Haimey’s character arc is multi-layered due to a complex past. This serves to bring us closer to Haimey, allowing us to understand her motivations and thought processes on a personal level. It’s conversational, often going off on slight tangents as Haimey describes her experiences.

Rather than the traditional, lyrical prose I had read from Bear previously, Ancestral Night is written in a stream-of-consciousness narrative. I was a little surprised by the writing style when I began reading. The ship itself has several major inconsistencies, including technology leftover from a hyper-advanced ancient civilization. Soon, Haimey and her team find that they are in over their heads. Once they arrive at the site, they find not only the salvage ship they had been seeking out… but also the corpse of an Ativahika, a giant space-dwelling creature that’s somewhat draconic in appearance. This is incredibly dangerous, and had they overlapped even a bit more both ships very likely would have been destroyed. Said ship is a bit further out from the core than the team is used to being, and things start to go south early on when a second ship manages to brush up against the white space bubble they use to trick space into allowing faster-than-light travel.

The team has been tasked with a standard salvage operation: find a lost ship, bring it back in to the core. I came in with high expectations for both prose and character development, and I’m pleased to say that Ancestral Night lived up to all my hopes on both counts! Where The Stone in the Skull had multiple points of view and broad-spanning political themes, Ancestral Night keeps things closer to home by following only one character: a traumatized young engineer named Haimey, who is part of the crew on a space salvage rig with a shipmind AI called Singer, a rather unfairly good-looking pilot, and two absolutely delightful cats named Mephistopheles and Bushyasta. My first introduction to Elizabeth Bear was on the fantasy side with The Stone in the Skull, which I loved. “Right about now the audience is screaming, ‘Don’t open the hatch! Don’t let her in! It will kill you all!’ into their VR rigs.” “This is the setup to a space thriller,” I said.

I waited, eyes closed, the fear sweat rolling down my face and between my shoulders in cold snail trails. Harder than telling my clademothers that their utopia was my hell, and I’d done that in a packet rather than to their faces. “There’s something in me.” And those were the hardest words I ever had to say.

Elizabeth bear ancestral night