The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August

Hello, hello, turn your radio on

Humanity has finally conquered faster than light travel and has become a galactic species. And in their expansion across the starts, humans have realized why nobody is out there. It isn’t that life hasn’t developed all over the universe, but it appears that wherever live has once blossomed, it has been wiped out and planets with live have been properly sterilized, guarded by remnants, robot-like guards ensuring that dead planets remain dead.

Against this backdrop, Scout and his brother Kieran along with their cat roam the universe as “archivists”, trying to find clues to the force that appears to have destroyed life all around (competing for their finds with a group of corporate mercenaries trying to commercially exploit any information found). Curiously, it looks like many dying civilizations have left behind caches of knowledge to preserve their heritage and humans are able to not only unlock those caches, but immediately translates the information contained in these caches into their own language. seems a bit far-fetched, but hey - this is fiction after all.

Things get interesting quickly when Scout and Kieran find a cache on a world previously inhabited by the Stelhari, an eerily human-like species, only to have their find snatched away from them by a pair of mercenaries. What follows is a chase for additional Stelhari artifacts in their local system, but more importantly an exploration of Stelhari culture as Scout is getting lost in the recorded memories of a Stelhari administrator mourning the loss of their partner to the invading force.

This is an entertaining book that begins to map out a sad and scary universe that would be perfectly suited to a broader exploration. Yet, at its core the book focuses on Scout’s exploration of Stelhari culture (which feels very human) as well as the two siblings dealing with the recent loss of their mother to cancer. This does feel like some of the world building is lost to a more narrow novelette.

This book could have been a great beginning to an exploration of what it means to live in a universe haunted by an all-powerful and destructive entity (Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space comes to mind) which would have left plenty of room for a lot of sub stories about societies lost. Instead, it is an entertaining read that unfortunately does not go far enough.