The HMS Matilda has been travelling through the void for three hundred years, searching for a new home for humanity after the Great Lifehouse was reduced to ruins. An Unkindness Of Ghosts boldly storms in and takes its place with the very best of the genre’s explorations of the generation ship motif, and makes the reader excited to see what Solomon will do next.

That this is only a debut novel is frankly astonishing. Solomon’s writing is remarkably assured, faer characters are engagingly complex and well-drawn, and faer worldbuilding is rich both in astute social observation and hard SF technical detail. An Unkindness Of Ghosts shows just how vital non-white and queer perspectives are in opening up what the genre of speculative fiction can do. The novel takes on the tried and tested science fiction trope of the generation ship, but Solomon’s approach encompasses a metaphorical reimagining of the cruelty and brutality of the antebellum south’s slave plantations as well as queer and neurodiverse perspectives. Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness Of Ghosts (2017) is an incredible, powerful and unforgettable debut novel, immediately establishing Solomon as a key new voice in the genre. Ancestors are everywhere if you are looking. She’d been helping Aster scrub down X deck with ammonia and bleach, a failed attempt to rub out the stink of what had happened there. “ That’s what ghosts really are, Aint Melusine had said, the past refusing to be forgot.

An unkindness of ghosts