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“I barely remember Earth. I don’t remember our crime. I just know what Chela told me: we’re telepaths, and we’re murderers. Four thousand and thirty lives, wiped out in minutes. The guilt eats me alive, like this never-ending darkness.��

My quest to read all the Nebula and Hugo nominees and winners this year finally introduced me to Vylar Kaftan. Somehow I have never heard of her, even though she already has won a Nebula for Best Novella in 2013, but then again, I tend to stay more current with longer fiction.

Anyway, the blurb and the first few pages not only got me all excited, but had a distinct vibe of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Walking to Aldebaran which I loved when I read it earlier this year. A couple of telepaths imprisoned in the neverending caverns and tunnels on a remote planet, struggling to survive among the bug horrors and dampness and dark, with our narrator Bee having lost her memories as a punishment for telepathic mass-murder, having no one except her grumpy partner Chela not just on her side but in her whole world. All while there’s a distinct sense of wrongness with the whole picture. And maybe, just maybe, a presence of someone else.

“Mostly we’re lost in an underground maze. A labyrinth with no Minotaur, no golden thread. Just us, trying to survive.��

Things take a different turn pretty quickly, however, sketching out a world that while different from what the beginning makes you assume, is still a very disturbing place to live in. And there’s a journey of self-acceptance and recovery from trauma underneath it all. And the twist is exactly what I hoped it *wouldn’t* be from about a third in, so that soured me a bit.

It’s one of the stories where I really want to say - it’s not you, it’s me. Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s reasonably well-done, and the first part is engrossing in a disturbingly claustrophobic way, and it has just enough of that fascinating dreamlike quality that I tend to appreciate in my stories (see Silently and Very Fast, and This Is How You Lose the Time War, and Walking to Aldebaran even). But when put together, it left me quite cold. The premise had all of my attention, but the narrative voice failed to grab me, and Bee’s unreliability and confusion and self-centeredness failed to resonate with me in any way, which is not a good sign in a short novella where everything depends on the narrator. I kept wishing for the story from Jasmine’s viewpoint, or maybe Chela’s - but instead we got Bee. It just felt so uneven and focused on the parts that I cared about less than the parts happening off-page, and the sparse worldbuilding did not compensate for that.

“I feel like a silhouette without a self.��

4 stars for the opening bit, 2 stars for the middle and conclusion. Altogether 2.5 stars and regret that the ending did not live up to the promise of the set-up. But I do plan to read more of her works to see if this was just an unfortunate miss for me.

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My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: /review/show...