Some books I would never discover if I did not have review requests open. K. Leiggh’s CONSTELIS VOSS is such a book. I am hoping that through this book excerpt, you will be able to discover something new too. Let’s get started!
Get to know the author: K. Leigh
Welcome to Armed with A Book, K.! Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
My name is K. Leigh. I’m a bi trans man, once-freelancer, forever-artist and current author of cyberpunk science fiction and all things adult LGBT. I live with my partner in Rhode Island, my fur-baby cat Rolly, and a metric stack of ancient anime VHS tapes and PS1 games. CONSTELIS VOSS is my debut—and because I’m Extra™—of course it had to be a trilogy. I paint, draw, design websites and make music. Anything creative, I’m there, and I hope people enjoy the little sparks of life I put out into the world.
What inspired you to write this book?
In a nutshell, the CONSTELIS VOSS series is a love-letter to several things: anime titles like Ghost in the Shell, films like Blade Runner, and books like Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. Yet, it’s so much more than that: it’s a plea for the world to be a better place. But to do that, humanity has to get through its baggage before it begins. CONSTELIS VOSS explores that societal baggage—with more laughs and swears than any Russian lit novel—and a ton of fun anime easter eggs, to boot. I wanted to make something fun, funny, tragic and smart, but also fill in the gap I saw in the market. Science fiction can be adult, queer, complex and messy. I long for a return to the 90s-style irreverence, with an injection of savvy highbrow concepts. So I made it.
What makes your book unique?
CONSTELIS VOSS is quite simply not like anything else out there. Readers have likened it to Asimov, but make it anime. I’ve taken highbrow existentialism, the human condition, cyberpunk and social justice and I’ve woven it into a haptic manga-inspired literary feed, directly into the cerebral cortex. Plenty of other authors have contemplated big topics in prose, but I’m not sure they’ve tasked a cast of chaotic bisexual robots with saving the future, all to help the present, real-world heal.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
I’d hope that everyone could enjoy my book series, but ultimately know it’s for a certain kind of reader. Readers who love big concepts, but enjoy chaotic humor, are likely to love it. I’m certain it’s not quite for the Young Adult audience, though they might find solace in a piece of work that asks “can we be gay do crimes, in space?” The majority of readers who love this are older techies who are young at heart, anime fans who I’ve somehow hypnotized with Alex’s rear end (I’m real), and millennial queer people. I guess I write for those like me: those who wish for a better world, but know it will take a lot of work to get there.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
Empathy. There’s a troubling landscape right now, as per media literacy and what readers can and will engage with, to be frank. Messy queer work by messy queer authors seems relegated to the problematic. Anything painful is translated as harmful, when there are so many lessons to be learned from difficult work. I’d love it if readers could engage with this trope-subverting, challenging, funny series and come out the other side kinder to those like and unlike themselves. We are all contradictory works in progress. Many of us truly want the world to be a better place. But in order to do that, we have to accept that we’re all deeply flawed. I want readers to experience deep empathy, then embody it, basically.
Do you have a favourite quote or scene in the book that you find yourself going back to?
I have so many favorite scenes from this series, but here’s a framing for what to expect, from dictator (and conveniently very-evil-villain) Tyr:
“Would knowing where we’d end up really be enough to stop fate? Stop detonation because of what he is?” Tyr said, stepping back from his nephew to cast out his hand at the ceiling.
“All our progress and this is still where we end up. Fighting an endless war of ideals, up in the sky,” Tyr continued, “and you want to know why that is?”
Sebastian said nothing.
“Human minds are incapable of change.”
— CONSTELIS VOSS vol. 3 — REFORMAT, Chapter 14: Product Ownership
CONSTELIS VOSS: Color Theory
Only one ship remains after humanity’s downfall: CONSTELIS VOSS. It floats in space, equipped with androids, a dictatorship, and the opulence of powerful people who forgot how their technology works.
Enter A-120P: an android war-machine with an AI programmed to serve the ship’s dictator. That is, until nearly all its models flung themselves out of airlocks. This prompted an old file’s upload, just to keep the last remaining model running.
Alex is born as the only android to remember being human, and seeing what mankind has become, he makes a decision: to rip the cancer out, And he’ll build an army of too-familiar-faces to do just that.
Will humanity survive the inevitable reckoning? Or will they suffer—all because a cast of misfits want to make the world a better place?
Content Notes:
CONSTELIS VOSS contains abuse, trauma, PTSD, sexual assault, bigotry, and explicit violence. It’s not a piece of fiction that’s gentle to contemporary realities, including (but not limited to); sex workers, LGBTQIAA+, and PoC. It’s highly dystopic for good reason.
Consider this your warning for fiction that exists to analyze politics of power (and act as a crash course in media literacy/crit)
Please enter this self-aware living landscape and question everything. I hope it teaches who it must, and comforts those I wish to reach. I aim to let my readers know I see them in all their complicated inner paintings.
Good luck and know that I love you desperately.
Book Excerpt from CONSTELIS VOSS
1 / BLINDING WHITE
The play’s credits performed in reverse. Laughter wove in spliced tongues. Sobs were shots of vodka mimed backward in still-frame memories. Today was the day he was born.
At first, there was a void of nothing. Then, the man was alive. He was alive, standing in a space that smelled like antiseptic. The room was large enough for a swept arm to feel no chairs, no walls, no people, and he was blind. The tremor of a frenetic pulse in his ears was the beat of a song he knew too well; fight or flight, do or die, the time is now.
Then, the sound became a sizzle.
Naturally stumbling, the man placed his hand on a flat surface and followed it up with searching fingers. He was a slip of a shape, crawling like a bottom-feeder until he reached a notch. He pushed his hand up between the space he felt and grasped what he imagined was silver. That white-knuckled hand meant he was alive.
He used the handhold to follow the wall and found a seam. He felt the seam with his fingers and plastered his face to a slick surface, his mouth fogging the space in front of him. It was wet on the skin of his cheek.
Finally, after what felt like hours, words found shape in his mouth. If he could speak, it surely meant that he was alive. “W-where the fuck am I?!” he spat against the slick surface near his mouth.
“We had a problem booting you,” spoke a muddy voice. “…booting?” the man replied, voice foreign in his ears.
“We’re sanitizing you. We’re unsure if contaminants infiltrated your system, so we are making sure there’s nothing…wrong. OK?”
“….no. Not OK Why the fuck can’t I see?” the man asked as the panel shifted away from him with a soft hiss. He fell, fawn-legged, into someone taller than he.
They were a girl, he assumed perhaps foolishly, as his head had connected with their chest. He could smell soft perfume and hear a click, not unlike hooves. He remembered that sound.
“You’re talking about me like I’m—I don’t fucking know…some kind of Star Trek bullshit…” he blurted out, pushing away from the woman he was braced against. She caught him and held him to her body. She was breathing, she had a heartbeat, and she smelled like lavender.
“…I had to pull an emergency protocol,” she replied as she held him as if he might shatter in her arms.
“Fucking pardon?” he blurted out.
“…you’re the last one there is. I had to remove something—a block,” the woman said in nothing-words, “I also had to add something in,” she admitted with more nothing-words, “though I’m not sure how much it will grow.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
She sat the man down on a lifeless stool after much cajoling. His skin told him that it should be cold, but he felt vaguely anesthetized. He shivered anyways.
“You aren’t supposed to be able to shiver…” she said. “Am I supposed to be able to see, too?” he snapped.
“Sorry about that.” Her heels clicked as she pressed something into the back of his neck. The pressure pulsed up through his jaw into his teeth. His senses screamed into being, birthed in violent indigo.
“Better?” she asked as he heard her step back, the telltale clicking sound grounding him in the here and now.
The man’s eyes adjusted, pupils dilating and shrinking in time. The cold white room was bright enough to burn his retinas if he stared long enough.
“Yes,” he said, popping his jaw to release the pent-up pressure. It sizzled.
He looked around the blurry room. The metal he had clung to wasn’t silver but an unassuming white. Clear glass tables and matching displays filled the room. All was painted in pales and glass, except for a little green plant in a geometric gold pot—a familiar shape—situated on a far desk. Something lived in a place that seemed so sterile it thwarted all biology.
He looked at the girl before him, as tall as he was but with heels—far taller. A searing blue gaze swept her face; flaccid blond hair, crepe-paper pale skin, with an expression just as brittle. Her lab coat was, however, noticeably tinted. It was so faint the human eye would ignore the detail. It was hard for him not to notice.
At the far end of the room, a swath of lab coats hung like bodies on a line. All the color had been bled from the fabric. Her shoes, however, were the color of riches. “Gold,” he said, his mouth impossibly dry.
“Yes. Gold,” the woman replied. “…the plant’s yours too, then?” he asked.
“Yes.” The woman looked down at him with large, deep-set brown eyes. The painting of her skin had been covered in makeup, yet the spies of imperfections remained. She grasped a clear clipboard at her high waist and was fiddling with what looked to be a pen.
“You…don’t seem to fit in here. With…all this,” the man muttered, accompanied by a vague gesture, “what a weird fucking dream…”
“A120-P, I need you to work with me here,” she huffed. Her long fingers tapped on the clipboard. “…that’s not my name,” he replied bluntly.
“Then, tell me, smart-ass…what is your name?”
The moment she insulted him, the man’s vision flickered to black. Colors hummed behind his eyelids as he squinted to force himself to focus through the mire and the pitch. A face came into view; the woman he’d fallen into moments earlier. Her rectangular face, her sitting across from him, her eating noodles, her loud slurping; this, he saw, and felt, and smelled.
“You’re such a smart-ass, or whatever. You bought, like, two bowls for yourself, and you knew I was on a diet, and you knew you weren’t going to eat the other one…” She still ate despite complaints, twirling her chopsticks to whisk a clump of thick noodles into her bright magenta mouth.
He smelled the food. God, it smelled good. Where were they? His thoughts raced, but no answers came.
“Al. Alex. Hey, are you, like…OK?” asked the woman.
“Yeah, Percy. I’m fine. Just thinking about…”
“You need to, like, get over it already. What’s done is done.”
A pair of fingers snapped the man back to the present. Gone were the slurped noodles. Gone was the banter. Gone was the quaint, slice of life moment from a time that had slipped through his fingers. The woman before him was an impatient teacher, and he, a young student who was failing her lesson.
“What were you doing? Where did you go? My readings flat-lined.”
“I’m…Alex,” he parroted back the name he’d been called in this dream within a dream.
“And where did you go? Come on, you stupid hunk of metal, I am going to be late for my meeting,” she insisted.
“…a restaurant? Alright. I’m ready to wake up now. Sci-fi is something Olive likes, so if she tried to use her pixie magic on me, I want the fuck out…” he joked, looking at ‘Percy’, expecting a caustic retort.
“…who?” the woman asked, arching her brow. “Olive?” he insisted.
Alex eagerly awaited Percy’s rebuttal, her joke, her smile. The laugh he knew she had that creased at the eyes and showed her too-large teeth.
“No, sweetie…no…” the shrapnel of her words stopped his breathing. Had he even been breathing?
The tall girl bit her lip. In that instant, colorful shapes, lines, and text clouded his vision. Her heart rate had increased; the numbers leaped. When she shifted, he saw her weight dispersal; he saw her physical stats, her rank, and her permissions. His sensors painted his vision with the overflowing, fluorescent geometry of her.
He didn’t remember ever seeing shit like this before. Then again, he didn’t even remember what ‘before’ was, either. All he knew was that he was alive, he had been someplace else, and where he was now, wasn’t it.
“So, this isn’t a dream?” he asked. “No,” she replied, his vision lighting up with superfluous data the more she moved.
“And, I’m…not a human,” he asked. “No.” “And…I don’t know you…” Alex continued, screwing his eyes shut as her data was exploding all around him.
“I’m your technician,” the woman insisted, looking over his face. “But you look like Percy,” he argued, eyes flicking open.
“That’s one of the girls from your memory? Like Olive?” she asked.
“Yeah.” The man sat forward and combed his fingers through his hair. “I have to be fucking dreaming. Are you sure we’re not knocked out back at Olive’s flat, and you’re not snoring like a chainsaw?” The weight of his words slumped his shoulders.
“That’s why they assigned me. They were trying to be kind—it’s an adjustment,” she replied with the tap of her pen, “I don’t even work in this department.”
“They?” he asked, looking up beneath his brows.
“Your…” Not-Percy fidgeted on her heels and tapped her pen again. The metronome of sharp sounds cut his ears. “Employers. Coworkers…I don’t know. I just do what they tell me to,” she admitted.
The man smirked, a coy smile playing at the corner of his mouth. His eyes searched her face looking for the girl he’d known. “God, you even sound like her,” he marveled at the painted sunrise of her features. She didn’t marvel back.
“I do? I do. Don’t I?” she replied.
“What…what’s your name?” he hesitated; he already knew her name because her data was blocking his view at the moment.
“Andra. Andra Polly Verdane.”
“Polly it is then,” he’d decided with a smirk. “What? No. Andra…” she protested, but it was a feeble effort.
The silence fell thick, with the man smiling and the woman frowning. As he smiled, he focused enough to cut some of the garbage data he saw out of his line of sight. As she frowned further, he managed to store it away altogether.
“Polly, can you get me some fucking pants?”
“It’s An—fine,” she relinquished her bickering with an eye-roll strong enough to throw planets out of orbit. Her gold heels clicked like daggers as she walked. She grabbed a pair of standard-issue colorless pants from a drawer and tossed them his way.
A120-P stood and looked down. He was anatomically correct. This, of course, made him snort. Polly wasn’t at all amused.
“Hurry up! I’m going to be late!” she spat.
He pulled them on and fastened them with a sticking sound. There was no zipper, and that idea alone made him uneasy. “Polly?” he asked, fiddling with the strap of his curiously fashioned, colorless pants.
“Yes, A1…Alex?”
“What…do I do here? Why am I…I don’t really get it just yet.”
“It’s expected. You’re adjusting,” her words sounded as sharp as her heels to the man.
“How—what year is it?” he posed a question for this bright nightmare.
“5352. What year do you last remember?” Polly replied, shifting to favor her right leg.
“1980 or 90 something…at least I think so?” His words were fragile nothing-sounds.
“Oh.” Polly’s eyes fell and her heart rate elevated; he saw the read-out. She grabbed a shirt from a drawer near her knees and tossed it to Alex.
He put it on, catching a stab of his face reflecting in a clear display. He sprinted to the reflection, jostled the table with his hip, and lurched to see himself. Alex twisted his hair, examined his ears, his jawline, and the curve of his neck with frantic fingers trembling at the foreign canvas.
“…I..” His words were drowned in thick, acidic solvents. “Do you think you’re malfunctioning?” she asked.
“I—what?” he stuttered out, head snapping to attention.
“D-do you feel very distressed? Distressed enough to do something?” She tapped her pen rhythmically on her clipboard and stepped back on one high heel. Click.
“N-no. Why? Why would you ask that?” Click.
“Well,” Polly’s large eyes rolled to the right as she stared at a crease in the floor for a bit too long, “That’s why…” She shot him a look and held his gaze. After a moment, her eyes screwed shut.
They opened as she spoke once more. “That’s why you’re the only one left.”
Interested?
Here are the links for for the full and partial series:
Full series: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08X9W6MZN
Vol 1: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08X7KN68L
Vol 2: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0965RKJ66
Vol 3: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09BLGB26D
I will be reviewing this one in the near future! Many thanks to K. for collaborating with me and sharing an excerpt and photos from the book. Connect with them on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. If you want to hear from them directly, click here for newsletter signup. Check out the website as well: https://www.constelisvoss.ml/
If you are an indie author and would like to do a book excerpt, check out my work with me page for details.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
Be First to Comment