Mori Grant’s DEAD-LINER is the story of Lucia, a generation ship with two sides that are forbidden to meet or talk to each other. The right side has a seemingly thriving population of over 15 thousand people, whereas the left side (the side the reader is focused on) has only 103 people left after a series of plagues—and they are currently being threatened by a spate of maternal deaths in childbirth. Life on the ship is tightly controlled, and has been for hundreds of years; all spouses are assigned by Lucia’s “compatibility tests,” and citizens are rewarded with high status and power for having more children. Anyone who breaks Lucia’s laws is immediately “departed”—rendered unconscious and shot out of the ship to die. In this endangered community, childless Lune (whose mother died in childbirth) and her best friend Solace (who is supposed to be dead) are outsiders. The book centers around how that status not only isolates them from an already isolated community, but also allows them to think and do dangerous new things that threaten the carefully-designed boxes of thought and ideology in which they were raised.

Lune’s curiosity, experimental mindset, and need for understanding contrast vigorously with the community leader Jovian, determined to control and manage the community for its own good. Both characters are fully-developed, fully-human, and believe that they are acting in the best interests of the community. Both want to protect that community, and seek out Lucia’s secrets in order to do so—but in very different ways. All the main characters, not to mention the reader, are forced to at least attempt to examine themselves and their society—as well as find their own way through (or around) the existential crisis that Lucia’s actions have left them in, if they can. The book’s action is vigorous and engaging, and its length is deceiving; it’s very difficult to pick up this book and put it down again without finding out how it ends. Lune’s interactions with the forbidden right side of the ship and her contact there are perhaps not tied in as neatly with the rest of the plot as they could be. Still, they do make a difference—in showing Lune as not only willing to break the rules but also willing to consider the humanity and wishes of people she has grown up thinking of as untouchably, unknowably alien. All in all, this is an intriguing look at the possible outcomes of a society that is isolated, controlled, and carefully managed by outside forces—as well as its fate when it encounters a person it can’t quite keep under control.

Mori Grant’s DEAD-LINER is a thought-provoking, engaging tale about power and its dangers, the role of the outsider in a world shaped by forced conformity, and the possibilities for both abuse and liberation in an isolated, divided spaceship-world heading towards an uncertain future.

~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader