An Unkindness of Ghosts

I'm a bit more than a third of the way through Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts, which isn't a horror story but instead a generation ship novel. I don't normally post a review until I have finished a book, but as someone who is a fan of generation ship stories, this one is doing something new.

New is a matter of some significance in generation ship narratives. The most prevalent themes in the fiction have been a ship that is lost, off course, or otherwise breaking down. Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is a terrifyingly grim late exploration of the theme, wedding hard SF considerations and social SF themes smoothly - and depressingly. If Aurora's central argument is that crewed interstellar exploration is a Bad Idea, he sold me on that idea.

What Rivers Solomon does is even more interesting. Her generation ship has a racial hierarchy similar to the Jim Crow South. Resource scarcity is experienced according to the color line, with brutal consequences like heat reductions on the lower decks that lead to malnutrition and gangrene. One of the first scenes in the book involves an amputation.

The ship has physical problems as well, and no one on the lower decks seems to know where it is going. A third of the way into the novel, it seems more likely than not that the ship's engineering/physical problems are really social problems. Time will tell, but I don't see how we avoid that. 

I said at the beginning of the review that A River of Ghosts wasn't a horror story - but it is if you consider racism a horror.