Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Eco-dystopia meets sci-fi homily in this immersive, genre-crossing story about a generation ship arriving at its destination after centuries of travel.

If you liked the existential conversations in A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, the unhinged, slightly horror-filled world building of The Employees by Olga Ravn and inimitable prose of This is How you Lose the Time War by Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, then this book will fit perfectly on your shelf.

The story follows Rochelle, one of only three engineers to wake up on a colony ship that has arrived at a new planet to terraform and awaken a new generation of humans. While the generation ship was cruising through space with this new generation of humans and engineers (asleep), the ship was filled with people tasked with guarding and guiding them to a new destination. Overtime these guardians have created new social structures, myths and language. Rochelle slowly begins to unravel what happened while she slept, and the story explores themes of the importance of memory, the power of grief, the cost of success, the ethics of power and the fragility of life. In the background, the relentless power of nature underlines the story.

I love the allusions to Homer, specifically when it comes to the importance of oral storytelling. There is a section of the book where a herald recounts the history of a 10-year war on the Calypso (I see you The Odyssey), and Oliver K. Langmead uses repetition and epithets to compose the poem.

Note, the author will not hold your hand and spoon-feed you this story. You are a part of this. You are walking the halls of a generation ship, you are imagining the conversations you don't see, you are as unsure of the outcome as everyone else in the story. I love when an author makes me work for it. The formatting of the story, the characters, the answers we do (and don't) get at the end are like impressionist art, only when we step back do we understand the full scope of what we're witnessing.

I am going to need to go through Oliver K. Langmead's back catalogue now!

Thank you to NetGalley and Titan for providing an advanced review copy of this book.

This book is best read deep in the ocean. So deep that you start to see bright, twinkling lights that remind you of stars and doubt whether you should ever return to the surface.