I don’t know if irony covers this situation, but it seems like it should. Shortly after humanity launched generation ships to escape a dying First Earth, they found a way to travel the expanse of space with gates. Those who didn’t leave ended up being the first people to colonize the universe. The word tragedy is more appropriate to what happened to the people on the generation ships. Only one of these ships succeeded in its mission; all the rest succumbed to violence before their arrival. People like Vessel Iris, the protagonist of A.D. Sui’s thoughtful novel The Iron Garden Sutra, now hold rites for the lost dead while scientists and academics study recovered ships.
Vessel Iris prefers to work away from other people. They distract him from his work as a Starlit monk. His only companion on most missions is his AI construct, VIFAI, who helps him navigate dead ships, witness for the deceased, and also remind him to take care of his body before he drives himself to collapse. Iris strives to be a perfect Vessel, but extracts from his writings and his conversations with VIFAI reveal Iris’s anxiety and doubt about his ability to serve the dead. It’s little wonder Iris wants to work alone; his head is busy enough without having to deal with other human’s doubts about the the Starlit order (the non-believers) or their needs for religious solace (the believers). So it is with profound dismay that Iris realizes that a whole team of researchers will also be working with him on The Council of Nicaea, a thousand-year-old generation ship that recently arrived through a gate.
Iris does his best to keep his head down and work on reassembling the bones of the dead so far recovered on the ship, he and his unwanted shipmates begin to realize that there is something very wrong on the Nicaea. VIFAI and Iris feel electric signals from inside the ship, which shouldn’t be possible. AI technology sophisticated enough to be sentient didn’t come along for centuries after the Nicaea launched. But something intelligent traps everyone aboard the ship and cuts them all off from the outside. And then, people start to die.
Being put in a position where Iris is pulled between his sworn obligations to the dead and his determination to save the lives of the living drives the Vessel to the edge of his sanity and physical endurance. Who will care for the dead if Iris gets free from the Nicaea? No one will dare come back to the ship and there are hundreds of souls that need to be laid to rest. What does it mean when his memorized prayers and sutras no longer offer comfort? Where will he turn for purpose and meaning now? And what in the universe is inside the Nicaea?
There are so many philosophical questions to ponder in The Iron Garden Sutra that I had to marvel at Sui’s writerly skills because this book also is a fantastic work of science fiction/horror. The atmosphere of the Nicaea is impressively claustrophobic, even though the characters presumably have the run of a massive ship. Corridors and rooms are crowded with sinister vines and moss; the humidity and temperature keep everyone sweating and irritated. No where feels safe. And then there are the relationships that grow between the reluctant Iris and the rest of the expedition: the cranky engineer, the botanist who marvels at the plants, the scheming archaeologist who wants to take everything back to his lab, the terrified grad students.
I highly recommend The Iron Garden Sutra. This is a book that sticks to the ribs.