Review: Kizuna: Or How To Lose a Spaceship and Still Go Places by Jamie Watt

Blurb:

Enoch is a down-on-his-luck salvage pilot who is trapped in his job, wants to go home but has nothing to go home to, and has no way of affording it anyway since his best friend and business partner left him for a masseuse job on Mars.

Enoch needs someone to talk to while in the lonely depths of space, so he picks up a cheap interface for his AI. On their voyage, they are kidnapped by pirates, meet a famous engineer lost in time, chase a mysterious (possibly alien) ship, and end up in the crosshairs of Earth’s monolithic, bureaucratic, and almost sociopathically uncaring System Navy, as Enoch explores what it means to be part of something bigger than he could ever have imagined.

Review:

Let me begin - thus tipping my hat to Tim Rogers, one of our greatest living artistic commentators - with the bottom line: would I recommend this book to you? Yes, I would. And if you’re interested in learning why, please continue.

Kizuna (Or How to Lose a Spaceship and Still Go Places) by Jamie Watt (with extraordinary cover illustration by Paolo Faresi) is the story of Enoch, an orbital waste disposal tech, living some seven-hundred-odd years into our future, wherein humanity has colonized most of the Solar System. The centuries of colonization have left great swaths of garbage loose in the sky, especially in orbit around Earth, providing would-be spacefarers like Enoch with opportunities for myriad blue-collar adventures amongst the stars. Our story begins though, not with adventure, but with three tragedies: the death of Enoch parents (in as comically dark a manner as I’ve ever seen), the departure of Enoch’s best friend to a new life on Mars, and the revelation that the love of Enoch’s life has entwined herself to a polyamorous marriage collective somewhere out near Jupiter. This series of unfortunate events leaves Enoch emotionally adrift; so as a parting gift and olive-branch, Enoch’s best-and-Mars-bound friend Matunde purchases for Enoch an AI that can be installed into their ship. Something (or someone, ideally) that Enoch can talk to while he’s working, and maybe something that can help with the work itself in Matunde’s absence. And so, with almost all his flesh-and-blood friends and family unceremoniously removed from his life, Enoch seeks friendship with this shipboard AI; and it’s their first mission together that propels the story of Kizuna along the rest of its galaxy-spanning arc. 

But despite finally coming to the conclusion that I would recommend this book, it did take me a moment or two to actually get into it. The primary reason for this is the extremely conversational nature of the prose; and when I say “conversational” I mean that Kizuna feels very much like a person telling you a story. “Of course,” you might be saying, “That is how stories work.” And yes, you’re right, but for the sake of Kizuna I’d like to make the semantic distinction between “person” and “narrator” more properly, though such a distinction is not one I can particularly well define other than how they feel different from one another. It does not necessarily feel dictated, as though it were a story a friend was telling you over coffee, but there is something about the text that gives it a much more specific feeling than that of other books with other omniscient narrators. 

And I think that something is this: from the way the text is presented, I came to understand that the omniscient narrator of Kizuna is definitely not some non-specific overseer of the story; but is, in fact, Jamie Watt. In a Crichton-esque twist on the Shakespearean aside, Watt liberally deploys footnotes throughout the text, which serve to exposit bits of lore that wouldn’t otherwise be revealed by the characters themselves, explain scientific concepts that readers unfamiliar with contemporary astrophysics or common genre conventions might be unaware of, and in one instance cites the anticipated reaction of “the author’s family” to a specific bit of narrative development - cueing in the reader to the notion that Watt is the specific narrator of this work. This revelation thus forgives past and future anachronisms in the more descriptive passages of Kizuna, since we know that Watt, from a contemporary perspective, is describing these grand, future sci-fi things in terms familiar to us the readers, rather than in terms that would be familiar to the characters themselves. 

However, if I have one minor complaint about how these footnotes are employed, it is that on rare occasions the footnotes can spoil upcoming comedic beats. The whole of the text is couched in a Douglas Adams-ian wittiness, and often the footnotes are used as punchlines to jokes set up within the body of the text proper. But this means that if one of these punchline footnotes sits below an expository or explanatory footnote, and my eyes wandered just a few millimeters too far down the page, I ended up spoiling a joke I hadn’t yet actually read. This is not a deal-breaking issue, but something to be aware of if you pick up the book for yourself. Beware funny footnotes! You have been warned!

Moving on then to the feeling of the book. Texturally, the blue-collar setting of Kizuna sets it firmly in the realm of works like the early novels in The Expanse series, Joss Whedon’s Firefly, Ridley Scott’s Alien, Peter Hyams’ Outland, or Black Bird Interactive’s Hardspace Shipbreaker. The relationship between Enoch and Frank (the onboard AI) also reads somewhat like an inverse of Anne McCaffery’s The Ship Who Sang (though you’ll need to read the book yourself to find out why), though as a slightly more contemporary comparison one might find similarities to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and the relationship between Matthew McConaughey’s “Cooper” and TARS, the sarcastic, quippy, absurdly rectangular robot that accompanies Cooper and friends on their mission into deep space. I love a good robot character, and Frank is exceptionally fun to see develop over the course of the text.

But Kizuna is not just a conversational, hard-ish sci-fi book about interstellar garbage collecting and AIs growing toward sentience; it is a book about connections: connections between people, connections between groups, connections between… everything.  

“Kizuna” we learn mid-way through the text, is a Japanese word that loosely translated to English means “ties that bind”, be they physical, emotional, geographic, or any other tangible or intangible thread that might be bound between two people or things. As one character explains, “It describes how it feels to be connected to others, and also describes how important those connections are”. 

And it’s the importance of these connections that is foundational to the thematic thrust of Kizuna. 

Very early in the book, we’re introduced to “The Church of All Faiths” - a universalist church seeking out contact with an extrasolar Signal that humanity discovered centuries ago; and Enoch is introduced more specifically to an imam named Yunus. Their time together is brief, and ends with Yunus giving Enoch his contact information, inviting him to call any time, telling Enoch that:

“It gets very lonely out there in the dark. Everyone needs a person they can talk to, and it sounds like you are a bit low on those right now.”

Enoch begins the story losing, permanently in one case and temporarily in others, everyone he cares about, and so has to learn to make new connections. The first is with Frank, the AI; and from this one new friendship Enoch slowly gathers more, inner-monologuing towards the end of the tale that, after spending so long feeling like he’d never have any meaningful connections in his life ever again:

“There was something about sitting beside someone and enjoying a meal. About someone standing beside you as you talk and patting you on the back for no other reason than to make contact. About people handing out sleepy-eyed smiles as they say, ‘Good morning’.”

And it’s that something that makes life worth living. It is in these moments that the subtitle of Kizuna, “Or How to Lose a Spaceship and Still Go Places”, becomes clear. The “place” can be anywhere on your own journey, anywhere on your own path of personal growth. You don’t need a spaceship to become a better person, you need connections with people - people you can trust, people you can love, people who can grow with you. Enoch begins the story of Kizuna embittered by the world - bitter that his best friend is leaving, bitter at his longtime girlfriend for running off to marry many someone elses, bitter that he didn’t get to say goodbye to his parents before they died; but through his voyages elsewhere amongst the stars, he meets people that soften the hard edges formed by these tragedies, and he goes places. He becomes more empathetic, he becomes more selfless, and (in perhaps the most literal application of the story’s themes) the path of his journey is guided toward a future in which he has to (figuratively) become an entirely new person. 

So if you’re in the mood for a solid, slice-of-life-ish sci-fi adventure with an emotional core about what it means to be a part of the grand family of “humanity”, check out Kizuna (Or How to Lose a Spaceship and Still Go Places).