The novel “The Stars Are Legion” by Kameron Hurley was published for the first time in 2017.
Zan wakes up without any memory and has to trust what she’s told by the women of the Katazyrna family, who claim to be her sisters. One of them in particular, Jayd, explains what’s supposed to be her destiny, how she faced the Mokshi, unique among the various worlds of the Legion. Her journey will be long and full of dangers but to accomplish it she must first of all avoid getting recycled.
Jayd wants to help Zan but gets involved in power struggles within the Katazyrna family and in clashes with their rivals, the Bhavaja family. An arranged marriage for strategic reasons makes her switch one danger for another, especially when personal relationships intertwine in twisted ways with loyalties with her family of origin.
“The Stars Are Legion” begins by throwing the readers into a world, which is actually a group of worlds, really peculiar where they can initially share their confusion with Zan, one of the protagonists, who wakes up without any memory. Zan tells in the first person part of the novel in which she tries to understand who she is and to recover her memory while someone considers her the savior and understanding what that means is part of her research.
The first face that Zan sees when she awakens is Jayd’s, who tells in the first person another part of the novel that concerns the relationships between two worlds in particular, Katazyrna and Bhavaja, through her experiences in the midst of an intrigue. These are dangerous machinations that include betrayals and power struggles that can easily lead a woman to be killed, or rather to be recycled since people’s bodies get recycled. In the novel there are not only references but much more about that with some descriptions that could be very well part of a splatter story.
Putting together the stories of the two narrators Zan and Jayd, readers can slowly start putting together information on the worlds of the Legion. “The Stars Are Legion” isn’t the type of novel in which in the end everything is clarified so if you prefer to get to know everything concerning a work’s fictional universe this is not for you. Kameron Hurley merely provides details based on the knowledge the two protagonists have of the Legion, which is limited because they don’t know their origins nor if they have a destination.
A general decay that in an organic world means decomposition leads to wars between the worlds of the Legion and Zan is considered the key to victory. The clashes are brutal and ruthless and “The Stars Are Legion” isn’t a story of good versus evil because it’s difficult to find a character that can be called good. It can be said that by examining the various characters’ motivations one can assess the various levels of their tendency to kill, a characteristic that certainly doesn’t help to make the characters likeable.
The Legion’s worldbuilding has an interesting potential in which Kameron Hurley mixed up narrative elements already seen, sometimes very classic, in a personal way. My main problem is that I didn’t find the machinations mentioned in the initial part didn’t seem particularly developed. Zan’s adventure seemed to me a sort of journey into the underworld with a subsequent rise full of rather random events, and in the end I didn’t find Jayd’s story very sophisticated either.
Overall, “The Stars Are Legion” seemed to me above all a brutal struggle for survival in an environment that favors the crudest elements of the characters’ existence. For this reason, it’s a story that is almost more horror than science fiction. If that’s enough for you, you might like this novel.
