primeideal

Ada Hoffmann first came to my attention via The Neurodiversiverse anthology. This is the first installment in a trilogy. In a future where superintelligent AI are worshiped as gods, an autistic scientist accidentally causes a disaster on a space station. As a result, she's basically kidnapped by angels working for the god Nemesis, who need her help in tracking down her former doctorate advisor. Both the forces of Nemesis and the heretic Dr. Talirr have the potential to cause terror, so Yasira does a lot of bouncing between a rock and a hard place. "The Outside" refers to forces beyond our universe's space and time, which occasionally breach containment and cause "madness" in onlookers, but of course, "madness" is subjective. (In the acknowledgements, Hoffmann places this book within the stream of "Lovecraftian subversion.")

The worldbuilding of AI-as-gods requiring mortal trust to perpetuate themselves, and eventually absorbing human souls after they die, is fascinating. Ditto some humans' desire to build their own space stations without relying on godly technology. The glimpses we get of other alien species are great:

Your Boater dictionary had two words in it before you started drawing on my work. And both the words were variations on 'destroy the soul-eating abominations.'

...

However, any culture studied in sufficient detail will yield up a word, and often a fairly sophisticated system of safeguards and protections, for the things in this universe which are inherently incomprehensible to sentient minds. The semantics of the word chosen can be culturally informative. My favorite, of course, is the Spider term: Ȋsȋrinin-neri-ȋnik, or 'that which eats reality.'

Yasira comes from a culture that's comparatively accessible for disabled and neurodiverse people, and that filters through early. This description felt true-to-life:

Yasira's neurotype was supposed to be all about joy, about being so in love with science and knowledge and patterns that they eclipsed everything else. She'd been like that as a child, throwing herself into dusty physics texts the way other kids played games or ate candy. So excited when she tackled a new problem that she'd abruptly throw the book down and run around the house laughing. At some point, maybe in grad school, that had faded somehow. Who knew why? She was still good at the things people liked her to do, so there wasn't much wrong. Maybe it was just part of growing up.

I would have liked to see even more contrasts of how someone like Yasira might relate to angels or nonhuman entities differently than other humans would. This struck me as strange:

Akavi peered over Yasira's shoulder at the chart of the galaxy. This was unnecessary, since he had downloaded the chart into his head and could mentally examine it from whatever angle he pleased. But the physical signs of shared attention helped put mortals at ease.

The Outside, by definition, is outside ordinary understanding and language, so any depiction of it is inherently vague. It wasn't too much gross-out horror for me, but I'm not super into "we can't describe it, it was just some bizarre wrongness."

I would have liked more worldbuilding about what happens to humans after they die and how that relates to the gods. Yasira, quite understandably, is reluctant to do things that will get people killed; life, even life with some "madness," is better than death! But in a world where the existence of afterlives is common knowledge rather than a matter of faith, I imagine people's ethical calculations would be different in some circumstances. I didn't get enough of "how divine are the 'gods,' really" to feel like I necessarily understood Yasira's reactions.

I'm also kind of burned out on "let's watch our hero bravely and selflessly being tortured by the antagonists, or the antagonists threatening her loved one to keep her in line" plotlines.

Yasira's girlfriend, Tiv, comes from a culture with great names and nicknames: "Tiv" is short for Productivity, "Citizenship" goes by "Ship," etc. Yasira struggles to have faith in the gods or experience religious transcendence; she looks to Tiv as an example of how a "good girl" would behave. Unfortunately, most of the time she's offscreen, and it's mostly like "if you ever want to see Tiv again, you better do as we say." We don't get a good sense of what Tiv sees in Yasira; to me, these sorts of relationships can come off as "anxious autistic person and their emotional support neurotypical." I understand that some people will value seeing f/f romance depicted in these settings! In my entirely personal opinion, I would have liked to see other kinds of relationships in Yasira's life.

(There is also a very funny subplot involving an angel who's crushing on his clueless boss, featuring a great Ironic Echo resolution.)

Bingo: Gods and Pantheons, LGBTQIA protagonist, Impossible Places, Epistolary (almost every chapter starts with an in-universe epigraph)