Artifact Space (Arcana Imperii #1) by Miles Cameron
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi, Space Opera
Representation: Black MC, autistic-coded love interest, secondary nonbinary character
Published on: 27th January 2026
ISBN: 9781668210178
Goodreads

The explosive first entry in a beloved space opera series where one woman’s thrilling journey aboard an alien trade ship reveals a hidden past and deadly secrets lurking in the depths of space, perfect for fans of James S.A. Corey and Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Out in the darkness of space, something is targeting the Greatships.

With their vast cargo holds and a crew that could fill a city, the Greatships are the lifeblood of human occupied space. They transport an unimaginable volume—and value—of goods from City, the greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint to trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species.

It has always been Marca Nbaro’s dream to achieve the escape her upbringing and venture into space. All it took to make her way onto the crew of the Greatship Athens was thousands of hours in simulators, dedication, and the pawning or selling of every scrap of her old life in order to forge a new one. But although she’s made her way onboard with fake papers, leaving her old life—and scandals—behind isn’t so easy.

She may have just combined all the dangers of her former life with the perils of the new…

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~feels cosy but high stakes
~excellent pew pew
~aliens!
~sci fi economies
~the only kind of AIs I want

I have in fact reviewed this once before, but yes, I’m going to do it again. A bit more seriously this time. I have thoughts!

First thing’s first: After reading the Gollancz edition four times, my biggest question about the Saga Press edition was: would the hundreds of typos be fixed? And even in the review copy I read – which, remember, is not finalised, and most review copy errors are fixed before publication day – the answer is a very joyous YES! Someone or several someones has done some serious copy-editing, and it is such a freaking relief not to be jolted out of the story every other page by egregious typos!

(I’m not exaggerating, by the way; I caught over a hundred typos in my first read of the Gollancz edition, and dozens more on every reread. Spelling, formatting, even continuity errors. AND THEY’RE ALMOST ALL GONE NOW! The number of typos in the review copy of the Saga edition is well within reasonable norms, and I expect most or all of those will be fixed in the final version! THANK YOU SAGA PRESS!)

As a novel, Artifact Space is…weirdly difficult to describe. It’s not cosy, but it’s decidedly feel-good. There are space battles, but more thoughtful and practically-conceptualised than I’ve seen before. It’s military sci fi – except that they’re not a military, they’re a merchant fleet. It’s not First Contact; humanity has known about, and traded with, aliens for centuries by the time the book opens. It’s arguably hardcore political intrigue – but the main character’s ship spends most of the book alone without other ships or people, so calling it an intrigue story would probably give the wrong impression.

See? Tricky!

Nbaro – as the text mostly refers to her – was raised in the Orphanage, where she survived horrific levels of abuse that Artifact never goes into in detail (a choice I’ll dig into in a bit). Through some enormous gambles, she manages to escape into the Service, a galactic merchant spacefleet that functions almost indistinguishably from a military in a lot of ways, but whose primary function is the trading of goods through human space. As it says in the book’s blurb, Nbaro serves on the Athens, one of the rare Greatships that can make the journey to trade with aliens. The aliens – known a the Starfish – create xenoglas, a material that underpins every human economy.

Which is what makes it so inexplicable when it becomes clear that someone is destroying Greatships. The Starfish have no reason to disrupt the trade they value, which means it must be humans. But what humans would want to plunge all of human space into this kind of chaos?

Considering that premise, Artifact Space is a surprisingly joyful book. Nbaro is just so damn happy to be on the Athens – even though she rapidly learns that all her simulation training left huge gaps in her knowledge, and worse, her very traumatic upbringing has left her pretty poorly socialised. But she works hard to correct for both, and is helped by a growing cast of wonderful characters; among them Thea, her roommate, Truekner, her skipper, and Commander Jan ‘Smoke’ Mpono, who is one of Nbaro’s fellow pilots (I do not pretend to understand military or military-esque ranks and have no idea how Smoke does a lot of what Nbaro does but is much higher up the ranks than her). One of the things that helps Nbaro unlearn her reflexive wariness of others – and that makes the book such a wonderful read – is how the vast majority of the characters we meet mean well; how – despite the normal, everyday messiness of humanity – most people are basically good. The crew of the Athens is extremely welcoming; Nbaro, as a fellow member of the Service, is accorded automatic respect because if she didn’t deserve it she presumably wouldn’t be here. It’s never saccharine, is kept from being so by very realistic misunderstandings and frustrations and moments of completely believable idiocy – Nbaro’s included – and of course, there are some characters who are deeply unpleasant, and the mysterious villains somewhere out of sight. This far-future setting is not a utopia, and Cameron is careful to make sure we never forget that.

It’s still a book I’ve come back to over and over because it makes my heart glow.

I’m not the only idiot, Nbaro thought with joy,

And quite a lot of that is definitely down to Nbaro’s growth and/or healing. At the start of the book, she’s desperate and determined, not just to do a great job, but also to overcome her own trauma. And she does blossom, and it’s just WONDERFUL to watch. She constantly calls herself an idiot for messing up something that should be basic or obvious, but she learns from each mistake, and we get to see her run into the same problem or situation again and do better this time. She reminds herself to smile so often that you’ll cheer when she starts to not need the reminder; the same when she manages to turn down sexual advances without wanting to reach for a shiv. Part of her ‘softening’ is a growing appreciation for luxury and things more feminine; one of my favourite scenes in the book is when, on shore-leave, Nbaro has a wonderful day with a group of women merchants who fit her for and sell her some seriously beautiful clothes. The realisation that she’s allowed nice things, that it’s no longer a danger to appear feminine and/or beautiful, that it is okay and safe to be soft when she likes, is the good kind of painful – and I think especially important given the stereotype of the Strong Black Woman, which it would have been so easy for Cameron to fall into when writing this character. Her dedication to the Athens and its crew is impressive and genuinely inspiring; there are moments of extreme danger wherein she is at peace with dying if she can just save her ship, or her friends, or her crew. Seeing her believe in something so passionately and completely, after what she’s been through? It makes you ache.

What has she been through? Cameron never goes into explicit detail, though some of the bare facts come out in Nbaro’s thoughts occasionally; she was definitely beaten, definitely starved, probably raped. But for the most part, Cameron defines the shape of Nbaro’s trauma by the scars it’s left; we’re left to infer most of it from what kind of normal interaction she struggles with, or the reflexive responses she has to certain situations, or the habits she has to work to break now that she’s in a place where they don’t serve her – for example, when she first arrives on the Athens, she eats with her arms wrapped around her meal tray so there’s no way it can be stolen from her, and she asks Thea if they’re allowed more than one serving (which greatly takes Thea aback, because: of course they are). This tells us plenty about what kind of food-related awfulness Nbaro’s been through, without going into a ton of detail about the trauma itself. And I think this was the correct approach, honestly: it would have been far too easy to cross the line into misery-porn if we’d gone into detail on the abuse, and we didn’t need any more information than we got. Writing it like this – showing us the trauma via the scars, leaving the reader to infer so much – is a technique I don’t think I’ve seen before this book, but really hope to see more of in the future. It feels like a very respectful way to portray awfulness, and dodges so many of the difficulties in portraying serious abuse and trauma.

All right, yes, Nbaro is epic, but what about the PLOT? The larger, more cinematic plot – the mystery of who is destroying Greatships, and why, and the danger the Athens and everyone on it is thus in – spools out gradually; only reasonable, on a (space-)voyage set to take about two years. Artifact Space is a wonderfully chonky book – the Gollancz edition is over 500 pages long – and Cameron does an excellent job at balancing the everyday of the Athens with the high-stakes plot. Readers familiar with his Fantasy novels will be familiar with Cameron’s practice of delving deep into the practical munitae of his characters’ jobs, and he does it again here, showing us Nbaro standing watches, flying the smaller spacecraft, transporting cargo, and the like. As with his Fantasy novels, by rights this should be immensely dull, but somehow it never is; instead it’s bizarrely relaxing, and incredibly immersive. Numerous smaller plots break up these not-so-dramatic stretches; intrigue in the ship’s laundry, a mysterious patrician with free access aboard despite not being Service, shore leave on a beautiful planet. And each time the reader begins to relax, something much bigger is sprung on us: someone tries to smuggle a nuke on board, or the Athens is invaded, or someone turns up dead in the depths of the ship. Something of interest is always happening for every one of those 500+ pages; sometimes it’s of interest because you care about these characters and enjoy watching them grow, and sometimes it’s because the tension has you by the throat – but there’s always something! And though the plot of this book feels quite tight and zoomed-in – very much focused on the Athens and its crew – much of what happens to Nbaro and co can be traced back to factions within galactic politics, to intrigue and politicking that has happened and is happening out of sight. It’s clear that there’s a much, much bigger picture here that we’re only glimpsing the outlines of in this book. That’s fine; having read the sequels, I can assure you that we do get the whole picture later on!

I’d love to write something smart about the political structure of this far-future setting, but I don’t think I know enough about political theory to pull it off. I do know that I really, really loved the deeply flawed attempt at a socialist utopia Nbaro lives in (DEEPLY flawed), and the contrast and conflict between it and other powers within human space. It’s difficult not to be wryly amused that the core of a lot of the trouble comes from a planet called New Texas; it’s not surprising, though it is gratifying, that ‘the bad guys’ are more or less conservative capitalists who think workers’ rights are offensive. But in an approach I found interesting, we don’t really get to see the ‘villains’ in this book – partly because they’re working quite hard to stay out of sight, but partly because of the nature of space warfare in this setting.

Something which, amidst all the different attacks on the Athens, the crew basically has to invent. Cameron has an explanation for why humans haven’t really worked out how to go to war in space until now that I don’t have any trouble believing, but with mysterious enemies about the Athens has to come up with ways to defend themselves – and attack, if necessary. The result is unbelievably realistic-feeling space battles, like none I’ve ever read before (though in fairness I should mention I read a lot less Sci Fi than Fantasy!) taking into account details that are obvious once they’re pointed out, but have definitely never occurred to be until now: the distance between ships being measured in light-years, and how that affects different kinds of weaponry; the fact that everything in space is in constant motion; the relative ease of deflecting radar; the presence of radiation in space; the need for spacecraft to refuel on-the-go on long voyages or post-battle. A lot of this makes for very long battles, which Cameron keeps nail-bitingly tense until they explode in immensely satisfying bouts of pew pew. I can’t imagine that anyone looking for space battles is going to be disappointed by these!

But it’s the warmth I mentioned earlier that elevates Artifact Space into something really special. I’ve read this book four times now, and it’s not for the battles; it’s for the inexplicable glow it fills me with. Despite the fighting, the spies, the battles, this is a book I reach for when I’m feeling low; it’s not cosy in any typical sense, but it feels as though it is – without defanging the story of meaningful stakes. Off the top of my head, I can’t name any other author whose books are like this – the only other ones I know are Cameron’s Masters & Mages trilogy.

So if you haven’t read this yet? You should absolutely preorder the Saga Press edition. They’ve done an excellent job with an excellent book – what more can you ask for?

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