Descendant Machine by Gareth L. PowellMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The problem with this one for me is that it fell short in continuity, consistency, and credibility (not to mention creativity).
The background is that humans in our not-too-distant future messed up Earth pretty badly and then accidentally started a nuclear war, but fortunately (the first of a number of fortunate coincidences), just as the bombs started launching a physicist discovered how to access subspace, and this caused the extremely powerful being(s) lurking on Saturn to intervene, shut down the nukes, and exile the entire population of Earth to a fleet of enormous space arks, forbidding them to settle any planets because they can't be trusted with a biosphere. (This feels, for me, very like Becky Chambers, and not just because the whole of humanity is now in space arks; it's theoretically optimistic SF, in that the individual characters are well-intentioned, but it's deeply pessimistic about humanity as a whole. That isn't the worst way in which humans screw up in this book, either.)
The problem with consistency comes partly because sometimes the exiles are very familiar with things that Earth people are familiar with, and sometimes they're not. Depending which scene you're in, for example, the protagonist might mention that her gods included the elephant-headed Ganesh (described as such), or she might say, apparently sincerely, "What's an elephant?" (Her gods are referred to exactly once, and then never mentioned again.)
The humans have a new calendar, starting from the date of their exile, but when it's necessary to refer to the 'Oumuamua object, the date is given as 2017, not X years before the New Common Era. A lot is explained (it's all in first person) that only needs to be explained to the 21st-century reader, not the supposed audience of the fictional account.
In terms of continuity, a quantity of antimatter is variously described as "a hundred square kilometers," "a hundred cubic kilometers," and "a hundred tonnes". Those are three very different amounts. In conversation, a person would say something, and then a couple of pages later accuse the person they were talking to of having said it.
To talk about credibility I have to use a spoiler tag for the most egregious example. (view spoiler) But there are also a good few fortunate coincidences, cavalry rescues, dei ex machina, and other such creaking plot devices.
In terms of creativity, it's on the tropey end of space opera. You won't find much that's new here. It also deploys the current Easiest Villain: a right-wing populist. Yes, right-wing populists are bad. Yes, we currently have a big problem with them. But making one your villain can easily become a short cut when you don't want to devote much thought to it, and I felt that this was what had happened here.
As far as storytelling goes, it's OK. The emotional arc, the trajectory of tension, the main character's inner journey, all of that is... fine. It's competent. It's adequate. The copy editing is, apart from a few obvious glitches, decent, in the pre-publication copy I got via Netgalley for review, and the remaining issues may yet be ironed out before publication (or they may not). But I didn't feel that the setting was fully thought through or consistently depicted, and the continuity and credibility problems, of which I've only given the most glaring examples out of many, kept tripping me up throughout. This lost it the fourth star.
If you're looking for popcorn space opera and are prepared to not think about it too deeply, you'll probably enjoy this. But for me, it was underdone.
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