Deep Black by Miles Cameron
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Representation: Black MC, austistic-coded love interest, secondary nonbinary characters
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 1st August 2024
ISBN: 1399615068
Goodreads

Marca Nbaro had always dreamed of serving aboard the Greatships, with their vast cargo holds and a crew that could fill a city.

They are the lifeblood of human-occupied space, transporting an unimaginable volume - and value - of goods from City, the greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint at the other, to trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species.

And now, out in the darkness of space, something is targeting them.

Nbaro and her friends are close to locating their enemy, in this gripping sequel to the award-nominated Artifact Space, but they are running out of time - and their allies are running out of patience . . .

Written by one of the most exciting new voices in SF, this space thriller will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

I received this book for free from the author. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~the aliens will surprise you
~being a hero is very odd, actually
~neural lace = superpowered brain
~do we trust the AIs?
~everything you think you know is about to go bye-bye

My review of book one, Artifact Space

:this review contains spoilers for Artifact Space!:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Listen. LISTEN. I reread Cameron’s books every year, at this point. At the time of writing, I just finished rereading his Masters & Mages trilogy for the fourth time. The first book in this series, Artifact Space, made my Best of 2021 list and was the only book I read twice that year. I’ve finished reading it twice more since, and read bits of it many more times than that, when I felt the need to reread particular scenes or chapters without reading the whole book.

To say I’m obsessed is putting it mildly.

I had no idea what was going to happen in Deep Black, but I was pretty sure it was going to be fantastic – AND I WAS CORRECT!

We left Nbaro and co having run off the ‘bad’ aliens and made contact with the Starfish at last. Deep Black opens what feels like minutes later, with the Greatship Athens still at Tradespoint – which is now in the process of being rebuilt, since the Bubbles (our bad aliens) did, you know, blow it up. Cue an exhilarating frenzy of construction, with the Athens making Tradespoint 2.0 much more sophisticated (and comfortable) than it was before. Cameron is especially good at this kind of thing; what would be extremely boring in the hands of another author is somehow (I genuinely can’t figure out how) escapist and delightful and soothing, even when it’s paragraphs of Nbaro welding things together. It doesn’t hurt that Nbaro is one of the very privileged few now allowed to trade with the Starfish directly, and worldbuilding fanatics like myself will swoon at all that we learn about Starfish physiology and…can you call it linguistics when no words are used??? Well, Starfish communication, anyway. Dorcas is doing his best to infer as much as he can about Starfish culture, with sometimes hilarious, often insightful interjections from everyone else, and it’s so freaking fascinating. I am constantly being hit with non-humans in SFF who are just humans in fancy dress, but Cameron’s aliens feel alien, my friends! How they’re built, how they think, how they structure their society… C’EST MAGNIFIQUE! *chef’s kiss*

Readers less interested in worldbuilding don’t have to be alarmed: you will not be drowning in info-dumps, I promise. I genuinely think that the worldbuilding is spread out enough throughout the book – instead of coming all in one or two reveals – that it won’t be overwhelming for anyone. And it’s all so freaking COOL!

Ahem.

So Tradespoint goes fairly well. It’s when the Athens is on the way home that things get…complicated. Again!

I loved Artifact Space, and I still do, but I am in awe of Deep Black. The grasp of tactics and strategy that is Cameron’s signature in his fantasy books is on full display here, but arguably even more impressive because now we’re in space. We saw some of this in Artifact, and it was extremely epic then, but it feels like Cameron’s playing on a whole nother level here. Which is partly because, yes, there are more space battles in this book! And the way that the fighting feels so believable, and so unfamiliar – because of course, you can’t fight a space battle the way you would on land or even water – the way Cameron makes it all make sense, and never, ever forgets that his characters are fighting in three dimensions and specifically, three dimensions in space, where refuelling is a huge concern and astronomical bodies shape the ‘terrain’ and the enemy don’t have to be close to take out your ship – all of it is just so freaking excellent.

The story, also, feels like it’s been levelled up. If Artifact Space was a story zoomed in on the little picture, intimate and almost homey at times, then Deep Space is Cameron zooming out to show us the big picture – and holy gods, it is not what you think it is! The twists and reveals keep coming, but beautifully, elegantly, each building on the last – and the sheer scope of it all! Bit by bit, we’re guided to an understanding of the full picture, not just with regards the conspiracy that’s been taking out Greatships, but also the different factions and philosophies within human space, and humanity’s place in the wider universe; one by one, all our expectations and assumptions are subverted, and it’s done so gracefully, with such brilliant precision. And as for what is revealed? When we learned who are pulling most of the strings, my jaw DROPPED. And yet, it made so much sense, and was just objectively brilliant both in terms of worldbuilding and wow factor!

What I mean is, it’s not just that there are plenty of twists, and it’s not just the technique and skill that went into the reveals. What is revealed is also just – brilliant. There are so many cool ideas here, so many details that made the happy parts of my brain light up. I was shocked and impressed and awed and delighted, over and over – and this is all managed without sacrificing the inexplicable cosiness that made Artifact Space so addictive. (Well. It’s one of the things that made it so addictive!) We still get to see Nbaro’s work and training as one of the rank-and-file; we’re still deeply involved with the found-family that’s coalesced around her; cake and pie and cookies are still being traded back and forth between the different ranks within the Athens. The – what I’ll call mundanity, for lack of a better word, although none of it is boring – the mundanity of Nbaro’s everyday life doesn’t just contrast interestingly against those times when she’s being accidentally heroic; it anchors those times, those more dramatic and exciting parts of the book. If we had just one or the other – the everyday stuff OR the exciting, fate-of-the-species-determining stuff – Deep Black would be a very different book; and, I think, a lesser one. We need both, and we get both, and it’s part of what makes this book rock so much!

One of the things that bridged these two halves of Nbaro’s life is the neural lace she discovered had been implanted in/on her brain in Artifact Space. It was a fairly small (albeit very plot-relevant) part of the first book; in Deep Black, she actually starts learning how to use it, and it changes quite a lot of her work dramatically. We all like it when sci fi authors give us cool tech to ooh and ahh over, but – like the uterine replicators of Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga – it’s elevated to something really fascinating when a storyteller explores the ramifications of that tech, and that’s what Cameron does here. The neural lace allows Nbaro to multi-task in ways her unaugmented peers (and superiors!) can’t, and gives her an enormous amount of access to the ship (although that’s not a given with a neural lace; if the AI of the Athens, Morosini, didn’t give her that access, she wouldn’t have it, lace or not) – and not everyone is happy about that, for very good reasons. In a similar way to how our eyes are gradually opened to the full scope of the plot, Nbaro’s neural lace helps us understand the direction humanity is going in, in this series – and it’s both exciting and frightening. Cameron never tries to pretend that forward motion (it seems too complicated to be called simply progress, as if it’s uncomplicatedly a positive thing) comes without consequences or harm, which I really appreciated; but equally, it’s clear that forward motion also can’t be stopped. What that’s going to mean for humanity and human space, I have no idea, but I am, again, very excited about it!

And though it’s a little subtle, Nbaro’s growing grasp of her neural lace – and what the technology is going to mean for humanity as a whole going forward – is contrasted really well against the two alien species we know of. Both the Starfish and the Bubbles have been around far longer than humans have – so why are they lacking some of the things humans take for granted, like AIs? Is it possible that they did have these technologies some time in the past, but got rid of them? And if so, why, and should humans get rid of them too? It’s usually a good idea to learn from other people’s mistakes so you don’t have to make them yourself – but some of these things give the Greatships, and the rest of human space, some advantages over the aliens. So should we keep them, and keep those advantages? Or sacrifice them before we go through whatever the aliens went through? I don’t know if Cameron intended for this to be a kind of exploration of the pros and cons, or risks of, technological advancement, but it does kind of end up being one – albeit not a lecture-y one, thank the gods! And not a moralising one, either; we’re not left with the clear conclusion that technological advancement is good OR that it’s bad – just that it is, and it’s smart to be careful about it. At the very least, we should ask questions when we get new tech – and I did love the questions Nbaro started to ask herself when she worked out a lot of this on her own.

Everything to do with the aliens is excellent – I really cannot emphasise that enough. The issue of anthromorphising an alien species, in particular, and how that affects individual humans and humanity in general, is a fairly Big Thing, and the way that plays out is just FANTASTIC. But I can’t really tell you anything about the alien stuff without spoilering you, so just trust me when I say that I can’t imagine ANYONE is going to be unhappy with it.

I don’t know what to say about the romance, other than I enjoyed it; it’s not really a major component of the book, especially since Nbaro and Dorcas don’t really have…a traditional relationship? I love their dynamic; I love the mutual respect, and how well they brainstorm together and inspire each other; I love that they both very clearly have their own areas of expertise and neither of them thinks the other is lesser for that; I love that they’re so good at communicating with each other, even as they slip up sometimes, just like everyone else. But they don’t date as such, they’re not very sappy or swoony, and it would be quite easy to ignore the romantic angle, I think, if you wanted to do that. But it’s there for readers who will enjoy it, and I’m not going to lie, after everything Nbaro’s been through, it’s still really wonderful to see her happy, and continuing to learn how to trust people, how to be open. And seriously: YAY FOR COUPLES COMMUNICATING! More of that, please!

All that being said, I do think it’s a good idea to read the short story collection Beyond the Fringe before diving into Deep Black, because two stories in particular give you context that makes this book hit even harder. It’s not mandatory; you won’t miss anything plot-relevant if you skip Fringe. But it definitely adds to the reading experience.

In conclusion: the writing is just as brilliant as it always is with Cameron; the plot is perfect; there is plenty of pew-pewing; the worldbuilding is EPIC; it’s still bizarrely cosy; and there is plenty of thinky-stuff for you to sink your teeth into. There is so much more awesomeness that I can’t share because SPOILERS, but genuinely, I think Deep Space must be one of the best book’s Cameron’s ever written. And I say that as someone who did not think I could possibly love a sequel more than I loved Artifact Space!

I cannot say how many times I will reread this before we get book 3, except that it will be many!

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