You are a philosopher, asking abstract questions about the nature of Reality, and Good, and the relationship between cause and effect all the way back to Aristotle's Prime Mover, that which created the universe we live in.

You are standing at a switch next to train tracks with a unstoppable trolley barreling down towards you. Five people are tied down in the path of the trolley. You can pull a lever to save their lives at the cost of one person tied to the other track. Now it's your father and your brother and your place in the world on the alternative track. Did your answer change? Now the trolley is coming at the 8 billion people on Earth, all the humans who ever lived and ever will. Did your answer change?

You are a turtle basking in the sun on a rock in Central Park. An alien with eight adder-like heads picks you up with a pair of its eight elegant white-gloved hands, effortlessly cracks your ribs from your back shell and scoops out the bloody meat inside. You are delicious. You are dead.

We begin with Anna in New York in 2013, when she meets Ssrin, an alien eating turtles in the park. Anna is a 30-something Kurdish war orphan, a tough woman who doesn't fit into America and can't ever go home because she pulled that trolley problem lever when she was 7, shooting her father and brother and four other villagers in the head at the behest of a sadistic Baathist officer to save the rest of the village. Ssrin drops a bunch of truth bombs on Anna: Anna is special, her horrific past has bound the two of them together on a quest to save the universe. The quest matters because narrative has a privileged place in the universe. Souls are real, the afterlife is real, good and evil are objective truths.

Ssrin is a renegade from the Exordia, an empire which has used their mastery of technology and magic to pinion all significant species into a narrative framework in which successful rebellion is impossible. While humans are not significant (inbred apes who are decent persistent hunters and like to watch each other have sex), a powerful narrative is written on all our human souls, offering a way to break the Exordia. Ssrin is being hunted by Iruvage, a cop from her species, who's own version of the quest offers a chance for salvation for Ssrin and Iruvage and their entire species of khai, because uniquely among the galaxy's sentients, the khai are damned to hell from birth.

And then the situation goes off the rails entirely. Anna and Ssrin conjure from some hidden dimension a jetliner-sized starship, codenamed Blackbird, in the remote valley in Kurdistan that Anna hails from. Three days later, an Exordia cruiser arrives in-system and announces its presence with actual bombs, a grid of high-altitude nuclear detonations, causing a civilization destroying EMP. The shadowy intelligence apparatus of the US government activates its contingency plan, MAJESTIC, a first-contact effort lead by Deputy National Security Advisor Clayton Navarro Hunt, with its military XCOM contingent of special forces operators lead by Major Erik Wygaunt.

Clayton and Erik have a History with a capital H. They went to school together, they're in love with the same woman, Rosamaria, though Clayton was the one who married her, and they ran a blacker-than-black assassination program called Paladin. Erik used Paladin to bring to justice criminals who operated in the legal gaps of the war on terror: US military contractors who committed severe human rights abuses. Clayton took a bigger view, that there were bad people making the world worse, and utilitarian calculus required their deaths to bring about a better future. The two disagreed, they went to Rosamaria, she told them to go to hell for doing this and confessing it to her. Both men have a very clear idea of what the right thing to do is and an overriding need to convince the other before they die, most likely at each other's hands. Erik knows for certain that Clayton is itching for a pretext to sell out anyone and everything in the name of some nebulous greater good and his own power. Clayton is convinced that Erik's rigid deontology will doom them all, and that standing up for an illusion of justice is pointless if it everyone saved dies tomorrow anyway. Oh, and Clayton is working for Iruvage, in the same way that Anna is working for Ssrin.

If you've read The Traitor Baru Cormorant (why haven't you read Traitor?), you know the kind of tension that Dickinson is able to produce. So believe me when I say that everything I've covered in this review is merely the first 20% of the book, and it is as tense as the last 20% of Traitor. I read the whole novel in one compulsive gulp of a day, stopping only to swear under my breath and take a long walk in the sunshine to remind myself that it's just science-fiction. 

The narrative does slacken slightly as the protagonists arrive at Blackbird to find the remains of the previous teams of investigators from Russia, China, Iran, and Uganda. The technothriller tropes of contamination suits, scientific investigation, gun-toting bad-asses, and quarantine by flame and bullet are entirely inadequate against an Outside Context Problem who's very existence is incompatible with the narrow range of environmental and ontological circumstances that allow humans to live. People die by the score, killed by each other, by the ways that Blackbird warps flesh and soul, and by Iruvage's willingness to expend human beings like we expend laboratory mice to achieve his agenda.

This book fires on all cylinders, with compelling characters, a provocative central conceit, thoughtful examination of the consequences of (American) imperial power, a propulsive plot, and crackling writing. I have to give particular kudos to the alienness of khai psychology and the nature of Blackbird's power and danger. Both of these things are very much not human, but this is no empty mystery box, and the book reveals clear reasons for why they are like they are, and why it matters.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.
This was incredible.
Seth, are you okay?
Cause I'm not sure I am.