The Stars Are Legion

Some very interesting concepts here. In a world of only women, people live on living ship-planets. Women birth randomly as the worldship requires, and they only give birth to one particular thing, as the worldship requires. The worlds are ruled by warlord women, and there are many layers to each world–so many that the bottom-most layers have no clue the top layers even exist. Each layer is its own world. The very heart of the world is where people go when they are recycled–when they are no longer needed or have offended those in power.

Our here, Zan, has been recycled before, and she awakens with no memories of who she is or what she's doing. She thinks she's part of he Katarzyrna world, but part of her knows this is not true. And everyone in the Legion wants a piece of the worldship she keeps trying to infiltrate for her bosslady. The Mokshi is a ship that has escaped the tethers of the Legion, and everyone thinks that this ship holds the key to saving the other worldships, all of which are decaying at varyingly rapid rates.

And then fights and politicking and lady bromances happen until Zan realizes who she really is.

There are some really interesting ideas here, like living ships, which really reminded me of Farscape. There are some interesting characters, though I wanted to see more of them. I'm possibly a horrible person because the character I wanted to read the most about was Rasida, even though she's terrible. She's also one of the most interesting characters.

The world is a little mindboggling, though, because it is just so very weird, and there is no explanation for why this is so. Rather than reading this as hard sci-fi, it should be read probably more as fantasy sci-fi.

Some of the the world-building is weaker than I expected, and so are some of the characters and their relationships. But this was enjoyable, I wasn't bored, and I was intrigued by an all-female world. But there is nothing BUT the women. There are no other options, so for non-binary character awesomeness, The Left Hand of Darkness is superior. Still, this was a nice introduction to Ms Hurley's fiction, and I'd give her another go.