Grabbed this off a recommendation thread where somebody said the cover, a fairly generic gold-and-black planet shot, does the book zero favors compared to what’s actually inside, and they were right, this needed pulpier art to match what it’s selling.
The premise: a cluster of worldships called the Legion, each one a living, organic vessel slowly dying and rotting from the inside, orbiting a dying star, crewed and warred over entirely by women, no male characters anywhere in the setting, which isn’t a gimmick so much as the whole point of how reproduction and inheritance work in this universe. Zan wakes up with no memory, gets told she’s tried and failed the same mission a dozen times before, and has to retake a worldship called the Mokshi that’s the only one that’s ever managed to break free of the dying swarm.
Hurley does not write comfortable books and this is no exception. The biology of these ships gets genuinely unsettling, birth and decay and repair are all the same bodily process here, and there’s a squeamish, visceral texture to nearly every setting description that some readers are going to bounce off hard. I didn’t mind it, closer to appreciated it honestly, but it’s not background wallpaper the way worldbuilding usually is, it’s confrontational on purpose.
Pacing’s the one real complaint. Zan’s amnesia is a good hook for the first third and starts feeling like a stalling tactic by the midpoint, the plot circles some of the same reveals more than once before finally committing to where it’s going. Renata put it down around there and never picked it back up. I stuck with it and the back half earns the patience, the political structure between the rival worldships gets genuinely gripping once the memory-loss gimmick stops carrying the weight alone.
Not for everybody, but if you want space opera that doesn’t look or feel like anything else on your shelf, this delivers that completely.