Fiction Reviews
The Last Gifts of the Universe
(2022/2024) Riley August, Del Rey, £14.99, hrdbk, 195pp, ISBN 978-1-529-93489-2
This book was originally self-published in 2022 and won the Self Published Science-Fiction Competition in 2023. It has subsequently (2024) been published by Del Rey. The page count is somewhat lower than many books today, mostly because it gets on with telling the story rather than keeping the front and rear covers well apart. I found it an easy and pleasant read.
Mankind has travelled out amongst the stars and discovered many civilisations, or at least the remains of them. In all cases, all that is left is once-inhabited planets now devoid of any sign of life. There are remains of buildings though they have usually collapsed, if only partly, long ago. It appears that their endings were always sudden thought there are no signs of bodies, or anything that might once have been a body. All traces of life have been eradicated, even down to microscopic life in the soil. The planets are usually left a uniform grey and it proves impossible to reintroduce any form of life as nothing will grow, even though mankind is well experienced in terraforming planets. It seems that mankind might be the last civilisation left - and it needs to find out what happened if it is to avoid the same fate.
On board the space-faring vessel Waning Crescent are brothers Scout and Kieran, along with their cat Pumpkin (who has his own spacesuit!). Their mother died not long ago; she was an Archivist and, in her memory, they are following in her footsteps, searching planetary systems for the remains of civilisations. Archivists hope that their studies of these dead civilisations will teach them something of those cultures but especially they are looking for data caches and any technology that humans can adopt and take advantage of. They are currently in orbit round planet 357 (which they later learn was called Panev) in the Beta Creon system of the Greerant Cluster and the sensors have located a cache. Hopefully they will be able to retrieve it, then read and translate it, though so often such caches have degraded too far and reveal little more than data errors.
Descending to the planet, their biggest fear is Remnants; nobody knows what they are but they seem to have been left behind by whatever it is that has destroyed the civilisations. They are powerful, impossible to destroy, and very few Archivists have ever survived an encounter with one. What they do not expect to find is a couple of operatives from the Verity Co., a powerful, money-grabbing, major company who also scour dead civilisations, but in their case to see what they can grab, patent, and make money out of. Although Scout and Kieran succeed in releasing the data cache from deep within the ruins of the building it was buried in, it is the gun-toting operatives who grab it from them and then disappear.
Fortunately, they had been taking a copy whilst trying to free the cache and so have much of its information. They play back a holographic recording made by Organiser President Blyreena Eskstafor of the Stelhari people in which she explains to those-who-may-find-it that they are aware of their oncoming fate and it is from something they call the Endri. This the first evidence that any of the lost civilisations knew what was happening. The Stelhari have data on the Endri and hope that this might reveal a defence (though clearly it did not do so in time to save them). Suddenly the game has got serious - Scout and Kieran must scour the other planets of the Stelhari people and hope that they can find the salvation of mankind - but they will have to outsmart the operatives from Verity Co., or at least get them onside to save humanity ahead of mere commercial profit. And that is the main part of the story - the chase for the information and the ongoing confrontations with the operatives.
Ultimately the story is about relationships, including those between the two brothers and their mother as well as those within the Stelhari people. There is no great reveal at the end and they do not get to save the universe (that is for later folks to do), but they do learn more about each other and what matters in life.
The story ticks along nicely though rarely with great excitement, much of it being set onboard their ship as they deal with the day-to-day life of being Archivists. The rest is set on the various planets they visit and their confrontations with the operatives, and these become almost routine as they work their way towards an understanding. This is not the stuff of great science fiction but it is written well enough and the pages turned easily.
Peter Tyers
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