THE SIXTH NIK
DANIEL KRAUS
Saga Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Perfectly aligned for readers of Iain M. Banks’s The Culture series and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, The Sixth Nik is a galaxy spanning adventure from the New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Angel Down and Whalefall.
Deep into space, far past the triworld outposts, beyond range of the lethal trollbot internet, soars The Sickness: a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew. Sisilla, a nine-year-old cultist with a brain enhanced by arcane tech known as “niks,” has boarded to investigate the enigma of Fém—a plague-riddled planet that has abruptly gone rogue.
The mysterious crew includes a faceless assassin, a beautiful engineer jigsawed by plastic surgery, a peyote-addicted medic, and—most lethal of all—a rugged, NonModded captain with a score to settle with Sisilla. Other dangers abound. A hacked robot begins to believe Sisilla is its daughter. The Sickness itself is mutating, possibly even pregnant. And the secret of Fém is more horrific than anyone could have imagined. To survive, Sisilla will need to forsake her predetermined fate and embrace the unknown.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Sisilla is a weird protagonist. She knows when she will die: after she completes her "Chore," the issue/problem/situation her birth family gave her life to resolving with the aid of major surgical brain modification and enhancement by alien tech. It's...distancing, for we-the-reader and most certainly for the Inuit people her birth family sent her to live among (it's the custom, it's required). She is the fifty-fifth child to have this life wished on her before she's got anything like the ability to offer consent, and then there's the fact that she will be killed when her "Chore" is complete. The alien-tech brain mods, the "niks," will be removed from her dead brain, the next sacrificial child will be found and modified, and giant social/technical/existential problems will be solved.
I was appalled and repulsed by this system of abusive exploitation. I was revolted by the most bizarrely powered transport that took Sisilla from her place of education and preparation into distant reaches of space, that "plasmagraphic" ship's name...The Sickness...apt for the ship and the "Chore" Sisilla is to accomplish at the cost of her life. This being Author Kraus, I was expecting seriously effective descriptive language everywhere. I got it in spades. I've seldom liked a character I sympathized with *less* than Sisilla, mostly because the Omelas-ness of her world is a truly effective backdrop for creating kind feelings by way of contrast. I was actually nauseated by The Sickness, thus felt a reluctant protective urge towards the child it was created to transport. A misplaced emotion...Sisilla is not a person in need of protection, but one to be protected against as normalizing a brutal, utilitarian corruption of innocence in a very questionable enterprise. I won't call it a cause.
I finished this read in May. I wrote three reviews, discarded them for being inaccurate and overly emotive. This review goes up no matter what. Author Kraus does a tremendous job of creating fascinating, flawed, awful human being protagonists in the two books of his I have now read. I know a lot of people read Angel Down (review linked on first reference) very differently than I did...it is my favorite WWI novel, despite the war being only the setting of a far, far more damning commentary on capitalism, anomie, and sociopathy writ large. Its commentary would not be as effective as it is were it set in another time and place. That is why I call it my favorite WWI novel. I won't call The Sixth Nik my favorite SF novel, or my favorite alien-contact novel; it is my favorite body horror novel. This is a finely gauged story that evokes sympathy and disgust simultaneously. There is a direct presentation of revolting meaty awfulness. Then there is, as one thinks about it, an awful emotionally excavating familiarity to its meaty awfulness. It is a story wherein People...that giant amorphous guilt-ameliorating construct...have chosen to sacrifice the humanity and the life of a little girl to solve a problem more quickly, more expeditiously, more seamlessly, at that cost.
Is the bell ringing yet?
So this read is not for everyone, not likely to be one you'll undertake unless you are willing to spelunk some dark caves of the soul with only a little light to carry with you. It will reward you with an undistorted assessment of the world, the humans in it, and (from Shakespeare in Love, remember that film?) a bit with a dog aptly named "Positive Roy." I suspect the fairly heavy-handed symbolism of the ship's mode of propulsion...one of my few true objections to the not-subtle nature of the story's worldbuilding...will cause eye-rolling. I offer to the rolled eye a reminder of "the Snarl," an equally unsubtle but much more palatable metaphor for tech-mediated human communication, and quite possibly an equally useful organizing principle to use along with Cory Doctorow's "enshittification."
Would I recommend you read this story? Yes. Do I expect you will? Not many of you. Do I hope you will try to overcome your reluctance to engage with something this complicated emotionally?
Very much. I did. I got a lot out of reflecting, revisiting, rethinking my ideas in this story's mirrors.
