Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston, is an interesting book. Its three protagonists are often confused and impatient with each other, and philosophically opposed, but they’ve been thrown together by a surprise interstellar war that threatens to destroy not just their culture(s) but everything that they know, or that can be known by any human or humanity-descended creation. It’s a book full of anxiety, dread, and suspense, but also a thoughtful exploration of war, negotiation, and potential ways of being.
It starts out with Praveenthi ‘Prab’ Saal walking home from a party, stewing over her family’s pressure from afar for her to rejoin the star-spanning online utopia known as the Arcology, but she likes experiencing life in a physical body and working as an Interlocutor (liaison) between the Arcology information space and the self-Excluded on a fringe world. She sees that there’s no traffic, neither physical nor messaging, and becomes aware that her planet has lost its connection to the rest of the universe. Hoping the situation is temporary, she answers an emergency back-to-work summons.
The message turns out to have been sent by an intelligent spaceship, which is a node of the Arcology, which it can no longer reach. Its physical pilot, Kercher, greets her at the dockyard, and together they escape the planet. They find out that the problem is widespread, as a previously unknown armada has come from nowhere and started attacking all of the Arcology. The trio translates across space to seek refuge, information, and allies. Meanwhile, the ship struggles to retain its identity amid a recently downloaded information overload of a vast Arcology archive, and as they all argue, and occasionally fight, about their goals and methods.
They don’t like each other or trust each other, but they do have to work together, or at least learn learn each other’s uses. Kercher has to do some warfighting along with the piloting, and Prab has to learn not only new ways of navigating informational space, but ways to communicate and negotiate with other species and polities (even as her “allies” pursue their own agendas and occasionally undermine hers). All of them have to battle against bouts of despair, as well.
Despite all this, the book does end somewhat hopefully, albeit with reservations. Prab is the character the book spends the most time with, and is the most sympathetic, but the reader also sees some of what’s happening from the perspectives of Kercher and the shipmind, and feels some of their conflicts (including the desires to simply escape into fantasy, or shut down altogether). And they do eventually learn to make accommodations for each other, and with some elements of the wider world.
I think Hotston explores his concept of the Arcology, a vast information space that also contains physical nodes and infrastructure, in a really intriguing way, in part by showing how the Arcology is perceived and handled by completely external entities. Hotston also throws light on some other species and cultures, and the ways they and the Arcology deal with perceived inferiors.
Hotston isn’t an author I’ve run across before, but I see that his other works include a BFS and Subjective Chaos finalist, Entropy of Loss, that I hope to track down and try. Meanwhile, I do recommend Project Hanuman, which is hot off the presses and available now.
Content warnings: War, mass death and destruction, family conflict and trauma, physical violence, forms of undesired assimilation.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this book for review from the publisher.
