AfterLIfe: An Undead Space Opera by BL Craig | 07/06/2021 |BooksGoSocial
William Butcher seems to have it made. Chiseled good looks, decorated Navy pilot, hero of the Miranda conflict where he turned the tide against alien invaders about to overrun a colony. He’s even about to propose to his gal. One thing you can count on in AfterLife, the debut outing for the writing team of Brandy and Lorne Craig, is that nothing is what it seems. William may seem to be the luckiest guy alive, but the reality is that fate has dealt him from the bottom of the deck at every turn, and just as he’s about to catch a break, a waiter stabs him in the neck, killing him instantly.

He doesn’t know it as the world fades from view, but his luck has just turned for the better.

Like most of humanity in an economy that’s been broken for the better part of a millennium, William had a mortgage on his life with AfterLife, the corporation that perfected the business of reanimating the dead. So while he’s a bit confused on waking on Elysium, the AfterLife processing facility, he’s not all that surprised. Unfortunately, he’s now one of the indentured undead, with an 87-year term, after which he gets a limited sort of freedom. Also, though his newly reanimated body is filled with regenerative fluid that keeps him un-dead, and is now good for a few centuries, he’s lost much of his sense of smell, color vision, and touch. The undead don’t actually eat, so losing taste may be a blessing, but it’s a drab world William wakes to. What it isn’t is boring.

Instead of the usual period of welcome to your new un-life seminars and job counseling that come with being reanimated, William is hustled off to join a survey ship from the Hades fleet of the undead. It turns out that the Mictecacijuatl, named for the Aztec goddess of the afterlife and known as the Tilly by her crew, is set to go on a very special mission, and needs a combat-trained pilot at the helm. If you’re thinking William’s demise was a hell of a coincidence, you’re not the only one wondering.

What follows is in many ways a classic tale of a small crew of misfits flying into danger and the in the face of bureaucracy. The same military action that made William a hero to the living, made him a villain to the undead, scores of whom he’d marched to their deaths in repelling the alien Rannit, and the crew of the Tilly isn’t pleased to have him along. Like most things in this tale, the truth is far from the version that they’ve been fed, but William isn’t eager to revisit the horrors of that campaign for an easier time of it.

This is the first of three books, all of which have been written and will be released over the next few months, and the crew of the Tilly will have to splinter, reform, and get their collective heads out of their un-dead asses in order to stop a war and lay the seeds for freedom for the un-dead, resurrected but only to be slaves with their very emotions controlled by the corporation.

Once AfterLife gets rolling, there are a number of good ideas and clever plot twists for the likable cast of characters to work with on their way to forming a family of sorts and doing some good in the process. Unfortunately, like many debut novels, AfterLife would have benefitted from a ruthless editor with a big red pen, eager to commit huge blocks of exposition to literary purgatory. It’s good that the authors gave a lot of thought to the interstellar and geopolitical setup as well as the mechanics of FTL (which only the undead can use, an interesting trait shared by Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle) and Star Gate travel, but we the living readers really don’t need to have it shared with us upfront. We’d be much better off teasing it out of the story on our own.

Fortunately, once the authors get it out of their system, things take off and we’re soon in can’t put it down territory. Hopefully, the next two books will follow on in that vein, and if they do, BL Craig may be an author to look out for. Recommended.

Note: Interestingly, this isn’t the only Zombie Space Opera out there, and I highly recommend Jim C. Hines’ Terminal Alliance and its sequel Terminal Uprising, in his hopefully to be concluded Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series.