Published by Solaris in November 2025
Review by DS Camperdown
The Ganymedan starts with a hundred-word synopsis of the story, for which this reviewer is grateful, otherwise they might have given up after the first couple of pages.
‘Start in medias res’ is almost a cliché in terms of advice to aspiring writers. It’s not bad advice, but it’s a good idea if the res involves characters you care about in a scene that holds some form of jeopardy. RT Ester starts with his protagonist Verden Dotnet poisoning megalomaniac tech titan Arthur Lenox-Pileser (think Elon Musk), inventor of the ‘God node’, a device that confers sentience to robots, drones and interplanetary ships. The scene is very long getting to the point: V-Dot, as his friends call him, waits until Lenox-Pileser is in his death throws – which take a lot of dialogue – to insert scrubware into the base of his brain, preventing him from uploading his consciousness to another ‘skin’ and thereby prolonging his five-hundred-year life even longer.
Having offed L-P, V-Dot tries to flee Mars for his native Ganymede, where sentients are not afforded the warm welcome they find in other parts of the Solar System. With him he carries the cache of L-P’s memories, which will reveal why it’s a good thing he’s dead dead rather than just uploaded elsewhere, and why V-Dot is the good guy. He has nine hours to reach his objective before the scrambler he’s carrying that cloaks his true identity stops working and the game is up.
On the run, V-Dot hitches a ride to Paradox, a giant space station, aboard the sentient craft TR-8901, who doesn’t usually take humans but squeezes him in behind a bulkhead. On Paradox, V-Dot encounters a gallimaufry of everyday objects granted sentience by L-P’s God node. Bureaucracy-loving forklift trucks, taxis that want their putative customers’ CVs, drones that take umbrage.
Then at the height of the pursuit, the narrative stops, and we find ourselves meeting V-Dot six years before, when he first went to work with the L-P family having been spotted by the daughter just as he was coming to the end of a bar job he won in a job lottery. He becomes the rich girl’s plaything, then L-P makes him the family mixologist. Like most plutocrats, L-P is bored and tries to alleviate his ennui in a number of ways, which include going full Elon with a chainsaw.
Then we’re pitched forward again in time to the pursuit and TR-8901, which, after a long dialogue with a character called Zaria (no, I don’t know who she is either) who lives in his God Node, decides to send a message to the authorities about its suspicions that its passenger might not be who he says he is.
RT Ester has built an intriguing world full of first- and second-generation sentients, who debate the nature of being, enter suicide pacts and wander the Solar System, along with humans, who have divided into sects in response to the advent of machine sentience and the possibility of repeated uploads as death approaches. However, the narrative switching back and forth hinders more than helps this story. There are one or two memorable scenes, but nothing is allowed to mature. Characters suddenly appear. Everything rushes by, and the plot is difficult to follow in places. This is a pity, given the richness of the world building.
On my Edinburgh to London train scale, this would hold my attention as far as York.