The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt
Nov. 3rd, 2025 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Immortality Thief
3/5. Scifi about a refugee linguist who is forced into a dangerous mission to retrieve ancient data off a starship mere weeks from destruction from a dying star.
This is a space survival story with horror undertones, and a strong commitment to enemies-to-friends as our narrator travels the ship in the company of two people who are intimately connected to the massacre of his family and community. I’m into that as a project, and did enjoy it, though I think the book does not entirely do the legwork on how this relationship develops. That’s a hard thing to pull off, to be clear.
The other thing to know about this book is that it is first person narrated by someone with absolutely galloping ADHD and close to zero impulse control. He is a lot. And the book flows with his thinking – somewhat erratically, with lots of interruptions and a million tiny chapters. I think part of that is by design, and part of it is first book messiness. And also being about 20,000 words too long. But my point is, whether you enjoy this book or not will probably turn on whether you can vibe with the narrator. I sometimes could and often couldn’t, so here I am.
Content notes: Recollection of massacre, violence, body horror.
3/5. Scifi about a refugee linguist who is forced into a dangerous mission to retrieve ancient data off a starship mere weeks from destruction from a dying star.
This is a space survival story with horror undertones, and a strong commitment to enemies-to-friends as our narrator travels the ship in the company of two people who are intimately connected to the massacre of his family and community. I’m into that as a project, and did enjoy it, though I think the book does not entirely do the legwork on how this relationship develops. That’s a hard thing to pull off, to be clear.
The other thing to know about this book is that it is first person narrated by someone with absolutely galloping ADHD and close to zero impulse control. He is a lot. And the book flows with his thinking – somewhat erratically, with lots of interruptions and a million tiny chapters. I think part of that is by design, and part of it is first book messiness. And also being about 20,000 words too long. But my point is, whether you enjoy this book or not will probably turn on whether you can vibe with the narrator. I sometimes could and often couldn’t, so here I am.
Content notes: Recollection of massacre, violence, body horror.