The First Sister Cosplay + Review
The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis
A Red Rising meets The Handmaid’s Tale space opera, out now from Skybound
Personal Rating: I’d betray any higher power to join Hemlock’s gang
Reasons to Read: Richly-realized worldbuilding, compelling characters, non-binary rep, multilayered tension, mindblowing plot twists
You know, despite literally being a sci-fi author, I’ve always had trouble connecting with space operas. I don’t know why. But I DEFINITELY didn’t have a problem with this book. The worldbuilding, character work, and unraveling plot threads were so perfectly balanced that I breezed through it without a single moment of boredom or confusion. Even though it was this far future space society with so much history, everything was presented in a very digestible way. The gist of the setup is that Earth and Mars originally fought a long war over resources, during which a bunch of scientists were like “aight, this is a lost cause” and flew out on a vessel called the Icarus to colonize Mercury. There, they found the fantastical substance hermium, which fulfilled all their nerdy scientist dreams and kicked their tech up to another level. By the time the war ended, with Earth and Mars’ combat AIs growing sentient and being like “aight, this is a lost cause” and peacing out to the outer planets, the Icarii were so much more technologically advanced and prosperous that they could afford to turn Venus into basically the Hollywood/Instagram planet, with a lavish entertainment industry. BUT they refused to share their resources, particularly hermium, so Earth and Mars joined forces as the Geans and entered a new war to scavenge tech from the Icarii. My favorite part of the worldbuilding was how a lot of it was conveyed via these excerpts from in-universe books or fliers or speeches, which gave it an extra sense of depth. I also found it interesting that the typical big sci-fi robot rebellion came BEFORE the start of the story, and it influenced the Gean society into becoming super religious and hung-up on being “natural,” as opposed to the Icarii, who readily embrace technology like neural implants and genetic engineering.
The Dead Century War was fought because Earth continued to demand resources from its child, Mars, while they were both suffering. Unable to help Earth any longer, Mars went to war. And afterward, when the war stopped because the Synthetics abandoned their makers on both sides, there was no choice but for the two planets to enter into a reluctant treaty and become the Geans. While the Dead Century War had raged, the Icarii built paradise and then refused to share it with the rest of the galaxy.
The story is told through 3 POVs on different sides of the conflict, 2 in real time and 1 through these cool voice message transcriptions, and they’re all easy to get invested in. The first, the First Sister, is literally nameless and voiceless, both having been taken from her when she was 12. She is a “priestess” of the Sisterhood, the chief religious organization of the Geans, but what her duties really entail is comforting soldiers on a starship by listening to their feelings, or “confessions,” and providing them with sexual relief (though no sexual assault happens in the book itself). This is clearly an allegory to how women are expected to listen to and comfort and serve everyone around them with a smile on her face, without troubling them with her own emotions in return. It’s like a male fantasy come true and codified into a system.
Somehow, at twelve years old, I had been forced to forget my name.
I was sent away then to my first assignment, a pleasure liner that brought soldiers home from deployment, with a dozen other Sisters who attended to passengers. And that was when I used all I had been taught, the taking of confession, the act of forgiveness, and, when I grew older, the comfort of the body. Yet I clung, ever so tightly, to the secret part of me. I wanted a home. I wanted a family. I wanted to be anything other than what I was.
On the surface, the First Sister acts like a loyal, demure servant of the system, but she secretly wants out badly. The only way she can avoid the advances of the entire starship of soldiers is if she has the captain’s exclusive favor, which she did before the start of the story. She thought she would soon be free from all this when that captain promises to take her off the ship with him as he retires, but she learns a painful lesson to never trust the promises a man makes in bed when he straight up leaves without her. Now, with a hardcore new captain Saito Ren on board, she has to fight for the white armband that marks the captain’s exclusive favor all over again. Except, this time, she receives a personal mission from the Mother, leader of her religion: spy on Captain Saito and report back any fishy details, despite their religious doctrine specifically forbidding this type of treacherous behaviour. She’s hesitant about this mission to begin with, and it only gets harder when she finds that Captain Saito wants to know more about her as a person instead of seeing her as an outlet for venting. They’re two lonely women who slowly get closer, but a sense of doom constantly presses down on their budding romance, and the biggest question of the book is how the hell they’re going to get out of this.
When I turned twelve years old, I woke to find my sheets covered in blood. I cried then, so sure was I that I had done something horrible. I did not fear for myself, never once considered that I was the source of the blood despite the pain in my stomach, but wondered who I had harmed or killed. Finally my dreams of violence had come to fruition, and I had become a monster.
My Auntie heard me crying and came to see what was the matter. She did not speak, but in the lines of her ecstatic face, I saw that she was pleased. She held me to her chest and hugged me, then slapped me across the face for making noise.
The second POV is Lito, a soldier on the other side of the war who worked his way up from the very bottom of Icarii society. He is a Duelist, a kind of elite Icarii soldier who fights in pairs with transforming hermium blades controlled by neural implants. He is a shining example of the Icarii equivalent of the “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” doctrine, so much that he even got his sister out and funded her pursuit of a career in art. However, a major failed battle prior to the start of the story made him fall from grace and caused the Icarii to separate him from his partner Hiro, who he is basically soulmates with. Lito and his sister still live in the top rung of society, but there’s a lot he’s unhappy about, and he has a tendency of repressing all those emotions with commands from his neural implant. His big dilemma comes when the army sends him on a mission to kill Hiro, who apparently went rogue while on a deep uncover mission in Gean space. His struggle deepens when he discovers that Hiro may have betrayed the Icarii for very good reasons (because, despite living so close to the sun, the Icarii are SHADY AS HELL). But if Lito doesn’t complete the mission, his sister is still back home, and he doesn’t know what could happen to her if he goes rogue.
From the moment I earned the Val Roux Scholarship to the Academy, climbing the levels of Cytherea for my family, I was nothing more than a soldier. I went for the same reasons anyone on the bottom level would—no more cramped two-bedroom apartment for four people, no more bland slop called dinner, no more poorly recycled air that left you slightly out of breath—but I became exactly what the military wanted me to be. Strong. Courageous. Loyal. I never asked questions, even when I should have.
The third POV is a batch of voice messages that Hiro secretly ships to Lito, and it definitely has the strongest voice of the POVs, providing iconic non-binary rep. Hiro is a character that EXUDES personality, mainly because they grew up in a such a repressive picture-perfect home that they decided that they could not deal with being anything other than unapologetically themself. There’s not a lot I can say about them without going into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave it at this: you will be delighted and mindblown by how the mystery behind their motivations resolves.
My mother’s name was Mariko. She couldn’t stand the idea of her or my father living a lie for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes I wonder if this is why I am who I am: unabashedly me. And sometimes I think of how this must remind my father of the woman who walked away from him, and wonder if that’s why he hates me so much. Not for who I am, but for who I remind him of. For Mariko.
Because I also can’t stand the idea of living a lie for the rest of my life.
In fact, the entire last 1/3 of the book is a sequence of twists that will boggle your mind. Everything set up throughout the rest of the book collides in such a way that will leave you going OHH MAN WHY DIDN’T I SEE THAT COMING. Each character has reasons to stay loyal to their societal system and reasons to defy it, and things don’t necessarily play out the way you’d expect them to.
Overall, The First Sister is a tense, thrilling, emotional read that’s easy to get sucked into, and worth a try even if you’re not typically into space operas. It’s out NOW, so go check it out!
Bonus cosplay shots:
