The Darkness Outside Us, by Eliot Schrefer

[rachelmanija]

A teenage boy, Ambrose, wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. OS, the AI programmed with his mother's voice, reminds him that he's on a mission to rescue his sister, who went to Titan two years ago and sent out a distress call. And also, he has a surprise companion on a journey he thought would be solo: Kodiak, a teenage boy from the rival nation, who is ensconced in his own quarters and refuses to come out.

Ambrose, who is a typical teenager in lots of ways apart from being a genius and an astronaut, manages to coax Kodiak out and immediately starts thinking lustful thoughts about him. Kodiak, whose country is much more austere and militarized than Ambrose's, very gradually warms up to him.

And then what I thought was going to be a slow-burn gay YA romance in a science fiction setting takes a huge left turn. To be fair, it does still centrally involve a gay YA romance. But the science fiction aspect isn't just there as a cool background. It's actually a YA science fiction novel that has a romance along with a plot that goes in multiple unexpected directions, and is very moving in a way that's only possible because of the science fiction elements.

If you're a stickler for hard science fiction in which everything is definitely possible/likely, this probably has at least one too many "I don't think that's likely to work that way" moments for you. But if you'd like to read a fun and touching science fiction adventure-romance that will probably surprise you at least once, just read the book without knowing anything more.



1. Yes, they really are on a spaceship. But it's not on a mission to save Ambrose's sister, who really did go to Titan... and presumably died there... over four thousand years ago! They're both clones on a generation ship, sent out to populate a colony with the help of frozen embryos and artificial wombs! The originals were left on Earth! It will take 30,000 years to reach their destination!

(I am dubious about the time scale. 30,000 years is a very long time for a ship to stay intact and functioning. I'm also dubious that two people could raise enough babies to populate anywhere. I feel like they'd be likely to burn out on childcare and stop way before they'd raised enough kids to prevent a bottleneck. On the other hand, all things considered, I can totally believe that a government would create a doomed project based on crazy assumptions.)

2. There are 24 more frozen clones onboard, 12 for each of them. Every couple thousand years or so, the ship accumulates enough problems that need humans to fix that it wakes up a pair of clones. It gives them a fake mission so they won't freak out knowing that they'll live and die on the ship, and kills them once they've finished their tasks as it doesn't have enough food for multiple human lifetimes, and they'll die young from radiation exposure anyway.

Over multiple lives, iterations of Ambrose and Kodiak fall in love, try to figure out the truth of their situation, try to leave messages for the next clones, try not to get killed by OS, and try to come to grips with their situation. It's very moving, and some of their solutions are pretty clever.

My favorite set were the most heartbreaking - the ones who do manage to live a lifetime aboard the ship, knowing they'll never reach their destination, but that some version of them will.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

I enjoyed this book and the sequel, which covers some of the same ground, but introduces some awesome new characters.

[asakiyume]

So the ones where they get to live a whole lifetime--then presumably the tasks or repairs they're woken up for take a (radiation-shortened) lifetime? ... If I were them and I figured out I was going to be killed when my task was done, I'd really try to drag out that task.

Do they/we know if there are already people on the colony? Or is everything going to start with this ship? (I realize this isn't important in the gay-romance scale of things, but I'm just wondering about having to raise babies to adulthood who are then going to have to put together the foundations of a colony. I feel like there's a reason that even with generation-ship stories, we posit frozen adults to start the colony building rather than embryos.)

[cyphomandra]

I really liked this! I went in cold (apart from “gay sf ya”) and thought the reveal and the way the book worked through this was great. I have acquired the sequel but this has reminded me I have yet to read it!

[torachan]

Is it explained why only two people were chosen and why it was two rando teenagers?