The first book of this trilogy sat on my Unread Shelf for way too long, mostly because I knew it was book one of a trilogy and if I read it and liked it I was locking myself into the next two books. And, well, yeah, in accordance with prophecy, I ordered The Fractured Dark and The Bound Worlds within the first couple hundred pages of The Blighted Stars, and … well, yeah. This is real good stuff.

The Blighted Stars starts off as a combination of a corporate espionage book (it’s one of those worlds where five big ultra corps control basically everything, and the leaders of those corporations are basically royalty) and an eco-disaster book. The Mercator corporation holds a monopoly on mining a material called relkatite, which is more or less completely essential to human civilization; it powers starship drives, for one thing, and it’s essential in printing human bodies as well.

… yeah, roll with that for a minute, I’ll come back around, I promise.

The two main characters are Tarquin Mercator, the scion of the family, who would prefer to not actually have anything to do with the family business and just study geology for a living, and Executor Naira Sharp, a monstrous badass who acts as a personal bodyguard, more or less, to Tarquin’s father. She’s also a revolutionary who wants to tear down the entire system from the inside. The Mercators are battling a major problem on their mining planets; a fungus that they’re calling the Shroud has begun appearing anywhere relkatite is mined, and it’s been overwhelming entire planets, rendering them more or less biologically sterile and preventing further mining from taking place. There are not many planets where humanity is actually able to live and thrive (the Earth has been rendered inhabitable a long time ago by the start of the series) and so the Shroud’s spread poses a genuine threat to the further existence of humanity.

That’s where it starts. It gets really fucking wild after a while, trust me.

For me, though, the most interesting thing about the series is the whole “human printing” thing. Basically nobody is in the body they are born in; if I understand the process correctly, once a kid comes of age they can be reprinted into new bodies that are more to their tastes, and people back up their own minds with some regularity, so that if they die the body they get reprinted into will have memories that are as close to “up to date” as possible. This isn’t necessarily unlimited; for one, it’s quite expensive, and especially traumatic deaths (or too many of them) can lead to a psyche being “cracked,” which basically drives the person irretrievably insane. The same will happen if someone is accidentally (or deliberately, as it turns out) double-printed, so that their mind is in more than one body at the same time. The fact that a cracked mind cannot simply be restored from a backup sounded like a weird sort of cop-out at first and ended up being really important later on.

The thing I like the most about this plot device is that O’Keefe really appears to have carefully though through its implications on society, to the point where I spent the whole first book trying to poke holes in this idea and make it retroactively dumb and every time I came up with something she’d anticipated it and dealt with it. Society is completely queernormative, for one thing; when you can simply reprint yourself into another body any time you want it’s hard to be against trans or gay people, and it’s heavily hinted that Tarquin was not born into a male body. There are a couple of prominent gay married couples as side characters as well.

The second thing, and I suspect some people might really be bothered by this, is the wide acceptance of suicide. Because you’re not really killing yourself; you’re just killing that print (the word “print” is used much more often than “body,” if not, possibly, every time) and you’ll be back soon anyway. In fact, a quick and clean suicide is a much better idea than several other ways you could be killed, because remember, really traumatic or messy deaths can lead to cracking. I feel like slitting my own throat might be kind of difficult, but it happens repeatedly across these books.

This blasé attitude toward death extends to murder as well, which is probably still illegal but not as much? This is probably a bigger deal for the poor, who can’t afford what are called “phoenix fees” to reprint, but all of the book’s main characters effectively have access to infinite money and so the characters kill each other with astonishing regularity. There is at least one point in the book where a character gets killed at the end of one chapter and then is the POV character of the next chapter after being reprinted in between the chapters.

My two biggest critiques of the series are both connected to reprinting. One, shit can get really confusing when a character dying does not have any actual impact on whether that character continues to show up or not. There are also occasional jumps forward or back in the timeline– not a ton of them, but they happen– and when you aren’t the world’s most careful reader (ahem) there can be a lot of rereading happening because something confusing has happened and you’re not sure if you missed a detail or not.

Second– and literally as I’m typing this I’m realizing what the answer is, but I’m going to do it anyway– is the notion that reprints are literally being loaded back into bodies from a “map,” which is their word for a personality download or backup, and maps can be altered through various nefarious means, but no one is against this whole idea, which I would think would be a thing. It’s the Star Trek problem– is the transporter really moving you from one place to another, or just killing you at location A and reconstructing you at location B? Personally, I’ve always been of the “killed then rebuilt” school, but people in this world really just treat reprinting as an inconvenience that might cost them some memories– and that’s occasionally even used strategically from time to time.

(The book does answer this, but kind of obliquely, to the point where I really did just realize what was going on, and I think they’re just relying on the tech having been around for so long that nobody thinks in these terms any longer, much like by the time Star Trek: The Next Generation rolls around absolutely no one is fighting against using transporters.)

I really enjoyed this series, and Megan O’Keefe has been around for a while, so there’s a bunch more where this came from, although these are currently the only books in this series. Strong recommend, especially if you’re in the mood for some complex, twisty sci-fi.