A Good Death Bookends A Good Life: My favourite reads of 2025 (Q1, Part 2)

On Ceridwen Dovey's Only The Astronauts, Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, and Emily Austin's Interesting Facts About Space

Welcome to part two of my favourite reads of 2025 (quarter one), in which I write mini-essays? reviews? on a bunch of banger books I think other people should read.

You can find part one, featuring Percival Everett’s James and Mariana Enriquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People here, and content warnings at the bottom of the post.

ONLY THE ASTRONAUTS by Ceridwen Dovey (2024)
Format: Paperback

I’ve been aware of Ceridwen Dovey for years. Being an Australian with an aggressively Welsh hard-C name means, among other things, that you tend you take note of other Australians with aggressively Welsh hard-C names. But I’d never read any of her work until February, when a whim to read nothing but sci-fi led me to pick up this book, which I’d seen in my local bookshop the year before and bought more out of a sense of solidarity than anything else. I had no idea what to expect. I had a vague recollection that her previous, well-received collection, Only the Animals, was written from the perspectives of various animals, but I wasn’t sure what the tone was. And, if I can be honest, I don’t always trust Australian accolades when it comes to genre fiction. I’ve always found my country, as an audience and a publishing industry, to be quite snobbish and embarrassed by anything home-grown that lies in realm of whimsy, the fantastical, or strange.

Well, more fool me! Only the Astronauts is delightfully absurd, poignantly bittersweet, and, in bits, really fucking odd. Tens across the board.

Only the Astronauts contains five short stories (or, more specifically, three short stories, a novelette, and a screenplay written by a tampon) which make up five clear parts of an overarching narrative.

My love, we need to talk. I’ve tried and tried to call you from the Tesla’s dashboard phone, but I haven’t had a clear connection in over six years.

Beginning with Starman, a story written from the perspective of Elon Musk’s jilted lover (the mannequin he strapped to a Tesla and shot into space) and ending with Hackgold | Hacksilver, Voyager-1’s final, attempted missive to her long-lost sister after leaving the solar system and discovering a colony of aliens, Dovey creates her own golden record: a loving tribute to, and searing indictment of, humanity. This glorious species that is capable of sending a hope and a prayer into the unknown, knowing they won’t be alive to hear any answer; who can send astronauts into space so that they can consider how very small our presence in the universe is; who can project feelings of real love, real empathy, real grief onto a probe, or a station, or a rover, but so often fail when it comes to our fellow humans. Who find a way into space and onto the pristine miracle of the moon only to leave behind masses of garbage, and send a woman into space for a week with a hundred tampons, and then associate her forever with someone else’s sexist blunder. I live for books that are able to balance joy with sorrow, and humour with gravity, and through her rich cast of inanimate spacefarers¹, Dovey strikes it perfectly.

Last year’s Booker Prize was won by Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a book that won over Percival Everett’s James² and has quite a bit in common with Requiem, Dovey’s second, and longest story in this collection. Orbital is a slice of life novella that covers one average day on the International Space Station (or, sixteen orbits of Earth). It slips between the perspectives of its astronauts and cosmonauts as they look back at Earth, pondering their planet, life, politics, family, climate catastrophe, and each other.

I like the modular way I came into being, and how I proved that mutual usefulness can sometimes be more appealing than mutual destruction.

Requiem is written from the perspective of the International Space Station in the year 2031, on its final day with its final crew. The ISS is due to be retired, and will soon be allowed to fall through the atmosphere and into the sea at the point furthest from inhabited land. What follows is a memorial that goes both ways: the ISS reflects on and pays tribute to its many inhabitants over the decades, while its final crew pays loving tribute to it by writing sonnets: all of which are read aloud for its benefit even though the astronauts and cosmonauts have no idea the ISS is listening, and has just written its own in return.

I don’t want to cause a global panic as I spiral out of control above towns and cities. I don’t want to destroy any living thing in the course of my own destruction. It would undo all the good I have done, welcoming humans into me, nurturing and sustaining them. A good death bookends a good life.

Both Orbital and Requiem are ponderous and hopeful, both reflecting on the isolation and distilled humanity of the inhabitants of the ISS alongside the odd conundrum that comes with being a human who yearns for space, only to get there and yearn for Earth. But for me, perhaps because of its unique narrator, and perhaps because the narrative freedom allows for a more satisfying and purposeful structure than a day-in-the-life situation, Requiem is the stronger (and stranger) of the two. Like all of the other stories in the collection, it would stand wonderfully on its own. But taken in the context of the others, I think it’s one of the biggest reasons the ending of the collection packed such an emotional punch for me. This book had me sniffling in the kind of way that makes my partner panic from the other side of the house.

Only the Astronauts has, I believe, only been published in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, so if you’re outside of these areas, it may be tricky to get a copy of. But if you like books that are sad and strange and lovely, I encourage you to try. It is, after all, a runaway hit amongst Australians with aggressively Welsh hard-C names.

KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Kim Staunton) and eBook

Octavia E. Butler is a giant of speculative and science fiction, a writer who was so good at paying attention to the world around her and connecting dots between past, present and future that she has been hailed in this, the year of our Lord 2025 (or, more relevantly, the year of the first entry in Butler’s seminal Parable of the Sower), as a prophet.

Kindred, however, looks backwards rather than forwards. Written and set in the late 1970’s, it follows Dana, a young, educated Black woman in California who is yanked through time and space to a Maryland plantation in 1815. Her first visit lasts only minutes, allowing her just enough time to save a young white boy from drowning. But in an unexplainable phenomenon that takes place over only weeks in Dana’s modern day timeline, she is pulled back in time for first hours, and then months at a time. Her anchor is the white boy, Rufus: an ancestor who is able to call her to him when he feels his life is in danger, and Dana is only able to leave him when she fears her life is in danger — a dangerous stipulation that she’s only able to game a few times. And so begins a complex relationship between the two that spans Rufus’s natural life. Dana’s survival depends on his, at least until she can guarantee he’s had the children who make up the next branch of her family tree. But as Rufus grows from an affectionate boy to a slave-owning, manipulative man, things become much messier.

“Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.”

I don’t think I picked this book up so soon after reading James on purpose, but doing so made for an excellent companion read. Whereas James is a road story heavily focused on the Black male experience, touching on and portraying, but not really exploring the horrors facing enslaved Black women, Kindred has two static domestic settings and is almost wholly concerned with Black women and the communities they forge to survive³. Dana, forced to live as a slave while she’s on Rufus’s plantation, is thrust into the orbit of several Black women: chief amongst them Alice, her once-free ancestor, now owned and lusted after by Rufus. With her is Sarah, the cook, who has seen all of her children sold except her daughter Carrie, who was born mute. The relationships between Dana and these women can’t always, or, in Alice’s case, ever, be called friendship. But there is sisterhood, a sharing of knowledge, a sense of support, and unflinching honesty. Dana enters into this community not-so-privately believing that her education, knowledge of history, and modernity sets her above these women who have, in her eyes, allowed themselves, if not to become enslaved, then to remain so. Exposure and experience, of course, challenge these perceptions. When all of society is built on the back of your labour, when every law exists to categorise you as an animal and unquestioningly forgive your abuse, your rape, your murder, then what can you do but try to cling to the few moments of joy and connection your life might allow?

I won’t spoil what is a really excellent progression in the story, but one of the most fascinating, sickening themes⁴ Kindred explores is how deep the ideas of white supremacy run, and how quickly people will accept the idea of a natural hierarchy so long as they feel they’re at the top of it (or, at least, not the bottom). Much like in James, the Black characters in the story are just trying to survive while the white characters are constantly trying to explain and justify their position: they are inherently smarter than Black folk(despite all evidence to the contrary), stronger (despite needing Black bodies to perform all their labour), closer to God (despite all the rape, torture, murder, abuse). Even the white “allies” in both stories fold at the first test of principle. White supremacist ideologies run through the veins of our societies, and it’s as true in 2025 as it was in 1979 and 1815. Kindred doesn’t hold solutions to that: only a mirror. And that, I think, is what gets me most about Octavia E. Butler’s work. For all her incredible imagination and powerful writing, she’s never really been a prophet. She’s only ever shown us the existing rot.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE by Emily Austin (2024)
Format: Paperback

Call me a sad white lady⁵, but I’m a sucker for a book that sounds like it could be a Phoebe Bridgers song. I’m also, increasingly, an absolute sucker for Emily Austin, whose debut novel Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead was one of my favourite reads of 2024.

Interesting Facts About Space is a contemporary litfic following Enid: a twenty-six year-old half-deaf neurodivergent lesbian with extreme commitment issues, an estranged and quite recently dead dad, a depressed mum she’s possibly keeping alive entirely via space facts, a bigoted and resentful step-mother, extremely kind half-sisters who keep trying to be be in her life, a backlog of embarrassing teenage youtube videos she can’t delete, an over-reliance on true crime media, a phobia of bald men, a possible stalker and repeat home invader, undisclosed trauma, and the wife of someone she’s been hooking up with calling her on the phone.

There’s a lot going on in this book (which, paradoxically, has been accused of having “no plot” by several of its reviewers on Goodreads⁶), but it’s a carefully controlled chaos, with every thread connected in a way that, when tugged, pulls the whole web of Enid’s stressors tighter and tighter. This is a story about an overwhelmed young woman desperately in need of help, but who can’t conceive that she has the right to ask for it.

“I worry that I am a shell for something bad. That deep down, in the spot where most people keep their souls, I keep a weird little bug. I picture him there, leaning on the apple core of my soul, crunching on what remains of what’s good of me.”

Emily Austin is, for me, one of those authors who writes in a way that causes me deep emotional turmoil and humiliation, because she captures how I think and feel so perfectly that it is occasionally difficult to look at (and yet, impossible to look away). She so perfectly captures the neurodivergent brain on the page in a way I can see would be frustrating for readers who don’t know what it means to live with one. Interesting Facts About Space is largely internal, its protagonist self-centred and self-reflective in a way she is painfully aware of. The scenes are short and snappy, zipping through Enid’s work, social and private life, lingering in moments when she’s alone and thinking too much. It has all the hallmarks of what people seem to hate so much about litfic, and yet it builds quietly and beautifully to an emotional catharsis that says, “I see that you are overwhelmed, and afraid, and a bit broken in places. I see that you don’t feel like you should be allowed to be an adult with all the shitty choices you make and all the things you don’t know how to do yet. I see that you don’t feel like you fit into the shape of what it means to be a woman, let alone a queer woman. I see that you’re struggling just to exist in a world that doesn’t accomodate all your differences. Now see me, see that I feel like this too, and so does she, and her, and them, and him. None of us know what we’re doing, but it’s important we keep fighting and trying and caring about each other anyway, even if we fail. Your life, no matter how quiet, how seemingly unimportant, means everything. You mean everything.”

Anyway, I made the mistake of finishing this book on a plane, and therefore weeping so much the woman next to me leaned very firmly in the other direction.

A solid choice on her part, to be fair.

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CONTENT WARNINGS (taken from The Storygraph):

Only the Astronauts: Death

Kindred: Slavery, Racism, Racial slurs, Rape, Sexual assault, Suicide, Child death, Vomit, Fire/Fire injury

Interesting Facts About Space: Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Abandonment, Suicidal thoughts, Homophobia, Death of parent, Self harm, Fire/Fire injury, Vomit

Please note: all of these books were written with adult readers in mind.

1. Several of whom reappear throughout the collection, serving to weave it into an even tighter and more cohesive narrative.

2. I’m a tiny bit mad about it. I actually really enjoyed Orbital, and think it’s quite a wonderful book. But I thought James was the stronger of the two, and while I can see a certain argument for choosing to give one of the biggest literary prizes to Orbital — while being a book with a strong environmental throughline, it’s ultimately a positive book: one that looks forward to a brighter future we can forge together — I think James speaks more honestly to this global era of accelerating fascism, which was as true in November 2024 while we were in the thirteenth month of Israel’s annihilation of Palestine and its civilians, as it is now, watching the American government kidnap immigrants and asylum seekers and send them to god-knows-what fate in a gulag in El Salvador… just to name a few current human rights violations being proudly broadcast by their own perpetrators.

3. Another fascinating tie between Kindred and James is that Dana and James are both writers, with writing as a form of witness, truth and a source of freedom being a strong through line between both books. While James is writing a primary source of documentation in James, Dana is consulting such works in Kindred. It’s very cool, and if you know of any Black writers or content creators who’ve done anything on these two books as companion pieces please drop a link!

4. Another, that I didn’t find room to discuss here, is the abusive relationship that develops between Rufus and Dana. It’s one of the most chilling and effective depictions I’ve seen of emotional manipulation and domestic abuse in a book. This book has so many layers to it.

5. I mean, it’s true.

6. Okay, allow me to use my MA for this one thing, I beg. People who claim “this book had no plot!” are usually misdiagnosing a problem. “Plot” describes the sequence of events that happen in the course of a narrative. It is very rare that nothing whatsoever happens in a book, therefore it is very unlikely for a book to have no plot. The plot may very well, however, be a meandering pile of shit. It may move too slowly for a reader’s tastes. It may have nothing to do with the story. It may even abandon the story altogether. But there is probably a plot. Personally, I find myself searching for a missing story in an underwhelming book far more often than I find myself in search of plot. It’s okay to dislike a book. But accusations of “no plot” when there is demonstrably a plot are very annoying to me, a verified fun-hater, even if you are purposely doing a bit of hyperbole.