The Iron Garden Sutra
Book 1 of the Cosmic Wheel
Eight people are trapped on an ancient space voyaging ship in A.D. Sui’s locked room novel, The Iron Garden Sutra.
Vessel Iris, a monk of the Starlit Order, and his embedded AI companion, VIFAI, board the generation ship Counsel of Nicaea with two goals: to shepherd the dead to their final resting place and to meditate in the complete silence of low-orbit. They were not expecting seven living companions: two security guards, a botanist, an archaeologist, and three engineers, all with plans to extract and study the ship’s technology and artifacts.
As Iris explores, he finds unsettling murals depicting life aboard the ship, each more violent than the last. They feature an ominous red camera eye. When VIFAI alerts him to an unknown digital ping and outside communications are cut off, Iris begins to believe there is more to the Nicaea than even her impossible rainforest suggests.
Creeping dread suffuses the text as VIFAI continues to track the mysterious ping and Iris feels pulsing deep within the ship. The book’s morbid humor is unexpected, but not misplaced. It is balanced by earnest emotion and overwhelming fear as the crew copes with the slow realization that they are being hunted. The momentum is interrupted by late interstitial chapters presented as lessons about the tenets of the Starlit Order.
The book is as meditative as Iris, who has deep emotional wounds and is prone to musings on human nature and the twin feelings of grief and anger. The book uses Iris and his interactions with VIFAI and the others aboard the Nicaea to tackle dramatic philosophical questions of ethics, sentience, and embodied existence.
In the horrifying science fiction novel The Iron Garden Sutra, the limits of technological development are tested, with and without human intervention.
Reviewed by
Dontaná McPherson-Joseph
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