A teen desperate to demolish the sentient spaceship that killed her previous crew goes to extreme lengths to hunt it down in T.A. Chan's YA debut, The Celestial Seas, an exciting queer space opera inspired by Moby-Dick.
MOBIS, known colloquially as "whales," are autonomous spacecraft whose artificial intelligences "developed methods of circumventing programmed limitations." They were banned, and anyone in the Seven Systems is free to hunt those that still float in the celestial seas to obtain the ships' valuable biocores.
Eleven-year-old Ishara Ming left her home planet of Qiāndǎo, arrived in the Halo System, and joined the whaler Essex. While pursuing the legendary Ballena, an elusive white MOBIS, it attacked; Ishara lost her arm, parts of her memories, and her entire crew. Now 18, Ishara is tracking the Ballena with a new crew. When a stranger claims he has intel on how to track the elusive white whale, Ishara hires him on the spot. His ability to locate the Ballena, though, relies on "problematic augments" that have him stammering out info he can't possibly know. Nonetheless, Ishara shares his "bone-deep need" to find the Ballena--and a willingness to risk "lunacy" and death to take it out.
Ishara's first-person narrative frankly deals with the crushing weight of survivor's guilt, the compulsive need to act, and the yearning to belong. Having come from a different star system, she battles with an internalized worthlessness and, consequently, an Ahab-like drive to hunt down her own symbolic white whale: belonging. Chan beautifully contrasts a softly burgeoning romance with breath-stealing battle sequences, gruesome deaths, and g-force heavy gunship maneuvers in this impressively imagined world of space mercs, scavengers, and pirates. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer