No One To Hold the Distant Dead by K L Schroeder

I would like to thank Psychopomp for a copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Psychopomp

Published - Out Now

Price - £10.99 paperback or $8.99 ebook via publisher

Inga Nyström chose to leave Earth and help the colony of Nordenmark escape a looming ecological disaster. But by the time she arrives, the catastrophic degradation of the planet’s terraformed environment has already passed the point of no return, and she finds its people defeated, sleepwalking through a slow-moving death.

What’s more, the technology that brought Inga to this distant colony—beaming her consciousness out of her original body and into a synthetic one—has misfired. There are haunting gaps in her memory, pieces of herself lost to the void. As extinction takes species after species, Inga and the people of Nordenmark must find a way to survive, and a reason to live, in the spaces death leaves behind.

There is a line from Star Trek The Next Generation where Captain Picard says "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life”. most stories are about digging deep and winning. Good will beat evil and all will be well. Sometimes evil wins but at least we all learn a message. It’s rarer to have a story that says sometimes we will lose and just have to learn to make do. In K L Schroeder’s interesting science fiction novella No One To Hold The Distant Dead we have a story focused on the idea of the no win situation and then having to manage it which I enjoyed but felt slightly missed its target.

Inga Nystrom has given up her body on Earth to go to the distant planetary colony of Nordenmark to save it from collapse. An expert in xenobiology she will arrive in a newly made body to aid investigations. However the beaming of her mind and body instructions goes awry and she arrives with memory issues and her body too is not fully functional. Indeed this matches the situation on Nordenmark too as has reached a point of no return but what can be made of this disaster.

Atmospherically this story works with a sense of unstoppable loss, grief and tragedy unfolding. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. The biology of the planet is not taking hold and we see creatures dying and the human settlers falling awry as their dreams turn stagnant. Inga’s condition also matches this as she knows she is now incomplete and also can’t help nor can she be returned or healed. This is a story about perhaps not raging against the dying do the light but learning to appreciate what was lost and see the embers go out. There is an elegance to that idea I appreciated.

But for me the story tries to have it both ways and for me overcooked the ending. We have the idea of automatons in anima form to take over the biology of the planet and indeed we see Inga’s gaps in memories hide her own tragedy. They’re all clues to add to the book’s themes but aren’t really fleshed out enough to make it a satisfying conclusion. Would a long lived population of settlers really be happy with robot lifeforms for the rest of their lives mimicking life? I didn’t buy how this would work at all. Perhaps a darker ending of no hope at all but at least being a witness to it would have worked better?

Sadly this started well but I couldn’t connect with it and while the heart is in the right place didn’t quite win me over.