I received a free copy from Saga Press via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Publish date June 17th.

I was intrigued by this book's premise of space historians and first contact. In The Folded Sky, archinformist Sunyata Song has been chosen for a mission to study an ancient alien AI orbiting a dying star. But when Sunya arrives, she discovers that not only did her academic rival beat her there, but the station is under threat by pirates, not to mention a mysterious attempted murder...

Almost from the first chapter, I was struck by the rich worldbuilding of The Folded Sky. Ships and habitats are run by complex AIs who are major characters in their own right. A docked clade is a person who's one mind sharing many bodies, and apparently they can get divorced. Sunya has several recorded human minds called ayatanas stored in her brain. Humans have a computer called a fox in their heads and they choose to manually adjust the intensity of their emotions through "rightminding," which is intended to make people less ruled by petty impulse and more prosocial. Although this is apparently the third book of a series, I had no trouble at all following any of the worldbuilding elements or introduced characters. (I assume the books are shared world rather than a tightly linked trilogy, I haven't read the first two myself.)

However, as much as I enjoyed the worldbuilding, the plot was glacially slow. The characters spent a lot of time talking and thinking, and remarkably little pagespace on major plot elements, like the murder investigation or Sunya's research. Sunya herself is inclined to second-guess and ruminate over her thoughts. Part of this is, I think, her culture. Due to rightminding, Sunya has been brought up with a heavy emphasis on regulating emotions and correct thought. Unfortunately, Sunya's self-consciousness tends to make the interpersonal dynamics, for a lack of a better word, heavily therapized. There's a heavy focus on analyzing what other characters might be thinking in order to say the most politely correct thing possible. The one partial exception is Sunya's tempestuous relationship with her nemesis and toxic ex, Victorya. (Although heads up that it's not a romantic relationship, as Sunya's happily married.)

What a fantastic premise, but I found the execution rather lacking, particularly the slow pace. If you enjoyed Ada Hoffman or Skrutskie's The Salvation Gambit, you might enjoy this book regardless of its issues.

Very different, not related at all to other books. A little too PC/touchy feely for my taste. Liked the first 2, not sure if I read the next.

The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear is White Space #3, following Ancestral Night and Machine, both of which I have previously read. The series shares world-building, but is not strictly sequential.

The cultural and technological milieu of book 3 is similar to the earlier ones in the series – relics of prior Koregoi civilization, pan-species cooperation among alien beings, brain-implanted foxes and ayatanas, time measured in dias (days) and ans (years), AI shipminds, clade persons, and rightminding. The gobbledygook physics borrows current vocabulary – the sort of thing I expect from fantasy writers working in science fiction, such as benevolent shadow-beings made of dark matter, and extravagant extrapolation of particle entanglement. The descriptions of Dr. Sunyata Song’s work – “archinformation” seems to be straight-forward pattern detection. All of the information from the ancient Baomind arrives serialized as Baosong, and Sunya writes parsers. But the really challenging part of understanding alien language should be context and semantics rather than syntax. Her ayatanas provide that somehow.

“Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to vanish without a trace. It wants to slurp down the drain like soapy water planetside, a slick Coriolis whirl and then – gone. Vamoosed. Kaput. Books crumble, digital media degrade. Evern holographic storage crystals grow lossy over time. As the universe expands, every cubic meter holds a little less information than it did the instant before. The sun’s rim dips. The stars rush out. At one stride comes the dark. Entropy requires no maintenance. Order and intelligibility do.”

Characters are a more important factor in this writing than the speculative science. There is a passive-aggressive first-person narrator, Dr. Sunyata Song, who uses her fox to rightmind her emotions and mitigate her personality traits. I find rightminding to be the most interesting and perplexing concept in the White Space books. It already requires a high level of self-awareness to know when rightminding is called for. With rightminding by outside intervention, from a shipmind AI for instance, what is left of free will? I feel the concept could easily go dystopian. But in this third novel, rightminding is used almost exclusively for interception of emotional reactions, so as to allow more considered decisions or action. At any rate, Sunya’s character evolves towards physical action when her children are threatened.

The main concern of the writing in this novel is Sunya’s relationships. Most important is her relationship with her sulky teenaged daughter. Most of the growth is on the part of daughter Luna, while Sunya’s rightminding allows her to not react disastrously to Luna’s provocations. Sunya’s relationship with her ex-lover and academic rival Vickee DeVine takes up way too much space, and doesn’t really go anywhere except as a recurring need for Sunya to rightmind herself. Finally, Sunya’s wife Salvie is a Mary Sue; a tirelessly saccharine alien warrior-wife and mother to their children. There are men in this world, but almost all of them are bad guys or pirates. Even the closer ones are described superficially, with no interior personality. I’m aware that superficial treatment of women was common in golden age SF; it was a failing of the genre in those times. Contemporary reversal is also.

There are multiple waves of female kickass action in space and within the ships and stations, with good attention to gravitation (or lack thereof), radiation, and visual display. I expect that aspect of the novel to be quite popular, but my primary interest is in conceptualization and world-building. This setting and plot further develops Bear’s White Space.

I read an Advance Review Copy of The Folded Sky in an ebook format, which I received from Saga Press through netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review on social media platforms and on my book review blog. This new title is scheduled for release on 17 June 2025.

The setup is fascinating—ancient AI, deep-space archaeology, and an isolated research station under siege—but the execution felt a little underwhelming. While Sunya’s perspective was engaging and the worldbuilding had potential, the pacing dragged at times, and some character decisions felt frustratingly contrived. The stakes were high, but the sense of wonder didn’t quite land the way it should have.

Interesting job. Great plot and backstory. Filled with great characters. Does stand alone. Must read for SciFi fans

I enjoyed this third White Space book and found it brisk and readable but ultimately not memorable. The characterization of the viewpoint character is good and there is sufficient creativity to the environment to create a sense of the alien and the possibilities of the future. I found the piracy and murder themes to be interesting but not wildly believable. I also thought certain plot developments - the attempted murder, for example - pop up without sufficient development or sense of “wow.” In fact, given the local setting - a sentient astronomical sized object circling a dying star - and the overall post-scarcity future, the book lacked the sense of wonder I craved. I like Bear as an author and would read her next book without question but this didn’t feel like her best effort.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free ARC in exchange for a review.

This felt like the final book within the White Space series (a loosely connected series about individuals suffering from certain ailments facing incredible odds) and I felt like the book lacked something in its core. The characters were fine and the revelation of betrayal was well done but many of the other decisions by these supposedly smart characters left me surprised. There was also a little bit of hand waviness and plot armor that took away from my enjoyment of the book.