Tade Thompson follows up his acclaimed Wormwood trilogy with a thrilling science fiction twist on the locked-room mystery. Thompson's vision of humanity expanding into the stars is distinct not only for its Afrofuturist bent but for its harshly grounded version of survival in space. The novel takes place in the Lagos system, home of the Lagos space station and the colony planet Bloodroot. First mate Michelle "Shell" Campion has arrived in the system on board the colony ship Ragtime; its mission to deliver hundreds of sleeping passengers to Bloodroot is interrupted by the horrific deaths of dozens on board. With the aid of a growing cast of characters, Campion must unravel the mystery of their deaths while dealing with the failure of the supposedly infallible AI running the ship and the grim encroachments of space.
The Afrofuturist origins of the Lagos system are crucial to the novel. Also crucial are the ravages of capitalism: the novel's mystery revolves around one of the deceased passengers, a ruthless titan of industry and "equal-opportunity exploiter" who, in a previous life, "would have owned and sold slaves." The novel's chief pleasures come in the way Thompson slowly reveals the layers of the central mystery--a mystery enlivened by the author's unusual spins on sci-fi tropes, introducing aliens that may have more in common with ghosts than Klingons, for example.
Far from the Light of Heaven harks back to the earliest days of space travel in its sense of space as a source of rapidly unfolding disasters that humans escape only by the skin of their teeth. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine