Review of "Born in Space" by Jeremy Clift

Score: 90/100 (9.0 out of 10)

Born in Space is a sprawling, near-future space epic that we sometimes wanted to throw across the room and other times could barely put down. It is part family story, part mad science drama, part corporate space thriller, all orbiting around Teagan Ward, who is haunted by octopus dreams and strange visions that seem to tie her to something far beyond Arizona and Earth. Her nightmare of becoming a robed “priestess of the Octopus” and the later VR encounter with the ant like being who tells her “we will meet one day” are eerie, memorable hooks that make it clear destiny is tracking this kid.

What's not so clear is what we're supposed to be tracking or focusing on. The book spreads its net far and wide. On one strand you have Teagan, her brother Hunter, their exhausted scientist parents Clara and Noel, the AI nanny (Betty), robots like the chef (Claw) and the joke cracking dental bot (Gummy), and their Labradoodle (Chester). Everyday life in Tucson already feels slightly futuristic with health pods, talking toilets, and omnipresent AI, but it is grounded in sibling squabbles, seed collecting, piano practice, and trips to the splash pad.

Right off the bat, this book does something that we didn't particularly like in Brent and Edward Go to Mars: it places a heavy emphasis on describing and detailing emerging/hypothetical technologies and scientific concepts. It's always a balancing act because you don't want these things to distract from the plot and character, you want them to enhance and elevate them. Your world and all its technology should accommodate the plot and characters, not become the focus.

The author imagines a plausible 2060s in which a failed Chinese cyber offensive and brutal Western retaliation trigger “the Great Unraveling,” with climate change, automation, and economic collapse pushing millions into poverty while the ultra wealthy retreat to rotating space habitats like Halona.

The details of lunar bases at Malapert and Shackleton, the gritty realities of regolith dust and buried habitats, the Chinese FAST telescope straining for signals and asteroids, and the orbital gateway at the Earth Moon L1 point all feel researched and thought through without becoming pure tech fetish.

There is also an unexpected thread about Indigenous land, sacred places, and cosmology in the Apache and Hopi material, especially the Ant People and the “Four Worlds,” which cleverly echoes Teagan’s visions and the larger question of who really gets to claim the stars. Now, when we say "clever", that's a double-edged sword. It's possible for an author to overthink everything and outthink their audience. Remember, it's not what the author knows, it's what the readers understand and experience. You don't want to dampen their experience.

Anyway...

In another strand, Clara (again, Teagan's mom) is on the Moon, trying to build a seed bank and food supply at Malapert while secretly asked to “keep an eye” on the Chinese at Huashan. Then the camera jumps to General Lin Wenyi, disgraced architect of the Great Cyber War, to Zhu Yan at the “Eye of Heaven” telescope in Guizhou, and to Guy Zephron, the haunted pilot whose dam busting raid drowned millions and who now flies for billionaire Howie Rich’s asteroid mining fleet out of the ElleWon station.

We distinctly remember Guy making a crucial decision to drop an asteroid to escape the Iron Hornet space pirates, then being reprimanded for it by someone detached from the situation. We distinctly remember him making a crucial (and pretty cool) decision to drop/launch an android in order to escape the space pirates, then being reprimanded for it by someone completely detached from the danger. It really got us on his side! That is a strong, punchy introduction to his character, but his arc never quite lives up to that promise, getting chopped up and buried under so many cutaways that his guilt and growth feel more like background color than a fully realized story. A lot of this book feels like this: stretched thin, choppy, and clunky. It's like wanting to enjoy the pizza but there are too many pineapples on it.

On that note (about how this book kept ripping focus away from characters just when we were getting to like them), even the MAIN protagonists aren't immune to this. Like, Clara eventually gets overshadowed by Teagan who eventually gets overshadowed by Nevaeh, the girl born in space, and her super baby space siblings. Just as an aside: Nevaeh's whole arc reminded us of Blood of the Fisher King by Endy Wright, a book in which the good super baby clone(s) with special powers needs to deal with her renegade super baby clone(s) with special powers.

Oh, and BY THE WAY... all throughout this, there's Kiana—who is admittedly our favorite character—who is a cadet-turned-spy (infiltrating the Iron Hornet space pirate group) who effectively serves as Hunter's love interest. And, honestly, their relationship is our favorite in the book because it actually seems organic and earned. It's one of the few things in this book that really felt natural and real. They're candidate for "Best Couple" and "Best Dynamic Duo." Teagan and Julian are up there as well.

Oh, and there's the freakin' pet octopus thing, Tentacle. All of this octopus stuff had our heads spinning on top of all the other stuff. There's a scene when one of its tentacles gets chopped off and morbidly cooked and eaten. There's a very brief scene in which it's explained that octopuses symbolize and represent freedom. Ok... It's also said to represent infinite possibilities and regeneration, which we guess kinda makes the tentacle-chopping scene not seem like a total disturbing waste of time.

Oh, there's another moment like that. There's a bunch of people being massacred, then a woman gets tied to a cactus and her toes are used for target practice. We don't even have her screaming or saying/shouting anything. She doesn't even struggle. She just seems to stay there statically and take it. Then there's the cliche, generic, done-to-death trope of finding the murdered mother's hidden baby who's somehow still alive despite not eating or drinking for "a few days" and somehow didn't draw any attention from the baddies despite crying its eyes/lungs out for much of that time.

It just seems like it's out of nowhere. It seems unnatural. It's shoehorned in between other sci-fi scenes. It's bizarre and tonally different from 99% of this book, which is rather hokey and even humorous. This scene is more like an ultraviolent western scene out of Diablo Canyon in which the bandits and villains in that book did stuff like that all the time. But that was a dark fantasy-western. It just seems like it doesn't fit this book at all.

Remember we talked about the tone of this book being hokey and humorous? There's a "Worm Song" in here, and it's the cheesiest, most childish freakin' thing. We think it's supposed to be cute and charming. We thought it was silly and disrupted the pacing.

There's a scene when the robots start saying, "I'm Spartacus!" (like the movie Spartacus) and are basically told to shut up, which was probably meant to be semi-serious (because these robots are being exploited for labor) but instead came across as humorous and goofy to us.  There's even a scene in which people are saying, "Get a room, you two!" What is this, a sitcom? Is this Seinfeld or a space epic?

All in all, this is A LOT to shove into one novel.

We're not saying this book doesn't make sense, because it eventually (kinda) does, but talk about dropping your readers into the blades of the blender. Remember: we don't know what the author knows. So all these choppy vignette-like perspective shifts in the beginning had us feeling unmoored, to say the least.

We found this book to be incredibly unfocused. Born in Space exemplifies three of the things we constantly complain about in fiction books:

1. Excessive and distracting world-building that tends to draw attention away from the characters and plot rather than enhancing or elevating them

2. Convoluted stories that seem disjointed and lack focus

3. Way too many characters and not even attention paid to developing them all

We found this book to be incredibly frustrating, at least for the first 180 pages or so. Yes, action was happening, people were saying stuff, characters were doing stuff, but it just didn't mesh and seem cohesive... at least until much later.

But this book did eventually redeem itself in a lot of ways. Previous characters we liked/loved, especially Guy and Kiana, came back into play, becoming relevant again. The author might argue that they were always relevant, but that's not the way we perceived them. It's like some of these characters fell off the face of the earth and we forgot they existed.

Also, the plot-threads start to cross over and tie together. There's some semblance of cohesion later in the book.

Oh, and there are moments of this book that actually made us feel something and got us a bit emotional. For example, Maureen experiences a profound loss, and it's a surprisingly touching scene.

Ok, maybe we should talk about the key villain lost in all of this chaos—the needle in a haystack. We'd like to briefly talk about Cesar.

Now, Cesar isn't the Jenova or the Sephiroth of this novel, he's the Hojo. He's the mad scientist who—if he had just stopped to think about how messed up his ideas and experiments were—a lot of this book wouldn't have happened. So... thank you, Cesar, you made this possible.

He has a range of evil experiments and plans. One of them, arguably the most important because it gives us the book's title, is his super space baby experiment on Teagan. We actually found that to be fascinating because it hauntingly reflects the kinds of drugs, recommendations, and procedures that OBGYNs and fertility doctors will actually do. Cesar isn't some crazy space pirate or a god-like cosmic entity, he's a dude who is so possessed by the prospect of what science can achieve that he can't help himself. He's the embodiment of science unbridled, unfiltered, and uncontrolled, especially when outside of Earth's jurisdiction. He even tells us so. In space, he has the freedom to do pretty much any experiment he wants. And this becomes dangerous when one of his other plans involves using cordyceps (which usually infect ants) to brainwash and mind control populations of humans. Now, granted, this cordyceps idea sounds kinda inspired from/borrowed from Lost of Us and shoehorned in during a later draft, but... whatever.

Anyway, Cesar moved the plot along and was a character we could follow from beginning to end who helped us feel like there was actually some rhyme and reason to the chaotic madness that is Born in Space.

Check it out on Amazon!