A cozy debut science fiction novel by National Book Award–winning writer William Alexander, this story of found family follows a planetary courier training adolescent androids in a solar system grappling with interplanetary conflict after a devastating explosion on Earth’s moon.
Captain Tova Lir chose a life as a courier rather than get involved in her family’s illustrious business in politics. Set in humanity’s far future, hiring a planetary courier is essential for delivering private messages across the stars.
Encouraged by friends, Tova begins mentoring baby bots, juvenile AI who are developmentally in their teens, and trains them how to interact within society essentially becoming their foster mom. Her latest charge, Agatha Panza von Sparkles, named herself on their first run from Luna to Phoebe station. But on their return, they encounter a derelict spaceship and a lurking assassin, igniting a thrilling chase across the solar system.
Tova and Agatha’s daring actions leave Agatha’s mind vulnerable, relying on Tova’s former AI pupils for help. As Tova starts gathering her scattered family around her, she is chased through the solar system by forces who want her captured and her family erased. This debut science fiction novel by National Book Award–winning author William Alexander is a must-read for fans of Becky Chambers and Ursula K. Le Guin. Lovers of poignant science fiction, where the bonds of found family, the evolution of AI, and the building distrust of centuries of bias, come together in this visionary look at humanity’s future.

My Review:

Captain Tova Lir has what is quite possibly the best possible job for the protagonist of a cozy science fiction story. She’s a baby bot foster mom. Just think of it, new, young bots come to her to learn how to be real people. Not human people, but people all the same. It’s a tough job, filled with a surprising amount of tough love, but ‘Captain Mom’ is the very best at it. And her ‘kids’ all love her for it even after they’ve ‘grown up’ and been released into this wide-open, post-Earth, future.

At least, it all sounds fun until Tova and her current bot, Agatha Panza von Sparkles, pick up the body of a dead courier out in the spacelanes. Tova, a courier herself, doesn’t want to take on the trouble that her late colleague unwittingly got into, but she has no choice. And once Agatha spreads her consciousness literally too thin in order to save her ‘mom’ Tova knows she’s in for the long haul of whatever-the-hell the mess might be.

It’s a bigger mess than she imagined, as the space docks on her homeworld, Earth’s moon Luna, have collapsed – and the blame for that collapse is being placed on the independent bots, just like Agatha and all of the other ‘kids’ that Tova has fostered. In spite of the total lack of evidence that the bots had anything whatsoever to do with the disaster.

Which is the point where Tova’s initial quest to find someone who can literally help put Agatha back together finds itself in the middle of Luna’s quest to lobotomize ALL the bots even while the equivalent of an assassins’ guild is out to kill Tova because she might have discovered the clandestine message the original courier was carrying.

Whether she actually did or not. Which seems to be the way that everything in this little corner of the solar system is going very, very wrong. With Tova and her kids caught smack in the middle of a conspiracy that they can’t even see from where they’re running from – or even running to.

Escape Rating B: At first, this feels like a story of mercantile empires – and it comes back to that at the bittersweet end. But the middle manages to combine an SF mystery with a fight against injustice that is both led and populated by a found family of grown-up baby bots and the ‘mom’ they all love. With just a touch of potential, future romance – or at least friendship born out of frenemyship – to add a delightful bit of sugar on top of a story that deftly mixes the bitter of mercantile/political skullduggery with the sweet of found family and coming of age and into their own for a bunch of surprising former children who have to do an end run around almost everything to reach the adulthood of their dreams.

And yes, this is a story where robots do have dreams of both kinds; dreams when they sleep and dreams of the future they want to live in.

The story mixes a bit of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built with a dash of Aimee Ogden’s Emergent Properties and even a sprinkling of Silvia Park’s Luminous to tell a story where the bots make considerably more humane humans than the born-humans ever seem capable of.

Sunward isn’t a big book, and it probably didn’t need to be. There’s just enough worldbuilding and background to keep the mystery and the found family story afloat, yet manages to hint at plenty of deeper possibilities if the reader looks. It’s also somewhere on the post-apocalyptic/dystopian side, as it’s clearly set in a world where Earth is no longer habitable and yet humanity has managed to survive even if they’re still being all too human. In that sense it’s a bit like the Jupiter colony of The Mimicking of Known Successes. There are oodles of hints of how things went, but further details aren’t needed for THIS story – as much as I would have liked to have them.

The story is carried along on the love between Tova and her children, that she nurtured them and now it’s their turn to help her save their newest sibling – all while fighting against a conspiracy that seems to have it in for the lot of them. There’s a lot of love and a lot TO love in this cozy SF mystery. I certainly wouldn’t mind checking back in with ‘Captain Mom’ to see how she does with her next ‘baby bot’. And the next and the next and the next!