The Folded Sky

By: Elizabeth Bear

Narrated by: Sarah Slimani

Dr. Sunya Song embarks on an interstellar journey across the Milky Way to connect with the artificial intelligence known as Baomind, a moon-sized entity that holds the key to humanity’s survival amidst cosmic challenges and unforeseen threats in Hugo Award–winning author Elizabeth Bear’s next epic science fiction novel.

Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to vanish without a trace.

Sunya Song’s job is to stop that from happening.

She’s an archinformist: a specialist historian whose job usually involves sitting at a console at her university job near the Galactic Core, sorting ancient documents and restoring corrupted files.

But now, the research opportunity of a lifetime has sent her—along with her teenage children and alien wife—halfway across the galaxy to preserve the data and aid in the retrieval of the archaeological find of the century: an ancient alien artificial intelligence called Baomind. As vast as a stellar system, the Baomind orbits a dying red giant, and the star’s time has nearly ended.

The isolated research station and its small fleet of ships come under attack by fanatic Freeport pirates who believe that artificial intelligence is an abomination that must be destroyed, putting the lives of Sunya and her family at risk.

Tens of thousands of lightyears from home, isolated from all help, Sunya is the only one who can save them all.

Great concepts, but not her best story

I love Elizabeth Bear. This story wasn’t her best. I really didn’t like the main character and I just felt that the story worked to hard to be a cliff hanger at the end of each chapter to the point of feeling annoying. I ended up speed reading the story to the end just to finish it.

Not the best of Bear

The ingredients of this tale are good, but delivered underbaked. The pace is jerky and the transitions are often confusing. Much of the inner dialogue was repetitive, losing emotional flavor with every repeat.

The kind of reminder we need when things look bleak

This story has beautiful moment after beautiful moment of people from different communities helping each other that are treated as so routine and expected that they don't bear remarking upon. We need that so much in our fiction, so we can build it into our reality. I need it in my fiction: the reminder that people can and do sacrifice for each other routinely. That we can protect each other, even if we don't think of ourselves as warriors.

Well that was……disappointing

I like Elizabeth Bear and I’ve really enjoyed her other White Space novels. But this one was just not very good. The main character was whiny and self-absorbed and went around “tuning” or “right minding” herself the whole time. Which I think is just the future’s version of Prozac. The story wasn’t very engaging - it was an attempt at a mystery set near an alien artifact. But it just wasn’t that interesting. I generally don’t mind the whole “gender doesn’t matter” and “our society would be so much better if just drugged ourselves until we all get along” vibe that many of her stories have, but only if there is an interesting story with interesting characters. This didn’t have either one.