The Listening Dark by Henri Hubert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A Review of Henri Hubert’s The Listening Dark
Elara Venn commands EOS alone, with no relief crew and no timely oversight. She decides every sacrifice when a system fails. The station AI, Oriel, is a precise, tireless irritant that logs every order, corrects her counts, repeats dismissed warnings, and will neither conspire with her nor ignore a discrepancy. In the long dark between shifts, its voice is the only one aboard.
Aboard the station EOS, in the shadow of a dark sun, Commander Elara faces scarce light, radiation, decaying orbits, and the tightening cost of every corrected assumption. She hears a growing beat in the bulkheads and coolant lines that Oriel logs as noise and that she takes as an accusation, echoing Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” She learns that an assault on the station and on herself was buried in EOS’s memory before she was born, and that the discovery is both the problem and the solution. Killing the AI brings her a measure of understanding, while fear of the consequences becomes a conflict of its own.
I liked The Listening Dark and give it five stars.
