Synopsis:
From New York Times bestseller and master of speculative fiction Garth Nix comes his first foray into adult science fiction with a brilliant and poignant stand-alone story of sentient starships, galactic warfare, and the bonds a crew forms far, far from Earth.
Caught me a mountain
Rode it to the stars
It’s business as usual for Ship Leader Parnell Shi-Sawahla and the crew of the corvette Sassafras. Ride a Massif to a new system, fight the enemy, repeat. For more than two hundred years humans have been hitching rides on these sentient, starfaring mountain ranges, colonizing planets and exporting an on and off again war between Earth and Mars.
But the big questions are always there, behind every battle, every new colony, every new star system discovery.
Why do the Massifs carry humans to the stars?
Why do they help us export our wars?
What’s in it for the Massifs?
Ship crews aren’t supposed to ask these questions, they aren’t supposed to think about these questions, and they definitely aren’t supposed to go deep and talk to Massif avatars. But now Parnell and his tight-knit crew must try to find the answers, to save not only themselves but the future of humanity.
Review:
By day, I teach junior high. For years I’ve seen kids walking around with books stamped with the name “Garth Nix” on the front cover and spine. I knew he had hits at the Middle Grade and Young Adult level, so I was intrigued when I saw he was releasing his first adult science fiction book with Massif. The concept is genius — almost like an intergalactic mass transit system where humans can catch a ride on these space-faring rocks traveling from one galaxy to the next to the next to the next. Over the course of a couple hundred years, humankind has spread out among the stars, starting new colonies on various planets wherever the Massifs went.
The concept is amazing. The execution? Maybe a little less so.
Not to say there isn’t some absolutely outstanding stuff in Massif. It…just takes a little bit to get to it.
When the book starts, Nix really plays into the “space military” aspect where different factions from Earth and Mars are vying for control over Massifs and the rest of the universe. After many pages of sometimes tedious maneuvering and dogfighting in space, the story settles into a brief section of a farce where we see the ridiculousness of a military bureaucracy on full display.
Once that section was over, the book really began to work for me. The final third to half of the book finally reveals certain truths about the giant mountains that humanity rides from one planet to another. Those truths range from uncomfortable to down-right cosmic horror. When the rest of the fleet leaves and Ship Leader Parnell Shi-Sawahla is only responsible for keeping his own crew safe, the story really starts to sing. For the first half of the book, I questioned if I really wanted to continue and the second half literally dragged me to the end, enjoying the questions and answers I discovered along the way.
This is a tough book to review. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people bow out before the halfway mark, but in my opinion, that would be a mistake. In retrospect, I can kind of understand what Nix was doing with the narrative, showcasing the things that humans believed to be of the utmost import, only for the reality to smack them in the face later on. I do recommend reading Massif, but hang in there for the payoff towards the latter part of the book.
Thank you to Avon and Harper Voyager for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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