Far from the Light of Heaven was not what I expected it to be. I thought it was going to be a space opera, but it’s not. Heaven is a closed room mystery set in space, and it’s excellent. The story begins with Michelle “Shell” Campion, the first officer of the Ragtime. Shell’s training for her job as the first officer, which turns out to be a redundant job. Ragtime is not just a ship; it’s an AI housed in a ship. Its job is to transport sleeping humans from Earth to the distant colony planet Bloodroot. Shell comes from a space-faring family and decides to skip the traditional NASA route and go straight into space as part of the private sector. Her job will be as backup in case of AI malfunction. In Shell’s world, AI’s don’t malfunction; so, in reality, her job is to sleep for the travel time from Earth to Bloodroot. Wake up for a bit. Go back to sleep, and travel back to Earth. Easy peasy. Except when Ragtime arrives at Bloodroot, Shell awakens to find thirty-ish passengers dead and the AI reduced to a more primitive state. Rasheed Fin, a disgraced repatriotator, lives on Bloodroot and is trying to get his job back. While tinkering with 3D printed weapons that he makes, Fin receives a call. He is to fly up to Ragtime to investigate what is happening. Joining him will be an Artificial, Salvo, that he’s worked with in the past. Salvo is an artificial human being; an AI in a bipedal body. The two travel to space to meet Shell. It seems someone woke up before the scheduled time and began killing. That someone is still on the ship because where else would one go in space. Fin and Salvo look for the killer suspecting everyone on board, even Shell, who has to keep the ship running and in orbit around Bloodroot.

Far from the Light of Heaven is a close, third person point of view novel set mostly on a ship in space. It does travel to other locations like Bloodroot, the Space Station Lagos, and even Earth. Most of the story takes place inside the ship’s hull, and there’s lots of action there. One of my favorite early bits comes from Shell seeing a wolf roaming around the ship despite there being no wolves on the passenger or shipping manifest. She begins to wonder if it’s a hallucination or if something from the special projects portion of the ship got loose. The answer is better than either of those questions.

Thompson wrote a novel filled with interesting ideas. In the afterword, he says he wanted to set his story in a space that was derived from the actual experiences of astronauts rather than the tropes that make up SFF. Space is a stress filled place, and Thompson does a great job of writing about them. Far from the Light of Heaven treats space similarly to how The Expanse series treats it. Thompson tried to ground as much of the physics in reality as possible; he also went beyond just physics to deal with the psychological stresses. Shell throughout the book stresses the need for routines, and this is something that isn’t given much thought in space fiction. There will be no diurnal cycle in space. The sun doesn’t rise or set. It’s either visible because you’re in a local system or it’s too distant for useable amounts of light to travel to you. Scheduled routines will be necessary for humans to maintain sanity and be able to operate in that environment. Thompson’s inclusion of habitability aspects made me love this book.