This is my third review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for the semifinal round of SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.
The book is Yours Celestially by Al Hess. It is available from Itch.Io. Al also wrote Mazarin Blues, which was a semifinalist in SPSFC #1.
Blurb
From the author: Yours Celestially is a cozy, gay, and extra weird sci-fi that I hope you fall madly in love with. There’s a biblically accurate A.I., completely bonkers visuals, and bionic penis jokes. It’s set in a hopeful, queernorm, and diverse city full of plants, cute bakeries, cob houses, and found families.
My Review
This is a warm, funny sci fi story about a few people with challenges, both external and self-imposed, who lean on each other and their friends for help and for hope. Some interesting sci-fi concepts are mixed with heartfelt romance. This was without a doubt the most feel-good book of any I’ve read for this competition, and it is well worth a look.
Plot and Characters
There are two POV characters in the book. One is Sasha, a man who’s recently gone through a paid resurrection. This service, provided by a high-tech company, is pretty readily available, and many people make use of it. For most, it is an insurance policy against an accident death or fatal illness, but in some interesting cases, people with self-destructive habits or behaviors die and come back too. Sasha is one of these, an addict whose life fell apart well before his death. As the book opens, he’s recently back from the dead and trying to do better by his friends and family, but he’s not doing great despite their support.
The other POV character is Metatron, an AI construct created by the resurrection company. Metatron helps people going through the resurrection process. Their minds and personalities are digitally recorded, and when they die, they spend a little time in Limbo, an artificial reality, before new bodies can be grown for them and their psyches can be reimplanted.
The wall between Limbo and the real world should be impregnable, but Metatron is a caring protector and helper, and they sometimes connect the deceased with the real world in special cases. In Sasha’s case, though, he is awash in Metatron’s emotions despite having completed his resurrection. This shouldn’t happen, and it’s significantly affecting his health, both physical and mental, in the real world.
There are a host of other characters, some with major roles, others more secondary, and the little communities each of the main characters inhabits are the real joy of the book.
My Thoughts
The sci fi in this book follows a common trope – a world much like our modern one but with one additional mysterious bit beyond our reality. In this case, that’s resurrection, and the book explores the process, the outcomes, a little of the social controversy, and some of the technology Hess imagines for such a world. The weird futurism isn’t the point here, though. The point is following both of these protagonists as they make parallel journeys towards courage, self-acceptance, and love. The journey for each is different, but both are well-described and made meaningful both by the characters themselves and by the reactions of the people they interact with.
That’s not to say there isn’t tension or setback or betrayal or machinations – there’s some of each – but the focus is really on the two leads becoming whole. In Sasha’s case, that’s fixing what was broken, and in Metatron’s case, that’s discovery of how much more is possible than constraints would seem to allow.
There is real joy here, as both of these people, one damaged, one a victim of circustance, find ways to get to the love they want and need. And the feel-good part of the book comes from the people rooting for each of them to succeed. Both have wonderful found families, and the richness of their relationships with those others is what leaves you smiling when the book is done. Much of the story arc wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie, but the characterization is deliciously rich and deep here, and of course you don’t see Hallmark movies featuring AI angels or spare bodies grown in vats.
My only criticism of the book isn’t a big one at all – I just found the opening 30% or so to be a little slow, with both characters spending a lot of time wallowing in their problems and not taking much action to resolve them. Not a big deal, and the payoff when they both stepped up was well worth it. Some big twists revealed in the second half keep the story hopping and make you fear for these people you come easily to care about.
There’s some woo-woo stuff here that’s plot-convenient and never really explained. It’s kind of written off as “we don’t really understand the full mechanics of the resurrection process,” but to me, it seemed like you still needed some magic to produce the effects described. Again, no big deal, and explaining it would have diminished the magic of the story, so I think it was a good choice.
Summation
A delightful, well-written, unabashedly feel-good story about love, redemption, and found family. Highly recommended.