Dark Orbit

by Carolyn Ives Gilman

Upon arrival, the team finds an extraordinary crystalline planet, laden with dark matter. A crew member is found murdered and Thora mysteriously disappears. Thought to be uninhabited, the planet is in truth home to a native blind populace, who navigate their world with a bizarre vocabulary and extrasensory perceptions. Lost in the deep caves of the planet among these people, Thora must battle her demons and learn to master these mystical faculties in order to find her crew-mates, and warn them of an impending danger. But her most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lie beyond the boundaries of science.

• ISBN10: 0765336308
• ISBN13: 9780765336309
• Publish Date: 10 May 2016 (first published 14 July 2015)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 19 January 2022
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Tor Books
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[Metaphorosis Reviews]

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Humans spread across the galaxy in the fabled First Diaspora. Now, a scout ship has found a bizarre planet that appears uninhabited. But then a girl mysteriously appears and upsets everyone's expectations.

Review
Clearing up my confusion about authors named Gilman (partially, because I then realized there’s also Laura Anne Gilman, whom I haven’t yet read, I think), reminded me that I still had this book waiting in the wings.

I enjoyed Dark Orbit, and in some ways Gilman repeats her effort to make us see cultures and relationships from a new angle, I felt the effort was far more awkward and less successful this time. For one thing, the clash is primarily between everyday sighted humans and those who have lost the ability to see. The sighted have what I felt was an extraordinary inability to understand those without sight (they’re not exactly blind) and a similarly extraordinary resistance to taking obvious steps to better understand them. Overall, it felt like forced authorial intervention to heighten the stress and stakes, rather than an organic and credible response by the characters.

Gilman posits an interesting variation on the teleportation-by-imagination trope, but in the end doesn’t really do much with it. It’s so underplayed that it barely feels part of the story. The same is true for a subplot involving deification and revolt on a distant planet – it keeps cropping up, but always feels like an afterthought rather than the concept central to one character’s history that it’s meant to be. There's also a tinge of 'wise native'/'noble savage' that I felt could easily have been avoided.

While I’ve previously found Gilman’s touch to be fairly deft, this book felt like a draft that would have benefited from several more rounds of integration and cohesion-building. Enjoyable, but not the eye-opening book it might have been.

It’s also mildly irritating that thee/thou forms are used inconsistently (“though hath a knack”, but later “thou dost need”), though that could be argued away as diverging dialects.