Apparently I didn’t review either Ancestral Night or Machine? Oops.

Quick recap: very far future, galactic colonisation, (most) humans live alongside other species, they have ‘right-minding’ to deal with anti-social tendencies, and there’s an ongoing search for the remnants of long-dead very powerful alien predecessors. Also, there’s FTL travel, through White Space.

The three books in the White Space series are connected by being set in the same universe and dealing with some of the big issues, and events from previous books make the next books happen, but there’s basically no character connections.

In this book, the archinformist (historian) Dr Sunya Song has left her family to go do research in one of the most exciting discoveries in centuries – an ancient AI left by that predecessor civilisation. Of course, things do not go at all as planned, starting with the very snarky AI ship she travels on, moving rapidly to a pirate attack, and then the arrival of her arch-nemesis. And there are the actual and attempted murders.

This is a space opera, with a whole lot of discussion about inter-species relationships on a personal and societal level, with both the continuation of racism and the desire to understand The Stranger playing significant roles. There’s also some interesting crossover between this and Arrival / “Story of Your Life” in terms of how someone can come to understand a species whose entire way of looking at reality is utterly different from your own.

On a more mundane level, this is also a murder mystery, since Song gets involved in that side of things, when perhaps she shouldn’t.

Overall this is a really fun story, with characters I enjoyed and a plot whose resolution I didn’t entirely expect. However I must note that there were disappointments, particularly in some poor editing. For example on p414 of the trade paperback, and a few other times, questions are asked and then not answered in the conversation. Obviously this is sometimes deliberate, but there’s no suggestion that’s the case here – it just feels like a line is missing. There’s also some repetition of information that feels like it’s been doubled up because someone wasn’t sure where it should go.

Will I read another book in this series? Of course I will.