Illuminae review

Illuminae

By Sahnan Haber

 

Summary

Iluminae is a sci-fi novel set far in the future when humanity has branched out to living on many different planets all across the universe and is capable of travel through wormholes. The book starts on the icy planet of Kerenza where Kady Grant and Ezra Mason, a couple who just broke up, are sitting in class. Not long later, there is a loud rumbling and multiple ships appear in the sky, and as soon as anyone noticed, the ships start raining hell down on the small icy planet of Kerenza. For context, the mining operations happening on this planet have been hidden and are technically illegal. These ships, later identified as being part of a large company, BeiTech, are trying to take advantage of these illegal mining operations and precious resources on the planet to try to profit immensely. This sparks the main conflict that will continue on for the rest of the book. After evacuation of the planet, BeiTech chases the civilians fleeing the planet to get to Heimdall Station, which has a wormhole that will allow the survivors to escape. The chase lasts over a year due to BeiTech trying to cover up all evidence of their attack.

    The book is written as a collection of files prepared by one of the main characters, Kady Grant to try to spread the word about the incident that happened on Kerenza. This report includes message logs between people on the ships, diary entries, reports written by the authorities on the ships, and surveillance camera footage summaries. While fleeing, many catastrophes happen, such as dealing with outbreaks of viruses or A.I. going rogue. The journey to Heimdall Station is long and treacherous, but definitely makes for an interesting read.

Review

This book is filled with action and hard to put down once you pick up. The format of a collection of files is a very interesting choice, and for this book, I think a good one. Being told in the way that it is allows the reader to see many different points of view, and see lots of information that the characters in the book wouldn’t be able to. The author gives vivid descriptions of the characters’ life stranded in space and keeps the reader constantly speculating what will happen next. Overall, I think this is a very good book and my final rating is a 4/5  due to some (in my opinion) poorly written romantic sections that generally take away from the read, and make it less interesting.