Pilgrim Machines

Pilgrims Machines is a rhapsody about exploration. Blue Cherry Blossom, our narrator, is a heavy cargo liner for Planetary Crusade Services. PCS is one wobbly leg of the human political system, an AI-controlled shipping concern that navigates between the staid bureaucrats of the UN and the near-anarchists of the Outer Reaches Colonial Authority. PCS moves supplies and people between scattered human systems on years-long sublight journeys.

So when Beacon, an immense alien probe that likes human poetry and tolerates human science, gifts PCS with an interstellar jump drive, Blue Cherry Blossom and its crew take off on a run far far past where any human being has gone before, into a universe far wilder and weirder than we can imagine. There is a long journey with the Stranger, a member of an interstellar civilization of shipminds perennially moving between stars, and encounters with the Grave Yard Keeper, and other old old entities.

This book begins with political intrigue, but quickly transitions into one of the most wonderful meditations on journeys, explorations, and what it means to be a very small being in a very large universe that I’ve read in a long long time.

This is book 2 in a trilogy. It made sense without reading book one, with optimism you’ll learn what you need to know in the first few chapters. It’s definitely sold me on the rest of the series.