Summary: By way of teleportation, seventeen-year-old Jessica Mathers is sent to join the parent who left her six years ago and the other crewmembers of the DS Theseus on a research mission around a distant exoplanet known as Carver 1061c. However, when she awakes she finds herself not on the Theseus in orbit around the planet, but alone in a damaged lander on the planet's surface. She finds blood smeared across the walls of the lander, fresh graves outside, and a copy of herself. The story splits into two perspectives -- showing the past from the POV of the Jessica who arrived as expected on the Theseus, and in the present following the transportation clone of Jessica. Slowly, Jessica v.2 uncovers the mystery of what went so terribly wrong on board the Theseus and grabbles with the concept of selfhood and what makes a person.
My thoughts: That ending sure was abrupt. There were a lot of potentially interesting ideas left unexplored and most of the characters were left underdeveloped. For example, the dead alien civilization of Carver 1061c and the idea of 'alien ghosts' provided some cool horror elements and helped to define Jessica no.2 as no longer just a previous iteration of Jessica 1.0. But it was a big element to introduce just to have it serve as a backdrop and inevitably go nowhere.
The story could also have been enriched by making the characters more defined and developed. If a big element of the story is going to be about what makes people who they are and a part of the conflict and horror is that even though the dead can be brought back in this world, a part of them will be lost, then it really seems like a story that needs to explore its characters more than it did.
There was interesting world-building and some solid themes with respect to the concept of personhood and identity, but it didn't bring it all together in a way that felt complete.
My thoughts: That ending sure was abrupt. There were a lot of potentially interesting ideas left unexplored and most of the characters were left underdeveloped. For example, the dead alien civilization of Carver 1061c and the idea of 'alien ghosts' provided some cool horror elements and helped to define Jessica no.2 as no longer just a previous iteration of Jessica 1.0. But it was a big element to introduce just to have it serve as a backdrop and inevitably go nowhere.
The story could also have been enriched by making the characters more defined and developed. If a big element of the story is going to be about what makes people who they are and a part of the conflict and horror is that even though the dead can be brought back in this world, a part of them will be lost, then it really seems like a story that needs to explore its characters more than it did.
There was interesting world-building and some solid themes with respect to the concept of personhood and identity, but it didn't bring it all together in a way that felt complete.