(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
This one is.
This phrase, which distills into three short but carefully chosen words a centred approach to life that forces, in the best way, to only think and concentrate on the present, repeats over and over in the imaginative joy that is The Last Gifts of the Universe by Riley August.
The premise of the book, however, may make you wonder when you would have time to ponder the now rather the what-is-to-be, predicated as it is on the idea that humanity has finally ventured out into the universe and beyond its own colonised systems, has discovered that the stars are full of dead civilisations.
But not just dead; absolutely, hermetically, ruthlessly and brutally wiped off the face of existence, even the last biota of the planet taken away, erased, leaving nothing but sterile rocks with decaying and broken civilisational vestiges waiting to be explored.
Which is precisely what Scout, her brother Kieran and their feisty and occasionally vocally sentient cat, Pumpkin, are doing when we meet them.
Happy, well somewhat, aboard their small spaceship, the Waning Crescent, they are Archivists, charged by the not-for-profit organisation they work for with retrieving what vestiges of these scoured ancient societies they can find and bringing them back for urgent study.
Theirs is an organisation dedicated solely to the pursuit of knowledge, both for its own sake, and to ensure humanity has a way of defending itself when the time comes.
‘Ready?’ Kieran asks.
I take a shaky breath and nod, lowering myself over the edge. Pumpkin does not like this either. His little feet flail helplessly as he lets out a protesting meow.
‘Same,’ I say and let gravity take us.
For the narrative ticking clock, and the propellant of Scout and Kieran’s urgent mission in The Last Gifts of the Universe, is the foreboding sense that sooner rather than later what killed the inhabitants of Planet 357 and so many others will come for human civilisation and that maybe, dear gods just maybe, one of the dead worlds out there may hold the secret to making sure that people don’t suffer the same fate as their alien neighbours.
It’s a race then, and a desperate one, and one on which the Archivists are not left alone to the purity of their search.
They are up against more profit-driven groups, equipped with better tech and a keen eye for the bottom line that means anything useful that is found is commercially weaponised and sold off to people for a price; there’s no sense of recovering ancient secrets for the common good nor that humanity is all in this together.
Much like the race to avert climate change in our day and age, which you suspect is one allegory for The Last Gifts of the Universe, humanity isn’t banding together to fight an unseen but expected foe but rather seeing if a profit can be made, rather ghoulishly, from the end of the world.
Not a smart strategy, since it diverts attention and time and resources, but it is what it is and Scout, who loves being out among the stars and Kieran (not so much) have no choice to race from signal to signal and hope that they are the first ones there.
(courtesy official Riley August Twitter/X account)
Hanging over their story the whole time in The Last Gifts of the Universe is this idea that each moment might be your last.
That each day humanity wakes up and looks to see what lie ahead might include the arrival of its doom, for why should it be spared what has befallen so many other once vibrant and bustling worlds?
If that seems doom-laden and oppressive, to some extent it is, and it certainly colours the way life is lived but what imbues The Last Gifts of the Universe with a sense of real hope is not just that they will find this longed-for salvational tech but that while they are waiting for it to ping the universe, that they are in the moment, however fractured and uncertain that may be.
This one is.
It means that even one though Scout and Kieran find themselves in real danger much of the time, competing with well-equipped commercial teams who will likely stop at nothing to get their profit-boosting prize, and that their own future is far from assured, that they can at least take comfort in the moments they occupy.
It may not save the world but it will save their mental health and in a society watched over by the certainty of collective, absolute death, if not today then eventually, that’s a prize and a consolation worth fighting to get and to hold and to keep.
Before I can turn fully around, fighting the wind to get aboard, she calls, ‘Scout, I can’t let you have that cache. Just know that.’
Woven throughout this book is the story of one of the “survivors” of these alien purges, a person who exists only in holographic form, their essence preserved only in 0s and 1s, their world long gone, their society long extinct but their voice well and truly alive and witnessed by Scout particularly who finds a sense of kinship with a person they can ever truly know.
But it is this person, and the curious relationship Scout develops with them – one way, of course; while the tech is sophisticated, it doesn’t allow for anything more than the watching of a recording, a holographic diary if you like – that grants a potent humanity to The Last Gifts of the Universe.
Even if the story of Scout and Kieran and possibly but likely doomed humanity isn’t enough to stir the soul, the story of this long-dead alien is and it informs the length and breadth of the thoughtfully nuanced and imaginatively world-built plot of The Last Gifts of the Universe which has at its core, what it means to be alive and how that affects everything these people do.
It would all too easy for them to be consumed by the ticking clock of mortality that hangs over them, and to some extent they are, but they are also, in small and big moments alike, and in the heat of action scenes which are big and blockbustery but also quite emotionally intimate too, aware that they must rescue and value what they can, and even if life does change, whether normally or cataclysmically, that must live in the moment and take life for what it is, then and there, for that is all that can really be controlled.
This one is.