Blood and guts in space

摘要

GALAXY-SPANNING "space operas" have always been near to science fiction's heart. Even the chilliest of them-Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, published 87 years ago-can still bring a lump to the throat. But where most space opera exists at a remove from humanity, Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion is fleshy and messily organic. There is a fairly simple narrative at work: Zan, an amnesiac general, is tasked by a conniving and secretive princess to save the disintegrating Legion. But if the novel doesn't amount to more than the sum of its parts, those parts are so inventive and bizarre that they are more than enough to be going on with. In one scene, hero Zan patches a tube with a length of intestine sliced out of a nearby corpse.