Miles Cameron’s space opera Artifact Space opens with a very action-forward sequence that sees Marca Nbaro, the protagonist, running away from space cops to board a huge cargo ship called the Athens because her dream has always been to work and serve at that ship.
The opening goes from exciting to mundane seamlessly, foreshadowing how the rest of the novel will transpire. Artifact Space puts Nbaro at the forefront of life in a spaceship, blending work and adventure. As the Athens is a merchant ship, its sole purpose is to reach a far-off system to trade gold for the precious xenoglas—the material almost everything is made of—with the Starfish, an alien race. Space hijinks, battles, conspiracies, and betrayal ensue to spice things up.
Something that is initially noticeable about this story is that it demands your full attention. This is a deep-dive novel, and boy does it deliver. The immersion is not immediate—you do have to get used to the tone and the pace—but patience is rewarded. The pace is mostly slow, and the story takes you first through the secrecy of boarding the ship clandestinely and then through the adaptation process that comes once Nbaro is settled in. You learn about the ship and about the universe alongside Nbaro, and you venture into this new world with almost the same knowledge as her. Life aboard the ship might be repetitive at times, but it is never boring. The language is thorough, and descriptions are evocative. It may not always be glamorous, but it always feels true to the world the story is set in.
As most of the novel is spent explaining life on the ship and how the world works, it is normal the language around space travel turns a little technical and specialized. It is not too technical that loses the reader immediately—I managed to read over a lot of the maths and physics of space travel without losing track of the general plot. However, after finishing a section heavy on science, I was left with a feeling of having missed something because I did not quite understand what was going on. I was left out due to my own shortcomings in physics because the school system failed me, to be honest.
Artifact Space is told through Nbaro’s point of view, so the reader is also privy to her thoughts. Nbaro is a lovable character—a misfit with a heart of gold that was wronged by the system, works hard for what she wants, and suffers from hero complex. However, she is a little too self-deprecating for me, particularly because she has a hard time establishing relationships with other characters in the ship. Who, by the way, are really nice and also likable, and their humor bleeds through the pages. The novel develops the found-family trope quite nicely with an underlying feeling of a horizontal hierarchy: no matter their rank, all officers are the same during lunchtime.
The novel also draws on the common ground of the Earth and history we know: Nbaro has read plenty of public domain novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and there are some customs aboard the ship that come from twentieth and twenty-first centuries pop culture. Additionally, the novel flirts a little with comedy as it describes something normal for human life in our time but in a completely othering and alien way for humans living in the future and in space.
Artifact Space should be in your TBR pile if you are looking for a space epic to lose yourself in for a while, enjoy a slow pace alternated with tense action scenes, want to get to know a band of lovable characters, enjoy the technicalities around space travel, and vibe with science-heavy narratives.
Adriana Acevedo is an editor, writer, and sleep paralysis demon. She's been published in magazines like samfiftyfour and Impostor. She's bilingual and living in the monstruos Mexico City. Whenever she's not reading horror stories or watching horror movies, she's baking sourdough bread. Read more of her writing here.