless at many of the routine tasks byt Campion needs his ability to piece the strange facts together. The rest of the crew compliment these two extreme characters (and I won’t say more as it may spoil your enjoyment finding out how they got on the ship). This is all about adventure and watching them all face brilliant deadly set pieces that just when you think one crisis is dealt with then the story will add two more for good luck!

This book is fast paced but what really impresses me is how Thompson uses so many ideas from science fiction that casual readers will be familiar with and without excessive infodumping gives us not just a spaceship mystery but a taste of larger future world that you want to know more about and slowly it’s secrets are shared. This shorthand allows us to quickly understand the relationships with AI; sentient Artificial life, new biology, colonies that went horribly wrong and we see how easily such sciences can be misused. All of these tales are refreshing and never feel stale. We also find out humanity is still learning to deal with a strange very alien group known as Lambers who seem overly fascinated with humans and can bend space and time plus reality for reasons they are not yet willing to share. At the same time humans are always humans and the political shenanigans so no one gets the blame for the loss of a spaceship that they could get sued for are depressingly reminded that greed is always a constant in our future as well as our past. When we do find out the rationale for all this chaos it is soberly reminding us exploitation of people by the rich is something unlikely to change anytime soon even when we can travel to the stars.

Far From The Light of Heaven is a book you will do well to just go in cold on as the fun is piecing all these random elements together and find out just how well plotted the tale is (The Wolf will make sense eventually I promise). This is very much compared to Thompson’s excellent Wormwood trilogy a fantastic high-octane thriller and yet Heaven is just as inventive in its use of science fiction ideas to give the reader a fresh new universe to explore. The tale ends very much as standalone novel but I would not be averse to Thompson coming back to this universe if not this group of characters in the future. This story was a delight to read and cements Tade Thompson as one of the genre’s best writers in science fiction and is well worth your time! Strongly recommended!