Unto leviathan

Unto Leviathan was originally released back in 2001, under the title Ship of fools, winning the Philip K Dick award in the process. It's since been re-released by Orbit under the current title.

The generational ship Aragonos travels the galaxy, looking for signs of life and a possible place to call home. They've been travelling through space for so long that no one remembers what their original mission was, where they came from or where they were supposed to be going to. A steady and unidentified signal from a nearby planet lures them in. They find a potentially habitable planet, a settlement but no inhabitants. That is until an exploration team find horrible evidence of their fate: a cavernous chamber neatly filled with rows of skeletons, each one hanging on its own hook. Moving away from such death with haste, they eventually pick up another signal, this time in space, with the hope that they will encounter something a bit more friendly.

The story is told in the first person, by the captain’s adviser and confidante, Bartolomeo. Being a colony ship, the position of captain isn't actually the most secure, and there are power struggles to replace him - often from the clergy, yes religion once again rears it's ugly head. Bartolomeo isn't an average protagonist. He's severely disabled for one, and kudos to the author as to how he's portrayed here. But he's not actually that likeable either, lacking in personality, ambition and quite a lot of common sense. It actually surprised me that he was the captains advisor, although it seems he was appointed due to his friendship rather than any real ability. He his however one of the few characters that are actually developed that far, most of the rest not so much. The author does however manage to portray the society and social structure aboard the ship pretty well, along with a really well developed sense of how such a group of people might become different and evolve (or perhaps devolve) having been travelling through space for all this time. The idea of the ship travelling for so long that people have forgotten much, is hardly a new idea, but it's done fairly well.

The author also does a good job of building tension, although the story does take a while to really get going and when it does, it's pretty linear and telegraphs most of it's punches. In tone it's got aspects of horror, but is more a first contact with some space opera thrown in. There is a lot of scheming and plotting and general back-stabbery. The way the religious faction was portrayed didn't really appeal to me though and some of the decisions around these characters just seemed a little off. When alien things are encountered, they appear properly alien and unknowable and for me this was the highlight of the whole book, that feeling of something out there that's truly different and incomprehensible to human minds. It's also one of those stories that asks more questions than it answers, with lots of loose threads just hanging in the air at the end of the book.

Overall it's not a bad read, but it's not great either. I struggle to understand how a group of people who make such bad decisions, are constantly trying to undermine each other and appoint inept people into positions of power can survive for so long in the vastness of space, on board a ship they no longer really understand. It feels almost inevitable that something is going to come along and destroy them, especially going from one signal to another, like a small child finding shiny things in the sand. Doing so without any real security or military force to protect them just seems suicidal. The enigma of the alien encounter rescues what would have otherwise being a more laborious read, but I didn't care enough about any of the characters, Bartolomeo included, that I didn't really mind if the aliens bumped any of them off. It's a bit like a Stephen Baxter novel, but ordered from wish, you get the space and the opera and the first encounters and all, but it doesn't all quite come together. I'm surprised it won the PKD award, although admittedly it was a bit of a slow year for US published science fiction. The relief at the end of the book is more that you've got to the finale rather than achieved any real sense of closure, with many threads left dangling.