No One To Hold The Distant Dead by K.L. Schroeder

Science Fiction, Ecological Fiction

Check it out if you’re a fan of: darker climate fiction, stories about ecological grief, explorations of memory and identity (and loss thereof), futuristic technologies, life on terraformed worlds, scientist MCs, characters who become each other’s sanctuary in bleak times, short sci-fi books that tackle big themes, existential dread

What’s the story?

Biologist Inga Nyström’s consciousness is transported from Earth to the planetary colony of Nordenmark, where she’s meant to help avert an ecological disaster. But she’s too late, because she arrives to find the terraformed environment already beyond repair, and the dwindling colony facing a slow spiral toward death as its ecosystem perishes bit by bit.

The technology that allowed Inga to beam through space, capturing her mind into a synthetic body, has also experienced an error, leaving her with a body that’s malfunctioning and unrecoverable gaps in her memory. As more and more of Nordenmark’s animal species die out, Inga wrangles with the missing pieces of herself and searches for purpose in the dying colony. The people around her are not only fighting for their world’s survival, they’re looking to each other for a reason to keep going when everything feels futile.

Tell me more!

It’s a short read at just over 100 pages, but it’s the kind of weighty, thought-provoking premise that will stick with you for a long time. I read this a few weeks ago and I still find myself thinking about it, the story lingering in the back of my mind like a haunting afterimage. 

This book explores what happens when the dream of humanity settling a new world doesn’t quite pan out as expected, and a terraforming experiment ends in catastrophic failure. The colonists are working desperately against the inevitable collapse, but the individual characters choose to confront that reality in starkly different ways, which leads to emotional character conflicts and interesting compromises. The worldbuilding is absolutely fascinating, full of exquisite little details seen through Inga’s unique lens.

This is a futuristic story that speaks a lot to our present-day climate grief, and to the ways we hold space for the memories of a past we can’t return to. Having the main character experiencing memory loss and inhabiting an unfamiliar body she can’t trust made for an affecting parallel. Above all, Inga’s journey examines the deeply human desire to find meaning, hope and purpose, even in a dying world.

Series or standalone? Standalone, but there’s definitely potential for more stories in this universe, especially if the author took us to one of the other human colonies that were lightly sketched in this one.

Available in ebook & paperback from Psychopomp (who also put out the wonderful Deadlands speculative fiction magazine!)

Author website: https://author.klschroeder.com/

Author bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/klschroeder.bsky.social

Add on Goodreads:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/240207962-no-one-to-hold-the-distant-dead