I know that Kameron Hurley is among a new wave of writers much-lauded for originality and story-telling prowess. I've only read two books by Hurley before this, with mixed reactions to both.

Here, somewhere in deep space exist a series of world-ships that have been at war with one another for hundreds of years. From the war(s) and basic neglect, the world-ships are decaying and soon to be at a point of no return if something isn't done about it, but most are too busy fighting to give the worlds themselves much thought.

Anat, the leader of one war-torn ship, and a feared fighter, wants peace and so she offers her daughter in marriage to a rival. That daughter, Jayd, is also a feared fighter and had hoped to lead the armies in her mother's name to victory. Now she'll be a consort to the enemy. And so Jayd pins her hopes on her sister, Zan (a pacifist), to lead the world's best fighters to victory.

The opening sentence... then the opening paragraph ... then the opening chapter, took my breath away.

Hurley drops us into the action, leaving us to figure out what's happening while we're on a wild ride. These warriors appear to come back to life after dying in fierce battles, though their memory of events prior are often lost and slow to recover and it is up to those around them to usher them back into their old lives.

Aside from giving us an exciting ride the moment we open the pages, Hurley provides us with a glimpse of the world-building that she's creating here and we immediately know that the rules are different here. It's a brilliant set-up and Hurley does this as well as anyone in the business.

The book is told from different points of view. Sometimes Zan and sometimes Jayd. This is not a device that I enjoy, and it is made a little more challenging here because the chapters don't alternate on a regular interval.

While Hurley is really spectacular at getting our attention and bringing us into her very unique world in the early goings of the book, I find that she often lets me down in the middle portions. I get bored and tend to feel I am getting a great deal of repeat story. I stopped caring about Zan and Jayd for a bit but then got back into it as we neared the end. This is not unique to this book as I've felt this way with other Hurley novels as well.

Looking for a good book? The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley shows us why Hurley is an exciting fantasy author, but the story does drag for a bit in the middle.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Hurley is an amazingly inventive author; there's no doubt about that. Each of the worlds she creates is full of fascinating detail: in this book, it's the living worlds and all their layers, the different environments that Zan travels through in the course of the book, the living or semi-living technology they use. The details are, well, visceral -- which is a bad match for the squeamish. Surprise! That includes me. The sensory aspects of this book just had me constantly wincing, not wanting to even try imagining them.

It doesn't help for me that the characters are not entirely likeable, and their endgame is necessarily a secret from Zan (which leaves the reader figuring things out at the same pace). Terrible actions for a goal I can support, I can get past -- when characters just do terrible things and interact with terrible people and I'm not sure if the goal is worth it, even to them... Well, it's difficult for me.

I think Hurley is a great writer with a lot of intriguing ideas, but I prefer her non-fiction essays and commentaries. It's not her, it's me.

If you know Kameron Hurley's work, you know you're going to get an intensely visceral experience, with plenty of slime. 'The Stars are Legion' delivers as expected. The whole book is filled with yucky-but-imaginative and fascinating details, and it's worth reading just for that.

However, I did have issues with both the plot and the pacing of the novel. It's an amnesia story: Zan comes to consciousness in the middle of a war; smack in the middle of a vicious ruling family, dependent on what they tell her about who she is, and what her goals are. She's suspicious- but she seems to be in love with Jayd, who woke her - and that makes her vulnerable.

She's on (aboard?) one world of the Legion, a swarm of organic planet-ships, which are in various states of decline and decay. Her(?) world is headed by a ruler who's desperate to take over another, called the Mokshi. And for some reason, everyone seems to be depending on Zan to lead the armada to do the job. Can she? If so, why? Moreover - should she? One thing is for sure: no one here is trustworthy, and everyone has their own agenda.

The plot starts out with space battles galore, but then Zan plummets into the depths of the world, which apparently has many onion-like layers. Those who live within know even less about the outside than the top-dwellers know about the underground. Once down there, the book shifts into a 'wandering-quest'-type format, strongly reminiscent of a lot of Golden-Age "weird planet" type sci-fi. Zan meets strange people and sees odd things, and tries to get back to the surface. And this went on for quite a long time. I have to admit that I wasn't that thrilled with all the wandering, or with the amnesia device.

It's still good - but I didn't like it as much as several of Hurley's other writings - for example, 'The Plague Givers,' which was on my Hugo Nominations list this year.

Many thanks to Angry Robot and NetGalley for the opportunity to read. As always, my opinions are unaffected by the source of the book.

Stop reading my or anyone else's opinions about this book. Just buy it and you'll be amazed at what you find. Think there's nothing that could make you gasp aloud and think 'This is so cool'? Read THE STARS ARE LEGION.

Thank me later.

Hurley, go isolate yourself somewhere and write fifty books - I'll wait.

I'm a longtime fan of Kameron Hurley, and to say that I was pretty excited about her writing a space opera was an understatement. I adore good space opera (and honestly, a lot of fairly ordinary stuff too - give me spaceships and explosions and I'm happy). Hurley has talked online about the fact that The Stars are Legion contains a purely female cast (and if you haven't seen the Lesbians in Space cover, go and find it now) and I was intrigued as to how she was going to utilise this.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it was not this book. I don't even want to describe anything about the actual wordbuilding because it is so damn amazing. The Legion is utterly unlike anything I've ever read before (and made me wonder, sometimes, what the inside of Hurley's mind looks like).

An interesting thing while reading - I found myself occasionally slipping into thinking of some characters (and creatures that we come across while reading) as male, even though we're told clearly that they're all female. Coming up against this was interesting, since it reflects so much of what I've come to expect as a reader from all of the books and media I've consumed.

There are several scenes from this book that are going to stick with me for a long time (Without spoiling, I'm just going to say the cog, and recycling - if you've read the book you'll know what I mean). The only thing that didn't quite work for me was that I felt that the very ending of the book could have been fleshed out (ha) a little more - after some of the amazing journey we're taken on with the main characters, everything kind of finished up quite rapidly.

With this book, Hurley cements herself as one of our foremost writers of innovative science fiction. It's immediately become one of my favourites of the last few years.

I really enjoyed this one, althought there are some aspects that I didn't like. The aspects that have not convinced me of the novel are very personal, and therefore I recommend you reading it without doubts, for its originality, for the spectacular world-building, and for the display of imagination.

Review in english: http://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-stars-are-legion-kameon-hurley.html
Reseña en castellano: http://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-stars-are-legion-kameron-hurley.html

I think The Stars are Legion is going to be a very polarizing book. It was one of my most anticipated releases of 2016 but then it was pushed back to 2017 and because of the wait, I think I might have expected too much of this book. I personally have extremely mixed thoughts on this novel, I mean, some aspects are frankly brilliant but in other areas, this book is lacking some precious elements.

This is a hard book to summarize because when it opens, it follows Zayn, a character who has lost her memories and no one wants to explain what happened to her and who she is, even the ones that claim to be her family won't answer her questions. Because of that, during the first part of the book, Zayn is very confused and since we are almost only reading from her perspective at the beginning, it's very hard to understand what's going on. Indeed, when Zay wakes, the only thing that she's told is that she has to conquer a planet called Mokshi that basically managed to escape the laws of physics. This planet has stop orbiting around the sun and can fly anywhere in the galaxy and this is disturbing the fragile balance of the Legion, th alliance of planets where humans can live. Zayn doesn't know why she's the only person who can access this planet, but everyone but her die when they are near this planet and it makes her the only person who can save the Legion.

The first third of the book was very confusing to me because Hurley was holding back on a ton of information that were vital to the comprehension of the story. The characters were always repeating the same info over and over and we didn't have any access to new things that could have allowed us to understand what was going on. I personally don't like when authors do that because it's hard to get a grasp on the story, it feels like the author doesn't want you to know too much because it could ruin the surprise.

However, after the first third, some things were revealed and it made the reading way more interesting because suddendly, we could kind of understand how the world worked and how it influenced the story and the characters.

I had some issues with the plot which was for me overly complicated, indeed I found the story to be pretty straightforward and simple, if I had to synopsize the entire thing, it would be very short. However, the structure of the book turned a simple story in a way too complicated thing and I don't really get why. In my opinion, this story would have worked better as a novella, it would have solved the problems I had with the pacing and the structure of the novel.

However, I have to say that some things were done really well in this book. First of all, my favorite thing about the book was the worldbuilding. The world Hurley created in The Stars are Legion is very original and inventive and it was fascinating to see how it worked. Indeed, all the planets are alive, they are organic living things which means that they can have diseases and that the humans living on them are tools for their survival. The Stars are Legion is book where all the characters are female and where sex and reproduction are two very different things. All the women living on the organic planets keep on getting pregnant and giving birth to things useful to the world they live on and giving birth to actual humans is a very rare and precious gift. This aspect was very unique, it was a fascinating experience to imagine humans living inside another organism made from the same matter as them. In one scene, Zayn repairs an organic vehicule using the guts of a dead woman ( this book doesn't hold back on how bloody it is so if you don't have a strong stomach, I won't recommend this one to you) and I found this aspect very interesting, this idea that planets are like bodies and that all its components are just cells that allows the whole thing to work.



So, even if my opinions are mixed, I would recommend this book if only for the characters, the worldbuilding and all the interesting things Hurley has to say about gender, love and betrayal.

There are a couple science fiction writers out there that reviewers and fans liked to call "the New Weird" in the nineties and early 2000s. Though that term's fallen out of use, author Kameron Hurley is a surefire fit into that niche with her new nonfantasy novel due to come out in early February. The Stars Are Legion is a book that's wildly creative, completely unique, and unarguably very, very weird in a genre often known for just those attributes. There are a lot of cool, fun, or just plain odd ideas permeating every layer and culture of this totally, 100% all-female space opera, and while some of those new concepts are better explained and thus easier to grasp than others, it's a pretty well envisioned and developed universe.

The depth of the world and its many unique cultures is impressive, especially considering that The Stars Are Legion is a standalone effort. Hurley builds her universe and its imperiled tentacled worlds (see? Already weird) with both intricacy and inventiveness; she uses the entire four hundred available pages to expand and show the imagination and originality behind Zan and Jayd's world and their own entangled history. There's a lot of background information that helps to illustrate how everything functions or how the families operate in this mad universe, but some of the story's finer points can have clarity issues during the big scenes. And honestly, some of the novel is just so weirdly described it's hard to wrap your head around it, (The whole... women giving birth to whatever part [???] the ship needs? ARE THE SHIPS ALIVE? What's the substance covering the metal? I still have so many questions....) even for readers with a very agile suspension of disbelief.

The secret at the heart of Zan and Jay'd intertwined tale is intricate and hard to predict; it also provides most of the motivation for both of the POV characters. I loved the unforeseeable nature of how their plot developed, though it hinged on one of my least favorite plot points: characters acting secretively about pivotal information because it's "better" for the main character to not know. I will say despite that, Hurley pulls that narrative angle off rather well. She keeps her characters complicated enough to compel interest; there's more to all of these women, even the antagonists, than what is immediately seen. Zan may not know her own history to start and everyone else is keeping their secrets, but the action and mystery keep the plot moving, as does Zan's own irrepressible drive to figure out the truth for herself.

The lingering questions left by the novel's end are small issues by themselves, but there are a few too many to not mention. The sheer amount of creativity and imagination at work is obvious and two of the best elements about The Stars Are Legion, but the lack of clarity or explanation does detract from the novel's overall appeal. The adventure level is high (Space battles! Planetary exploration! Trash monsters!) but the pacing is a bit uneven -- Zan's plotline just after about midway stalls for several chapters. Some of Jayd's storyline is redundant and unnecessarily drawn out. Still, these are small issues in the face of so much more awesome (did I say there's no men? None. Zero. Not. Even. An. Offhand. Mention.) A unique and strange, fun book, I can say that The Stars Are Legion is definitely one I won't forget.

Kameron Hurley has become one of my favorite authors, mostly because of her ability to take impossibly weird settings and situations, and make me wish I could live them myself.

Her talent has become more refined, her characters have become more fierce, and with this story, she's mastered the very essense of organic.

A powerful and riveting tale of war and intrigue. Hurley is a master at building tension and suspense within an enthralling universe riddled with characters we love. Simple put, this book is outstanding.

Zan wakes up injured and with amnesia. She does not know who or where she is. The world to her, and to us, seems to be half mad. We are swept along with Zan and told as little as she is as she tries to piece together who she is.

Zan is on one of many worlds / spaceships that are actually living creatures. The walls and the floors are spongy, and they move between levels by using the umbilical cord. They have to cut open the skin to get outside! The further into the middle you go the more visceral and sticky the world gets.

These worlds, collectively known as the Legion, are stuck in their orbit around the false sun. They are slowly dying. Cancer eats away at them, and with each new generation the inhabitants are losing their knowledge on what they are and where they came from. They can barely control them and don't know what half the equipment on them does.

The different worlds are in conflict with each other, fighting for resources, each of them salvaging what they can to heal their own worlds at the expense of the others.

One world, the Mokshi, has managed to leave it's orbit and now everyone wants to board it and control it, to find out how it does it and hopefully create a new future for themselves.

The world building here is impressive and original. It reminds me of Iain M Banks space opera stories in its scope. Hurley creates the same sort of atmosphere and strangeness in her unique universe.

The characters are interesting if not always likeable, with realistic emotions and believable actions. Zan travels to the centre of the world and the people she picks up along the way are from different cultures with different life experiences, and each has their own distinct personality.

In the middle of the book, when Zan reaches the centre of the world it suddenly becomes a blend of sci-fi / horror, before bringing in elements of fantasy. I thought this was very well done, it didn't feel out of place to me. I loved the sci-fi side, and the space battles, but this journey through the centre of the world was my favourite part of the book. Hurley's imagination ran wild here, and there are some very inventive ideas as we learn more about what the world is and the different social and cultural groups in it.

As Zan struggles through the world trying to make sense of it and piece herself back together Hurley doesn't shy away from showing us the darker side of humanity. There is love in this world, but also betrayal, fear, cowardice and prejudice as we see the things people are capable of doing to others and to themselves to get what they want.

There is a hopeless feel at times, the world is dying, the leaders rule by fear, and even if Zan gets back her memory where can she go from there? But just as it starts getting overwhelming for me Hurley shakes it all up again and reminds us there are good things in people too, when they are given the chance to show them.

There are answers given eventually, but not all of them are concrete ones. Some things are hinted at but left for you to fill in the gaps yourself. It might be very confusing at first but stick with it because Hurley's world is worth the effort of getting to know!

I received a free copy from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The Stars Are Legion was my first book by Kameron Hurley and it definitely won’t be the last. Quite the opposite, I now want to devour every single book of hers, preferably all at once.

This book is like nothing I’ve read before and I had a lot of fun reading something as unique as this. The Stars Are Legion might as well be titled Lesbians in Space and even that doesn’t cover how truly epic it is: men don’t exist in this world (don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against men in books but it’s SO DAMN refreshing to have an all female cast). And if you wonder how this could be possible, they need to have babies after all, let me tell you, you are in for a ride. Pregnancy without men is just one of many reasons why this book deserves the gold metal of WEIRD (and I mean that in the best possible way. 100% my kind of weird).

That’s not all that makes this a great book though (but let’s be real, that alone would make it a damn good book). THERE IS MORE. One of my favorite things in books is having an unreliable narrator and tha’ts what you get. At first it might seem like it’s taking the usual, often-read memory loss route, but The Stars Are Legion takes this scenario and turns it into something… more. The main character doesn’t just suffer from memory loss but people around her purposefully keep secrets from her. Secrets are being kept for good reasons which makes the whole situation very addictive instead of annoying like it often is in other cases. It also helps to have more than one POV character and hints that give the reader ideas of what’s going on.
On top of that it made for a good way to introduce the world building. It seems like a hard balancing act to explain the world while at the same time keeping many details from the main character. On me it had the effect that it was easier to get behind the world building (which seemed quite complex and as I said before, WEIRD), and it also kept me hooked and unable to stop reading because I wanted to know more and find out what’s going on.

As for the characters: from what I’ve heard Hurley keeps true to her signature and created once again a cast of characters which many would probably label unlikeable. I absolutely loved how cruel and monstrous all these ladies are and how you can trust absolutely no one.
I got to admit that this meant it took me quite same time to start really caring about the characters, but once I did, I HAD FEELS. By the last third of the book I was so attached to some of the characters that I know I would rate this book even higher on rereading.

Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion is a space opera like never seen before, putting weird on a whole new level, and featuring a fantastic cast of brutal, amazing women.

The Stars Are Legion is a standalone science fiction novel by Kameron Hurley. I’ve recently enjoyed Hurley’s “Mirror Empire” series, and thought her “God’s War” sci-fi series was innovative and deserved more attention – so I was quite excited to see what this one was all about before I turned the first page.

Hurley brings us a universe of craft which are also worlds. They orbit each other in an enormous swarm, sitting around an energetic star. These world-ships though, seem organic – if they do not live and breathe in the same way as the people inside them, still, they persist. There’s a sense of a larger entity, which is aware of the people within it purely as part of the systems which sustain it. But it’s the sense of the organism, and the feeling of its decline, which sparkles rancidly on the page. If a world can live, it can also die. Systems fail or go into systemic decline. Shielding withers slowly away. The population forgets who and what they are, slowly falling into micro-societies which rarely look anywhere but at themselves. The world-craft have a sense of morbidity, a slowly dripping decay which can be read between every line – and the societies it builds reflect that. They’re insular, some are prone to violence, others simply taken in strange directions.

There is, literally, a world on display here, and that its internal social structure (and external wrapping) resembles a Hieronymous Bosch painting is daring and disturbing in equal measure. There’s something of Giger floating about as well – with individuals birthing components required by the ship, with no choice as to what, when and why. In some cases, the results of this process aren’t even required. In moving the typically mechanical into the realm of the organic, there’s space to have a discussion about what exactly defines humanity, and quite what people will do, for themselves and to or with others. That these fecund, terrifying environs are accepted by those within them as mundane simply highlights their strangeness from a reader perspective – and from that perspective, Hurley has brought out something strange, new, and more than a little horrifying.

It may be unclear, but I found myself alternately repulsed and intrigued whilst turning pages, from visceral reaction to further thought, and back again – and the narrative evokes those feelings skilfully, whilst investing you in the journey of the characters within this unusual space.

There’s more here that would stand further analysis – about the self-sustaining nature of worlds within the swarm, and what the failure of that nature suggests, or about the presence of metal beneath layers of organism, for example – but suffice to say that as a setting, this feels vivid, quite real, and shockingly imaginative.

The characters are, well, different. Victims of circumstance and necessity. Zan is perhaps the most immediate, and the most opaque; she is a woman without a memory, a woman without a past. Or at least not a past she can recall. Her struggles to orient herself in an environment as strange as a world-ship provide opportunities for both sympathy and admiration. Here is an individual who has been mentally broken – but she fights. She fights for every piece of understanding she can muster, dragging truth and lies from those around her, and, if need be, creating her own. In a sense, she creates her own persona – beginning as a tabula rasa, Zan has the chance to decide for herself who she is and what she will be, drawing from the immediate world, and the aspects of the past she can gather from an entire host of unreliable narrators. I’m not sure if she seemed to have the moral certainty to call herself a hero; on the other hand, she certainly has the courage expected of one. There’s strength here, a dogged stubbornness and willingness to struggle, which left me cheering her on, even when her choices or the promises of her past seemed particularly haunting.

Zan’s assisted in her journeys, physical and mental, by a relatively small but rich supporting cast. They’ve all got their own problems – from prejudice and cowardice, to physical mutations. Because, rather than in spite of those issues, they seem to look out from the narrative, inviting the reader to consider themselves inside this collective of hurt looking for their mettle. If the world is broken, then so are those within it – some committing atrocities because they think it’s the right thing to do, and others living with the consequences. This is a realm of broken monsters. That said, there’s not much sense of the victim here – whilst some individuals are constrained, they all have a sense of agency, of purpose – a feeling of lives interrupted and brought into focus by the narrative. Whilst some evoke more sympathy than others, each of them feels like they have more than the sides they show the camera. As a result, the underlying cross-currents that come as a consequence of well-drawn, well-developed characters make the whole a gripping, punishing, enchanting read.

With a plot that begins in the unknown, I’m reluctant to get into too much detail, so as to avoid spoilers. Suffice to say, Zan has some interest in finding out who she is – and who she was. At the same time, there are agenda at play, as those around her are looking for their own leverage, to enact their own changes. Some of those changes are more atrocious than others. In the interim, there’s gunfire, different but utterly convincing space battles, and rather a lot of intrigue. It all adds up to a book I had great difficulty putting down, even after I’d finished reading it. The Stars Are Legion is weird, strange, and horrifyingly wondrous. It asks a lot of big questions, and lets us try and find our own answers. Read this one – it’s smart, innovative and compelling in equal measure

Zan wakes up on the world-ship Katazyrna with no memory of who she is or how she got there. The mysterious Jayd takes charge of her recovery from her battle wounds, but won't tell her much about her past.

Sabita tells her not to trust Jayd, but Zan's instincts tell her Jayd is someone she loves very much.

She finds out her memory was lost on a raid of the world-ship Mokshi, where she boarded the Mokshi only to be ejected with no memory. It's happened countless times--the Mokshi has the capability to save the dying Katazyrna, and she needs to take it. Every time she's tried, if the Katazyrna enemies don't stop her or the Mokshi's defenses don't repel her, the Mokshi simply spits her back out.

Jayd tells Zan that the only way to retrieve her memory is to take the Mokshi. Zan will remember who she is, even if it kills her.

Hurley has written a fascinating book documenting a journey through living ship-worlds, mirroring an internal journey of the mind to a literal internal journey of our intrepid band of characters through the insides of a living ship. It's interesting, clever, and something very different from what I've seen lately.

The world building is detailed, vast and strange, populated by characters who are far from perfect--but we care about them all the same.

Great book, and something I expect to see on several recommendation lists this year.