62. I’m eager for other people to read Meredith Mooring’s Redsight

Perhaps one of them will be able to explain to me what it is I just read.

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Cover art for Meredith Mooring’s Redsight

Meredith Mooring, Redsight. London: Solaris. 2024.

Readers who find in Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth a staggering work of thematically coherent genius will find much to enjoy in debut author Meredith Mooring’s space fantasy Redsight. (I think Harrow‘s a hot mess, personally. An entertaining hot mess with a good voice, but a hot mess.) For me, this was a novel I was prepared to enjoy, and for the first few chapters, I found myself imagining I’d rather like it, albeit with several caveats if I came about to recommend it to anyone else.

I held that belief right up until it started throwing itself energetically off cliffs in pursuit of ever larger sharks to jump.

Korinna is an acolyte in the Order of Vermicula. The Order of Vermicula, housed on the giant spaceship Navitas, is devoted to the goddess Vermicula, considers themselves her descendants, and produces Redseers: women blind in conventional fashion who nonetheless can perceive and manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe, making fully trained “red priestesses” valuable as pilots and navigators to the ships of the vaguely-defined space-faring Imperium. Korinna considers herself the weakest of her cohort, and fears the day when she will be found sufficiently wanting to be drained of blood in a sacrifice to her goddess and “recycled.” But in a surprise twist, it transpires that her mentor and tutor has been concealing the extent of Korinna’s strength in the hopes that she will be one day able to overthrow or succeed Renatia, the order’s High Priestess, and pushes her into an accelerated regime of training so that Korinna can pass her navigator exams and escape into the arms of the empire’s military before Renatia has her bumped off.

Sahar is a Lightbender in the service of the Order of Radiosa. The goddess Radiosa, like her sister Vermicula, is long trapped away from the universe, but the Order of Radiosa serves the empire as legal functionaries, judges, and law enforcement. Their abilities let them detect spoken untruths. The discovery of Sahar’s talent as a Lightbender took her away from a much-desired career as an engineer and scientist. Now, in her posting to an isolated world, she has found a heretic scientist constructing fascinating forbidden weapons – once used in the service of the goddess Furia, who was allegedly cast down by her sisters. Sahar judges the scientist in accordance with the law, of course. But her curiosity leads her to investigate the heretical weapons in order to be able to construct one herself, and when she is summoned to a gathering of the Order of Radiosa, she essentially conceals one of these weapons in her luggage. For science.

Litia Sarai is visiting the Navitas as a civilian advisor to an imperial governor and ship commander, Governor Wu, who is attempting to buy a new navigator from the Order. We first meet her as she is about to transform into a scaled snake monster and eat an imperial senator: she is some form of human-seeming shapeshifter. This is a secret which, as with many others, she keeps from her erstwhile employer. (We’ll get to those in their place.) She has other purposes on the Navitas, but her path crosses Korinna’s and the two of them immediately experience a pull towards each other. Ultimately Litia is the one to bring Korinna to Governor Wu’s attention and secure her a role as a navigator outside of High Priestess Renatia’s approval.

On board Wu’s ship, Korinna makes friends, has experiences, and worries about surviving to oust Renatia and reform the Order of Vermicula away from requiring its initiates to sacrifice children. She learns that Wu is headed for a region of space known as the Umbra, to track down a pirate, Aster Haran, and her fleet – responsible most lately for the destruction of an imperial warship like the one in which Korinna is now serving. Litia departs the vessel on business of her own.

Then Aster Haran’s flagship, the Diabolos, successfully attacks Wu’s flagship, and instead of suiciding as she’s expected to, Korinna allows herself to be captured.

Litia Sarai is Aster Haran. And she’s also the last surviving black priestess, descendant of the goddess Furia, the only one remaining from Furia’s space magic star-eating Order. Aster Haran means to restore the goddess Furia to the universe for the sake of vengeance for her centuries of loneliness. And she wants Korinna to help her do it.

Thus we arrive approximately somewhere near Redsight’s midpoint, or at least the end of its first third. Up to this point, I have been a little baffled by some of Mooring’s choices. At this stage, I feel the novel would be improved by cutting significant amounts of Korinna’s training montage out and dropping Sahar’s point of view entirely from the beginning of the novel, while the novel’s pacing is kept off-balance by Mooring’s insistence on having her characters attend meetings in which information is conveyed in disjointed fashion, or recapped from previous scenes. Any sense of narrative unity is undermined by a certain… jumping-about without filling in the gaps.

For goodness sake, don’t hide from the reader that your people-eating space snake shapeshifter monster woman is also an undercover pirate captain! That’s pointlessly burying a really good lede!

This jumping-about grows more pronounced in the latter part of the novel, where new information is presented to the reader out of nowhere, previous relationships and threads are dropped entirely, entirely new plot-points arrive fully-formed from the void, and things develop in a fashion that not only makes the most unhinged Kameron Hurley novel seem tastefully understated, but also, despite its plenitude of transition scenes, fails to join up major incidents involving the major characters in a coherent, sensible, narratively satisfying way. You want vibes? There’s lots of them. You want to feel the satisfying (yet occasionally surprising) inevitability of a well-turned narrative driving down to its well-earned conclusion?

Yeah, not so much that.

The worldbuilding introduces new elements with occasional abandon, sometimes to temporary (and soon neglected) effect, and sometimes signalling an abrupt change of direction in what one had previously understood to be a true constraint.

If you’re hoping for the relationship between Korinna and Aster to acknowledge certain problems – notably around informed consent, appropriate personal boundaries, and healthy ways of dealing with conflicting goals – you’ll be left wanting.

When Korinna is abducted by Aster, who has been lying to her throughout their acquaintance, and is left in Aster’s personal quarters with instructions Not To Look behind a secret door, Korinna decides to comply on the grounds that, “[S]he didn’t want another reason for them to argue.”

(I think we’re beyond anything as tepid as an argument as this point, despite the Power Of Attraction between them. Kidnapping! Is not kosher!)

Aster continues to accommodate Korinna in Aster’s own palatial captain’s suite, rather than affording her privacy or quarters of her own. (I don’t recall if there’s any excuse for this beyond the conventions of abduction romance.) (Send me more cliché! I’m almost out! I have absolutely no objection to deploying tropey tropes but good heavens give me an excuse to believe it makes sense.) Let us note that Korinna has highly destructive space magic powers, and at one point one of Aster’s lieutenants reveals to Korinna (against orders) that she’s on a ship affiliated with her Order’s ancient enemy, then leaves her alone, unsupervised, and somehow still able to send unmonitored messages via the Space Internet.

When the two of them begin a sexual relationship with each other, Aster does not in fact first reveal that she is a shapeshifting space snake person who sometimes eats people. (Also sometimes stars.) Not to discriminate against snake people, but I feel that the fact that eating people is in your C.V. is something you should maybe disclose to your prospective lovers. (Aside from the ethical implications of anthropophagy, think about prions, people. Prions are terrifying. Maybe space snake people don’t need to worry about prions, but I feel like it belongs in the discussion.)

“I’m not a good person,” says space snake pirate captain, while canoodling.

“You saved my life,” says Korinna (not mentioning that Aster was the one to endanger it in the first place).

“I’m selfish,” says Aster, still not telling her about the eating people thing.

Korinna initially agrees to help Aster’s plan to return her goddess to the universe. When she realises that Aster’s plan involves a lot more outright murder than she’d really thought about, and quite understandably hesitates, Aster feels betrayed. Aster proceeds to drain space magic power from Korinna to use for her own ends and keep Korinna imprisoned.

“Aster was so self-righteous about keeping her imprisoned, but at least she was keeping her from making more foolish mistakes.”

Korinna remains imprisoned until, on foot of several revelations delivered via the intervention of Aster’s goddess-mother (who’s not as gone as the rest of the universe might assume), she levels up in her space magic powers and also comes to the conclusion that Aster was right to feel betrayed by her reaction, and that she should apologise to Aster for driving her to this point.

“Korinna wandered to Aster’s bedroom… This was where they’d been closest, before Korinna made the choice that split them apart.”

The choice not to go all-in on Team Murder when the reality of combat is first sprung upon her, let’s be clear. After which Aster made like a space-snake-vampire on her.

Look, sometimes you have really intense feelings of attraction for people who are Incredibly Bad News. Do not act on these feelings! RUN AWAY! Let the Bad News Hotness have intense, adrenaline-filled, earth-shattering relationships with someone else.

If I were describing the bald, not-space-magical progression of Aster and Korinna’s relationship, I would describe a relationship where one party repeatedly manipulates and pressures the other, restricts their freedom of movement, and steals from them, until eventually the second party sees the first party as right and justified in their actions and adopts the first party’s goals largely as their own.

Such relationships can be interesting fodder for literature, if the ways in which multiple inappropriate things are happening at once is acknowledged and examined. But I do not see Redsight as inclined to view the relationship between the principal characters through such a problematised lens: rather, to the degree in which the text supports a position, it takes the view that Aster acts justifiably towards Korinna. I’m old and jaded: it’s not that I believe fictional relationships need to be healthy, but rather that if the narrative doesn’t recognise the ways in which they’re fucked up, it’s missing a wealth of interesting opportunities and making itself less compelling in consequence.

The social worldbuilding of Redsight strikes me as disjointed. But then, so are narrative developments in the run-up to the conclusion. For example, at one point when the narrative has stayed in Korinna’s point of view for a while, it is revealed that Aster has just captured High Priestess Renatia, and is about to make her abdicate to Korinna. Everything to do with acquiring this captive high priestess, and even the very idea of capturing her, before her arrival, takes place off the page. Suddenly a captive priestess appears!

This is a peculiar approach to take, considering that until now, Mooring hasn’t been shy about spending a chapter or more in Aster’s or Sahar’s point of view. The ability to plan and execute the non-fatal abduction of a highly-placed space-magic-wielder (who is also a key figure in the supply of Redsighted navigators to the empire) should speak volumes about the extent and complexity of Aster’s space-pirate organisation, and its relationship with other political, military and religious organisations in this context. But we see none of that, instead receiving a key turning point in the narrative as a kind of deus ex machina to go along with the actual goddesses that start emerging from their boxes to pull increasing over-the-top twists.

This is an acid trip of a novel. I remain bewildered by its sense of scale. Imperial warships apparently have a crew of 500,000 people. That’s larger than an army corps. At that scale, you’d be carrying an entire division’s worth of personnel just to deal with administration and discipline, to say nothing of logistics and supply, waste management, medical treatment, and deaths in service. And yet somehow space combat can still effectively involve boarding operations that aren’t the equivalent of urban warfare in prepared and fortified environments. The moral scale is also bafflingly off: at one point Korinna muses:

“…consuming an entire star system, killing millions of people in the process – that was the kind of mistake they couldn’t afford if they wanted to survive.”

Not one thought about how wrong it is on ethical grounds to do a war crime, not a single little qualm from a character who had previously balked at killing in combat: just, Oh, hey, everyone will hunt us down if we do that so let’s not.

As matters proceed towards the (theological, goddess-restoring, viscerally bloody) conclusion, I found myself less and less able to believe the narrative’s leaps of logic. Sahar turns from enemy to ally to enemy to ally with whiplash speed, people with little reason to agree with Korinna’s plans go along with her, and somehow, in a fashion whose connective tissue yet escapes me, everything works out for Korinna, Aster, and Sahar – this, though I do not understand how, is the conclusion that they turn out to want.

It’s an acid trip, a kaleidoscopic dreamscape of a narrative, and I’m not sure I can mean that as a compliment. I’m still not entirely convinced that I wasn’t hallucinating parts.

Also, the name “Vermicula” makes me think of both pinworm and potting soil. It is not, I think, supposed to be funny, but the unintentional humour has rather stuck with me.

Fiction, unlike the real world, is condemned to make sense within its frame of reference. I don’t really believe in literary merit, but I do believe that art, in its infinite varieties, has a scale that runs between more and less accomplished, based on what it sets out to do, whether it’s a whodunnit or the fever-dream experience of reading Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf: A New Translation. Redsight is a debut, so I should try to judge it kindly, but to me it exemplifies a recent trend in SFF debuts, where coherence and underlying narrative logic, and ultimately a reading experience that stands up to repetition, are valued below vibes. (Obligatory disclaimer: Not all debuts. Perhaps not even most debuts.)

Perhaps this was always the case, and I was in the wrong place to notice. But I can’t escape noticing that this phenomenon is most frequent with writers who have traditionally marginalised backgrounds and perspectives to offer: queer and/or of colour, disabled and/or coming from outside the US/UK/AUS/NZ Anglophone sphere. It affects novels that have the core of something great, that contain buckets of potential, but ones that don’t feel quite cooked yet: where more time to grow, or perhaps more editorial input, might have resulted in a more polished work.

Is this my unconscious bias at work? Am I holding these works to different standards? Or is it the mark of an industry hungry to exploit authors from historically marginalised backgrounds for their novelty, without efforts to care for and encourage their development as artists? (Oh, wait. I forgot. This is publishing we’re talking about. Only the stubbornest and the luckiest still have a career five years after their debut.)

Either way, I don’t like it. But I’m eager for other people to read Redsight. Perhaps one of them will be able to explain to me what it is I just read.