Noah Chinn Reviews: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

Mur Lafferty is no stranger to KODT. Aside from her column Geek Fu Action Grip column back in the day, I reviewed another novel of hers, the Hugo-nominated Six Wakes.

But while Six Wakes is more along the lines of hard SF, her latest novel, Station Eternity, is more along the fantastical lines of science fiction, with living space stations, aliens made of rock that evolve into spaceships, hive minds intelligences, symbiotic relationships, and translation bugs injected into your ear.

What the books have in common, however, are layered mysteries and characters with slowly revealed backstories.

Station Eternity also has a heck of a setup for the protagonist. You ever watch a murder mystery series and wonder how the heck the Jessica Fletcher type of person ends up around so many murders—yet nobody finds that odd? Like really odd?

That’s what happens with our protagonist, Mallory Viridian. Ever since she was a child, murder has followed Mallory. What’s more, she’s been solving those murders ever since she was old enough to do so.

However, rather than getting on with her life each time, this instead takes a toll on her. Being able to solve murders is a small comfort when you’re increasingly convinced that you’re somehow the one triggering them in the first place. And people either don’t believe her, which is bad, or they do believe her, which is worse.

Needless to say, it puts a damper on things like relationships. And she can’t even get a job as a cop or detective, because the powers-that-be block her at every turn. The best she is able to is take those cases and turn them into fiction.

On top of that, the rest of the universe has just made first contact with Earth, which makes a lot of people excited, and a lot of other people nervous.

So when she gets the opportunity to leave Earth and find sanctuary on board Station Eternity, Mallory leaps at the chance. After all, if she’s not around other humans, she can’t trigger more murders, right?