A Mote in Shadow
Review
A Mote in Shadow is ’s debut novel. It follows two down-on-their-luck outsiders dragged into a war between shadowy mercenary groups: exobiologist Chaeyoung No, whose disagreement with the scientific establishment leaves her in no position to question a too-good-to-be-true offer to fund her research expedition; and space hauler Frederik Obialo, who is more than willing to take a dangerous jobs if it brings him closer to his dream of giving his daughter a permanent home.
A Mote in Shadow is a “hard sci-fi techno-thriller”. It feels like ’s work, but not from the operator or spy perspective; it’s told from the view of civilians dragged into the conflict. The plot is hard to follow, but I think that’s the point: Chaeyoung and Frederik have no idea why governments and mercenary groups keep hiring them, double-crossing them, or holding them hostage.1 They’re a lot like Daniel Brüks in Echopraxia: they understand the least about what’s really going on.
The character writing is excellent. I was rooting for Chaeyoung and Vis, hoping they’d survive and reunite. I wanted Frederik to make it back to his daughter. And the villains, Sato and Ninya Blanca, were so evil I hated them. Their presence was overpowering—I felt scared and tense whenever they showed up, imagining what atrocity they were about to commit.
But there are signs of unfinished edits. Sometimes it felt like a sentence or two was missing, or that both an old and a new version of a sentence ended up in the draft. Still, it never made me cringe the way House of Suns or Shards of Earth did.
The worldbuilding is unique and deep, but not overdone. The way society is structured around unbreakable quantum encryption makes sense, and it ties directly into the core conflict. At the same time, throws in all sorts of smaller details that make the setting feel alive: different waves to indicate your pronouns when meeting someone; robots that shift genders as they speak; automated systems that act less like clean, logical sci-fi AIs and more like modern, hallucinating LLMs.
This book reminded me of a few works. The Closed Timelike Curve computers that can break any encryption made me think of Sneakers and its black box that could hack anything. The solving of the Fermi Paradox—with oxygen—made me think of how handles it in Not Till We Are Lost with an alien federation that annexed everyone and then left, and how approaches it in The Three-Body Problem with hostile aliens. Cryptographic seals brought me back to the seals and (weak) encryption on infofeches in ’s A Memory Called Empire, and even more so to the cryptographic memories in ’s The Quantum Thief. And the way the narrative flips between two timelines to preserve its surprises is like ’s Use of Weapons.
The alien side of things reflected other works too. The spooky ruins, the ferrofluid plague, and especially the multi-armed metal aliens near the end reminded me of Rorschach and the Scramblers in Blindsight. The infected humans from the plague felt like the Flood from Halo or the xenomorph infection in Aliens. Continuing the video game theme, I kept picturing the Gray Top and the Absolute Horizons commandos as Raul Kortenaer and the Krenel mercs from Disco Elysium; Krenel, with its roster of sadistic war criminals given free rein to rape and murder, would have fit right into this story’s brutal disregard for human life. And the “blacker than black” Shade suits brought Fuligin to mind, the blacker-than-black worn by Severian in ’s The Shadow of the Torturer.
Finally, the importance of time and distance—how Earth failed to govern its far-off colonies because it had to predict events months or years in advance—reminded me of the Shardlings in ’s House of Suns, forced to rely on actuarial estimates to guess whether their destinations would still exist 50,000 years later.
I really enjoyed ’s debut novel. Sci-fi is my favorite genre, and techno-thrillers are probably my second, so combining the two was perfect for me. I’m excited to see where he takes the universe next, and what happens to Chaeyoung and Vis now that they’ve joined the Shades.
Up next is ’s Hyperion for my book club. I’m looking forward to giving it a second read, as it’s such a deep book, full of references to other literature and packed with themes and motifs I missed the first time.
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Chaeyoung’s Storyline:
Chaeyoung, an exobiologist, is hired by Acheron Private Capital Group to investigate the Mu Herculis system. Her expedition discovers an alien derelict but is ambushed by the rival mercenary outfit, Grayson Services Group. Chaeyoung and her love interest, Vis, are captured together. Grayson takes them to a secret base where they are forced to work on advanced faster-than-light drives. Vis is rescued by United Planets Navy Shades. Chaeyoung and the two other captive physicists (Mimo and Ali) are moved to the planetoid Tritonis Prime, where they are forced to reverse-engineer a powerful alien artifact: a Closed Timelike Curve Computer (CTCC), likely built by a second, more advanced alien species.
In a desperate sabotage attempt, Mimo triggers an explosion that unleashes a xenoform plague from the CTCC: a self-replicating ferrofluid that transforms victims into monstrous creatures. Chaeyoung escapes the chaos and is rescued by the Shades, whom she convinces to destroy the installation. The Shades go rogue after learning their leader is going to be blamed, and Chaeyoung joins them.
Frederik’s Storyline:
Meanwhile, the covert United Planets unit, the Shades, use a front company to hire freighter captain Frederik Obialo. His mission is to transport their operatives and a rescued VIP (Vis) to a safe house. His ship, the Ergo Infinitum, is ambushed by Grayson operatives who attach themselves to the hull during a cargo pickup. The crew manages to warn the safe house, leading to a firefight that destroys it but ends with a few Shades, including one named Omolara, making it to the ship. Omolara gives Vis a prototype CTCC (built by the physicists before their capture).
The crew is then betrayed by one of their own, Kirk, who disables their ship and hands them over to Grayson’s warship, the Delightful Death. The warship is suddenly attacked by metallic, crystalline aliens, possibly drawn to the CTCC. In the chaos, Frederik, the survivors of his crew, and the Shades escape in a shuttle. ↩