I wanted to like this book, but there were aspects of it that I could not get past. It does well in giving us a vision of the future that feels like the right balance of idealistic and pessimistic. Beyond that, however it gives a perspective on the value of diversity that is pretty cis and white.

Yes, the vast majority of the human crew are shades of brown, she used the gender neutral pronouns xe/xir in dialog, and Dr. Chef started his life out as female, but these were all surface level representation of diversity.

The POCness of the crew was pretty much only skin-deep. They were basically white characters with brown skin, which assumes that in the far future, the only culture we will have retained as humans would be white American culture.

One of the things that bothered me was the seeming rejection of the concept of trans or non-binary people. Case in point, in the first few chapters, she makes a point to say that “they” is only used as a plural pronoun, and only ever uses xe/xir to represent a question of the gender binary when no gender is known (as opposed to using neopronouns for a non-binary gender). This was all used to introduce a character who is literally represented as a pair of beings and thus uses “they/them“ pronouns. Moreover, the only character who changes gender is a literal alien. This kind of setup (non binary people don’t exist and trans people are aliens) is a good breeding ground for TERF ideas.

I think the author had a good idea with this book, but the execution could have been better.