3.6/5
When Hwa Young's home is destroyed and her family is on the run from enemy forces, she faces an impossible choice. Stay with her family and likely perish or be adopted by a new family connected to the Empire, which is enforcing conformity across the galaxy. She chooses her own survival.
Several years later, Hwa is a talented lancer pilot, manning a mecha robot on missions to planets under the Empire's control, when she discovers the next mission is to destroy her home planet where her mother is still alive.
‘I love Yoon’s work! Solidly and satisfyingly full of battles and political intrigue, in a beautifully built far-future that manages to be human and alien at the same time.’ -- Ann Leckie
‘Beautiful, brutal and full of the kind of off-hand inventiveness that the best SF trades in... an effortlessly accomplished SF novel.’ -- Alastair Reynolds
‘Starship Troopers meets Apocalypse Now -- and they’ve put Kurtz in charge... Mind-blistering military space opera, but with a density of ideas and strangeness that recalls the works of Hannu Rajaniemi, even Cordwainer Smith.’ -- Stephen Baxter
‘A dizzying composite of military space opera and sheer poetry. Every word, name and concept in Lee’s unique world is imbued with a sense of wonder.’ -- Hannu Rajaniemi
‘Yoon Ha Lee sits next to Ann Leckie atop the podium for thoughtful, intricate, and completely human science fiction.’ -- Tor.com
‘The story is dense, the pace intense... Readers willing to invest in a steep learning curve will be rewarded with a tight-woven, complicated but not convoluted, breathtakingly original space opera.’ -- N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times