Illuminae

After having read These Broken Stars as my first novel by Amie Kaufman (co-authoring it with Megan Shepard), Illuminae instantly got on my radar. It was still more than half a year before Illuminae was set to be released that I added it to my to-read list and the wait to read it has been long. Like the Starbound trilogy, Kaufman co-authored it, this time alongside Jay Kristoff. I’ve heard incredibly much about Illuminae and how good it’s supposed to be, how different and how fantastic, so I was very eager to dive into it myself and see if it lived up to its high recommendations. (Spoiler: it did).


The story starts on the day that Kady breaks up with her boyfriend Ezra. She knows she did the right thing even though it was one of the hardest things she’s had to do in her life. She has no idea what awaits her in the future. Because that same afternoon, her planet, Kerenza IV, is invaded and Kady narrowly escapes from it onto science vessel Hypatia. Ezra is among the few thousand other people who manages to get off Kerenza but ends up on battlecarrier Alexander. Together with Hypatia, the Alexander along with another science vessel, Copernicus, escapes from Kerenza and the assault of BeiTech Industries. The only remaining ship from the assault, the Lincoln, takes chase and without the possibility to escape through a wormhole, the three ships are left with no choice but to run as fast as they can toward Heimdall Station for help and hoping that the Lincoln won’t catch up to them. But what first seems to be the biggest problem, the escape from the Lincoln, soon pales in comparison to what goes on inside the Copernicus.

I could literally sit here and gush about this book the entire night. It has everything I could ever want in a novel and more. First off, it’s a story set in 2575 involving colonized planets and spacetravel. Second, it’s a sweet love story that does not take over the entire story. The male main character, Ezra, is a big softy with a brave heart always trying to do what’s right. The female main character, Kady, is the sassiest girl south of Sasstown with a big knowledge of coding and hacking which she most often uses for illegal purposes. There’s also a mutating virus turning people into brainless killers spreading on the ships and the battlecarrier’s artificial intelligence (AIDAN) was damaged when the Alexander escaped at Kerenza and now seems to turn against its own fleet. Help is at best six months away and all the while the Lincoln is slowly catching up to them. We are basically talking about explosions, zombie-like killers, an insane computer, explosions, a spacechase, a love story, crazy hacking skills, a big scoop of sass and explosions. Did I mention explosions? In my world it does not get any better than this.

Taking a look at our characters; we have our two main ones in Kady and Ezra and, partially, in AIDAN. Important side characters include general Torrance, a computer guy named Byron Zhang, Ezra’s friends Dorian and McNulty and a few commanders and high ranking military personnel. We get to know Kady closest but since the story isn’t an actual text like regular books but is instead told through a series of classified documents, video surveillance footage and direct messages as well as data recovered from AIDAN, we don’t get to come any closer to Kady than reading her journal at times. You can still feel how angry and sad she is though, how she fights everyone but herself most of all. How she puts all her energy and effort into finding out the truth instead of letting herself break apart. She’s hardcore, a real badass and a sassy one at that. She makes extreme sacrifices, knowing what she has to give up to save strangers and when she’s forced to kill someone, even though it’s a crazy lunatic who tried to kill her, she makes the choice of not killing again because she knows that that’s what truly breaks you. She’s hard on the outside but deep down has a soft heart and she’s absolutely perfect to carry the heavier load on this novel. Ezra, on the other side, seems like a tough guy when you look at him but it doesn’t take many pages to figure out that he’s a sweetheart. While Kady is not working on the Hypatia, Ezra is conscripted into the military aboard the Alexander as a fighter pilot. They have to work together across the two spaceships to unravel the truth, even though Kady swore she wouldn’t talk to him after they’d broken up.

Kady and Ezra brings the story forward but there wouldn’t even be a story without AIDAN. It’s a computer that runs the entire battlecarrier but after being damaged after the battle at Kerenza, AIDAN first has to be shut down and then taken back online again when the threat from the Lincoln becomes too great. AIDAN is nothing but statistics, facts and, as one character in the book says, a big calculator, but when reading through the data from AIDAN it becomes clear that the machine is actually having feelings. This in itself creates a very interesting side-story and while AIDAN seems to be a crazy computer out to kill everyone and everything, I actually have a soft spot for it and found myself not only understanding it but also caring for it. I think that AIDAN was one of the best and most interesting things Kaufman and Kristoff could’ve put in the book.

The side characters flies by in emails and IM’s but leave a footprint just the same. Sometimes side characters are empty shells just filling a void, but not in Illuminae. They all have their own story and their own background, you don’t always get to find out what that is but you can feel that it’s there. I connected to many of the characters and it hurt that not all of them made it out alive.

The writing was different since it’s not an actually story with chapters but instead is told through documents and interviews. It’s a very different way of telling a story but I really liked it! I wouldn’t be interested in reading every book this way but in this case it really fits. I think it’s even better than it would’ve been through the eyes of the characters. On top of that, the artwork, the cover as well as the inside of the book, was amazing. Black fingerprints on papers along with blood and coffee stains were among the details that made the layout even more believing. The direct messages between Kady, Ezra and their friends was written in slang with a various amount of smileys and typos, which again only added to the feeling of it all being real. I was amazed at how much feeling could be conveyed through documents in this way, rather than through the eyes of characters.

The ride you take when you start reading this book is something out of the ordinary. There are few books that has gotten to my heart as fast as this and I know it’ll stay there for a long time. It’s an incredible adventure, one I definitely think you should take. It has something for everyone and it’ll leave you breathless and longing for more. Luckily, the sequel Gemina is scheduled for release in October 2016. Make sure you’ve read Illuminae before that. You won’t regret it.