Orbit

by Leigh Hellman

Ciaan Gennett isn’t green, despite the brand of light hair that betrays her an Earth mother. A mother she remembers but doesn’t know, who left one day and never came back. Ciaan’s as metal as her home planet—cold and hard and full of so many cracks she’s trying to ignore that she doesn’t have time to wonder about questions that don’t get answers. After one too many run-ins with the law, Ciaan finds herself sentenced to probation at a port facility and given an Prove that your potential is worth believing in. With help from her best friend Tidoris, Ciaan stays away from trouble—and trouble stays away from her. But when a routine refueling turns into a revelation, Ciaan and Tidoris find themselves forced into an alliance with an Earth captain of questionable morality and his stoic, artificially-grown first officer. Their escalating resistance against bureaucratic cover-ups begins unraveling a history of human monstrosity and an ugly truth that Ciaan isn’t so sure she wants to discover. Now they all must decide how far they are willing to dig into humanity's dark desperation—and what they are willing to do about what digs back.

Genres: Science Fiction, Young Adult, Queer, Adult

357 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 18, 2018

About the author

LEIGH HELLMAN is a queer writer, originally from the western suburbs of Chicago, and a graduate of the MA Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After gaining the ever-lucrative BA in English, they spent five years living and teaching in South Korea before returning to their native Midwest.

Leigh’s short fiction and creative nonfiction work has been featured in Hippocampus Magazine, VIDA Review, and Fulbright Korea Infusion Magazine. Their critical and journalistic work has been featured in the American Book Review, the Gwangju News magazine, and the Windy City Times.

Their first novel, Orbit, is a new adult speculative fiction story now available through Snowy Wings Publishing. They also have a historical fantasy piece included in the SWP anthology, Magic at Midnight.

Leigh is a strong advocate for full-day breakfast menus, all varieties of dark chocolate, building a wardrobe based primarily on bad puns, and bathing in the tears of their enemies.

Reviews

[iam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great speculative science fiction!

Content warnings include: disappearance of a parent, court appointments, violence, bullying, labor service and sex work as punishment, human trafficking; mentions of human experiments, torture, invasive procedures resulting in death, sexual abuse, all in the name of science and survival of humanity. I talk about the context of these later in the review.

Orbit is a great read playing in the not so far future where governments built metal planets in the solar system where they sent all the poor people. A few generations later, these p-people (p for project) no longer feel like they are the same as the people on earth, and they no longer care for what's going on there either.
Ciaan stands out among the p-people, not because of who she is but because her mother was from earth. Her mother who never came back after an earth visit.

When Ciaan's list of minor crimes get one entry too long she is sentenced to labor service at the p-planet's central port. Luckily her best friend works there as well, but the two soon get involved with some shady seeming characters, and slowly begin to unearth secrets both personal and global.

While the thing with the p-people and the metal planets for the poor already has it's implications, it's what gets unearthed later on that really disturbed me. When a fertility crisis started on earth, socalled fertility centers emerged, where every sexually mature person had to go for checkups. As it turned out, these centers were highly unethical: human experiments, sexual abuse, forced invasive procedures that bordered on torture and lead to death, leading to the abuse and trauma of billions of people.
This was unearthed and while a few of the perpetrators were tried, many never faced punishment and it's mentioned that many of them believed they did the right thing because all the abuse was done for the good of humanity or whatever. The protagonist finds out that her mother was one of the leading figured behind the fertility centers and what was done there.
As part of the solution for the fertility crisis, artifical humans were created who were supposed to act as surrogates, but this failed, leading to the Artificals becoming a cheap work force mainly used in security. It's not elaborated what sort of rights the Artificals have, but it's implied they are not entirely seen as human.

While Orbit was never boring, instead always being very compelling, I at times didn't even notice when a big reveal happened because it didn't come across to me that the moments were significant, or that it had big implications.

What bothered me the most was how some side plots didn't seem to be resolved or were just insignificant in hindsight. What was the deal with/purpose of You and Me? Where they really siblings? What happened with them? Why were they in the container in the first place? What was up with the baby? And what about Melean? What were his final motives for several of his actions? Was it rly just that he wanted to fuck Ciaan despite hating her??

Overall an engaging read that is definitely thought provoking and grows more disturbing in it's implications the more you think about it.

[Shoshana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this debut novel by Leigh Hellman. The world that was created is massive in scope and yet quite thought provoking regarding contemporary society. I look forward to more adventures with Ciaan and the crew!

[Riley Barnitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my god. I did not realize how much I needed this book in my life! It is so good!

[Lyssa Chiavari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orbit is a book that gets into your brain and doesn’t let go. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I finished reading this excellent sci-fi debut. While set against a fantastical backdrop of spaceships, artificial planets, and genetically engineered soldiers, its core story about family—both blood and found—is one that resonates universally. I was sucked right into Ciaan’s world and the mystery she finds herself embroiled in, and the twists and turns it took kept me on the edge of my seat. A perfect read for fans of Firefly and the Mass Effect video game series!

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ciann Gennett has lived her whole life on a p-planet, a man made, metal planet orbiting Earth to support Earth's excess population.  Ciann's birth mother was an Earther, and Ciann has the hair to prove it, but she sees herself firmly as a p-planet citizen.  Not one to turn down a fight, Ciann finds herself in trouble with the law.  On her latest run in with the law, Ciann receives a labor punishment, working at the port facility.  Luckily, Ciann's best friend Tidoris, has also taken a position at the port facility to help prove to his family that he doesn't need their name or money to succeed. With Tidoris' help, Ciann is staying out of trouble until an Earth pilot, Mael, docks at Ciann's port and asks for her assistance in hiding precious cargo and getting the cargo to a safe place.  Tidoris reluctantly agrees to help, especially when he finds out what the cargo is. While trying to help, Ciann finds out the truth about her birth mother and the difficult situation on Earth. Tidoris concentrates on trying to keep his family, especially his brother from interfering.  


Orbit is an exciting and suspenseful young adult science fiction.  I was intrigued by the idea of the p-planets and the hierarchy that had been developed on them.  Ciann's character immediately caught me with her fiery disposition. I would have loved to know more of her backstory from the beginning to understand her anger. The story picks up as Ciann is placed on labor duty at the port.  The descriptions of the port and seeing space and Earth from the p-planet were amazing.  I liked Mael and the artificial first officer who give context as to what is happening on Earth.  The cargo that they were hiding created an interesting turn of events, I wish I knew more about the characters simply called You and Me.  However, their presence created a situation that led Ciann and Tidoris to learn the truth and find out more about the past. Tidoris' brother is another twist in the story that I wish I knew more about.  The group's mission is exciting and inspirational, ending with a satisfying epilogue. 

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't wanna say I disliked this book because I didn't, but it ended up feeling sort of like a work in progress. Some of the language and descriptions were really lovely and evocative, but there were some errors in editing (a couple missed punctuation marks at the ends of sentences, etc. — but also there was a weird habit of saying "Ciaan'd" instead of "Ciaan had", which I can't say is straight up incorrect but man it comes off as bizarre when it happens like every third page). I don't think the errors should interfere with a great story, but I do feel like they got my guard up and made me suspicious of other editing problems, mainly with the story itself. The first 175-200 pages weren't slow-going in the traditional sense, but once the story kicks into gear around there I realized how much this book was actually trying to say and the complex ideas it wanted to convey — and how much it fell short in giving those ideas the impact they really need. The characters were interesting and I liked them overall ( Nkoti especially was the most interesting to me and my favorite in interactions, with the most consistent character development — but editing-wise they are misgendered at least once, and not in an intentional way). I think there were a bunch of great ideas — I did really like the contrast between Ciaan's first and second mothers and her interpretations/the eventual realities of their histories, as well as the truth about the fertility crisis and how the Artificials fit into that but the story lost the thread of which ideas it really wanted to wrap itself around and ended up not explaining or exploring any as much as they deserved. It's not a super long book to take on so much, and I don't want to say it HAD to be longer, but I do think it needed to be a lot tighter and more precise on world building and character arcs to successfully portray such weighty ideas in 350ish pages.

[John Driscoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 stars for me, rounded up because it finished on a strong note.

Hellman has built an immersive world in which people are living on artificially-constructed satellite worlds known as P-planets, and Earth is more myth than reality. Ciaan is a half-breed - half local stock and half Earthling - whose life is a rough-and-tumble one in which her constant scrapes with the law have ended up with her doing probationary work at the spaceport, with jail time waiting if she screws up one more time. Along with her best friend Tidoris (who chose a technician job at the same spaceport rather than leveraging his influential family name), she tries to get by and stay more-or-less out of trouble, until a routine refuel and repair job drags Ciaan into a web of dangerous interstellar secrets, which may even hold the key to her own past.

This was pretty awesome. It took awhile for the story and characters to click for me, but Orbit eventually came together as a neat story. It touches on issues of gender identity and is (very) mildly suggestive of sexuality without making any of it central to the story or beating the reader over the head with it. You can read romance into it a couple different ways, but there's nothing overt and I like that.

My only qualms are that it took awhile to get into and it ended rather abruptly, but otherwise this was a great read.

[Brooklyn SciFi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, and I read it with my eyes. I was curious about the parallels between the exploitation between the artificial and non-artificial people in the fertility camps but it didn’t seem very fleshed out. The ambrosia salad was delicious. Ah, shit. I read the first two chapters on the train, and they were fine. I think the idea of an entire race of artificial humans still being used after a failed attempt to solve a fertility crisis is a good demonstration of the sunk-cost fallacy. Eh. I don’t know if this was a book but it definitely had a cover. There was no evidence of teledildonics, which was a missed opportunity. This was a fun romping origin story and I would like to see where the crew’s adventures go from here. I would have liked the romance and sex to be much more explicit. Pacing issues, man. I was thinking I might actually finish this one but based on this discussion, no. The addition of the fertility stuff makes this a fascinating prequel to the mobile suit Gundam universal century timeline. This book was basically Children of Men but all the boring stuff that happened in space that no one cared about. There’s great things that come from independent publishers and there’s bad things that come from independent publishers, and this was one of them. I want more space pirates.
3.125/5

[Andrea Stoeckel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Don’ t do something if you’re unwilling to face the consequences“

This will be a hard review to write without spoilers, so I’m going to focus on how I personally feel about the book.

First- the cover art is gorgeous! Second: the story is amazing and characters are truly unforgettable. Ciaan is fully formed and brilliant. Dorie is trying to make it on his own, but is willing to throw his name around to cut through the “shibal” and get to the simple truth. From the time Ciaan meets Lieutenant 2719-“Aaniin” through the time she meets 1119-“Nkoti”, Ciaan’s past knowledge of everything changes as she goes from being a recruit to a resistance fighter. And Mael is...a big teddy bear shoved into a space pirate’s body.

I read this almost all the way through in one sitting it was so compelling. It made me laugh and cry and wanting to stalk the author. Thank you #SnowyWingsPublishing for taking a chance on this author. You’ve hit this out of the park in this reviewer’s opinion. Best SciFi book for 2018. Highly recommended. 5/5

[disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher and I chose to voluntarily review it]

[Lenni A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Committed troublemaker Ciaan Gennet runs afoul of the law one too many times and ends up sentenced to probation at a spaceship port facility. He blonde hair makes her a target for bullies so she hopes to keep her head down and serve her time without incident. But when a captain with obviously suspicious cargo docks his ship, Ciaan gets caught up in a multiplanet conspiracy that puts her life in great danger.

Perhaps a little slow going until Ciaan ends up on the spacecraft but it's still interesting. Great characters, awesome worldbuilding, and a great spin on some dystopian concepts. We have a smart woman of color as our main lead and I love reading about a motley crew of space rebels. Very cool book. 4.9 out of 5.

[Mayu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orbit is set in future where new metal planets have been made in order manage the over population of Earth. 78 yrs before the story starts, the first batch of Earth people were deployed to p-planets after which they have created a world of their own in different p planets. Our main character Ciaan belongs to a p-planet called Toi.

Orbit is full of adventure and mystery which kept me at the edge of my seat right from the very first page. I loved the backdrop of artificial planet and inter planet communications. I also loved the character of Ciaan and her friend Dori and their rock-solid friendship.

This science fiction is must read for all science fiction fans. And if you are not a sci-fi reader and would like to try something different then this is the book to buy.

****I received a free copy of Orbit from the publisher in exchange for review consideration****

[Muriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast-paced with a strong, female lead in an immersive world.