The Stars Are Legion

The Stars Are Legion, Kameron Hurley. This book was brutal and gory and I loved it. Really excellent use of the amnesia trope (sidebar: Nnedi Okorafor was just talking on twitter about how much she hates the concept of "tropes", as applied to stories, which I found fascinating, since I would guess that "trope" associates with positive reviews in my own reviewing! and also why would you hamstring yourself from this handy term of analysis? she didn't really explain) to drop you right into a court-intrigue warring-families plot and world exploration. Hurley is doing interesting stuff with quest tropes (now I'm self-conscious of every time I say trope) and maybe even game tropes (TROPES) in this amazing generation-ship setting as designed by, like, H.R. Giger, pulling off this masterfully balanced writing where there are sometimes things that would be massively body-horrific to us that aren't necessarily to the POV character, and it's really clearly conveyed how much things bother her vs us? Oh, and in this universe everyone's female, not as in gender - there is no gender, there is only one gender, all the pronouns are "she" - but as in uteruses. (Which I know are not always female in our own gendered world.) Lots of both pregnancy horror and pregnancy power here. Recommended to fans of Octavia Butler, "The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe", or Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" series.