The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis (science fiction, 342 pages) was another book from my holiday book exchange.

“First Sister has no name and no voice. As a priestess of the Sisterhood, she travels the stars alongside the soldiers of Earth and Mars – the same ones who own the rights to her body and soul. When her former captain abandons her, First Sister’s hopes for freedom are dashed as she is forced to stay on her ship with no friends, no power, and a new captain – Saito Ren – whom she knows nothing about. She is commanded to spy on Captain Ren by the Sisterhood, but soon discovers that working for the war effort is so much harder to do when you’re falling in love. Lito sol Lucius climbed his way out of the slums to become an elite soldier of Venus, but was defeated in combat by none other than Saito Ren, resulting in the disappearance of his partner, Hiro. When Lito learns that Hiro is both alive and a traitor to the cause, he now has a shot at redemption: track down and kill his former partner. But once he discovers recordings that Hiro secretly made, Lito’s own allegiances are put to the test. Ultimately, he must decide between following orders and following his heart.”

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW

I have a lot of thoughts about this book and I’m not quite sure which ones will actually show up in this review. As a general rule, I tend to not write up reviews for books not to my taste with living authors, as I understand how hard writing novels is and how much words can cause damage, even words on a tiny website with no influence. So while I have read the entire Red Rising series by Pierce Brown, you will not find any reviews to that series here. When the First Sister arrived as part of the winter holiday book exchange and the comment on the back indicated if you enjoyed Red Rising, you would enjoy this book, I was immediately leery.

The First Sister is a space opera novel, the first in a trilogy, which shows the darkness of humanity’s future in space. Even the idea of being so far in the future we’ve colonized several planets and yet there’s an entire religious organization devoted to enslaving and selling young women as legitimized soldiers’ property is horrifying. The fact that the entire order is of women and anyone on the ship is allowed and encouraged to use these women however they see fit made me angry that we as a species have continued to allow women, and only women, to be subjected to worse and worse religious subjection. And even though this novel takes place far in the future, we have the echoes of that religious subjection right here, right now, in our very own modern world that continues to deny women proper health care and control over our own bodies.

So showing that the universe actually gets WORSE for women?

Yeah.

There are a lower class of men called the Cousins on the ship, and they function as janitors and other people for those on the ship as soldiers to abuse, and they are lower on the hierarchical ladder than the Sisters but it still bothers me that women again bear the brunt of especially sexual abuse. And I guess it bothers me more that in the future, military forces are still seen as base humans who are shallow, crave violence, and are still inclined only towards their animalistic behaviors.

But. I will say that the abuse in the beginning of the novel is perhaps intended to show the overarching cost and stupidity of war, as the warmongers do some legit horrible things to the characters in this novel. I think it’s also a testament to how cult religions and war work hand-in-hand to take everything from everyone. As the book progresses, once you get passed striping a young woman naked in front of the entire ship’s crew and sending her out the airlock so she can die in space in front of everyone, the book does a lot more to show how those in charge of war will often go to great lengths to ensure war continues.

As the book progresses, readers become more familiar with the plight of the Asters, who are a true slave-race in the universe. They are shown in the beginning of the book to be inhuman and as the story progresses and the characters are faced with more challenges, the Asters take a much bigger role and are humanized in ways most “others” in our modern society can relate to, especially since governments, military, and corporations deny their existence, their rights, and even use them for experiments.

It’s a horrible, and accurate, truth about how humans are societally programmed to disdain those they believe are “beneath” them, or at the very least, to turn a blind eye to those they’ve been raised to see as not human at all. There are a lot of populations in our own world right now who are very familiar with living as an “othered” population, QUILTBAG personnel among them.

Overall, the beginning of this book was definitely rough but the end has a more hopeful sense of making the universe a better place. I think I would have to reserve full judgement until reading the entire series, but I think this would be a two on my rating scale. Without knowing how the series ends and addresses a lot of the over-arching concerns, I don’t know that I would read it again.

Lewis, Linden. The First Sister. Skybound Books, 2020.