A teen desperate to demolish the sentient spaceship that killed her previous crew goes to extreme lengths to hunt it down in T.A. Chan's YA debut, The Celestial Seas, an exciting queer space opera inspired by Moby-Dick.
MOBIS, known colloquially as "whales," are autonomous spacecraft whose artificial intelligences "developed methods of circumventing programmed limitations" more than 50 years ago. For this reason, they were banned, and anyone in the Seven Systems is free to hunt those that still float in the celestial seas to obtain the ships' valuable biocores.
Eleven-year-old Ishara Ming left her home planet of Qiāndǎo, arrived in the Halo System, and joined the whaler Essex. While pursuing the legendary Ballena, an elusive white MOBIS, it attacked; Ishara lost her arm, "parts" of her memories, and her entire crew. Now 18, Ishara is tracking the Ballena with a new crew--retrieving the whale's biocore would mean getting both revenge and a huge payout. It would also prove she's worth something to this system and not simply a broken outsider. So when a stranger claims he has intel on how to track the elusive white whale, Ishara hires him on the spot. His ability to locate the Ballena, though, relies on "problematic augments" that have him stammering out info he can't possibly know while experiencing episodes of dizziness. Nonetheless, Ishara shares his "bone-deep need" to find the Ballena--and a willingness to risk "lunacy" and death to take it out.
Ishara's first-person narrative frankly deals with the crushing weight of survivor's guilt, the compulsive need to act, and the yearning to belong. Having come from a different star system, she battles with an internalized worthlessness and, consequently, an Ahab-like drive to hunt down her own symbolic white whale: belonging. Compounding this feeling of isolation, Ishara thinks herself a fraud for embarking on a mission that is "insanity incarnate," especially since she cannot even remember the people she means to avenge (except through brutal flashbacks). Yet the bonds Ishara now enjoys shine: "if you're heading toward the edge of insanity," her first mate tells her, "I'll be there with you." Chan beautifully contrasts their softly burgeoning romance with breath-stealing battle sequences, gruesome deaths, and g-force heavy gunship maneuvers in this impressively imagined world of space mercs, scavengers, and pirates. An exhilarating spacefaring adventure. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer
Shelf Talker: A teen bent on avenging her former crew furiously seeks to kill the sentient spaceship responsible for their deaths in this thrilling YA sci-fi inspired by Moby-Dick.