Floating Hotel (2024)
A space hotel full of intrigue and a ragtag bunch of misfits.
This is a story of staff and guests on the Grand Abeona Hotel, a luxury space hotel that travels between planets. It’s set in a human-only empire led by a mysterious Emperor who strip-mines planets for resources and insists that humans are the only form of intelligent life in the galaxy.
The blurb caught my attention, with four questions to draw me in:
- Why are there love poems in the lobby intray?
- How many Imperial spies are currently on board?
- What is the true purpose of the Problem Solver’s conference?
- And perhaps most importantly – who is driving the ship?
All four questions get answered over the course of the voyage, to a varying degree.
We get a single chapter with each of the main characters, told from their point of view. It includes the hotel manager, most of the staff, two academics, an Imperial spy, and a rebel looking to recruit a dissident who’s believed to live in the hotel. Each chapter includes some backstory, explaining how they came to the hotel, and a mini-episode of the day’s events on the hotel.
This gives us lots of different perspectives, but perhaps makes it tricky to get attached to any character. Going in, I thought this might be like Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, but it never reaches those heights.
The Imperial backdrop makes this a more sinister story than similar books. A significant chunk of time is devoted trying to find the “Lamplighter”, a political dissident who broadcasts from the ship. There are some violent scenes between spies and rebels who are both looking for them.
The characters were interesting and the mysteries resolved in a mostly satisfying way. I don’t have any strong feelings about this book, but I enjoyed reading it, and I’d happily read more sci-fi by this author.
Plot notes
Spoilers, obviously.
Why are there love poems in the lobby intray? One of the guests is a rebel spy trying to recruit the Lamplighter, who doesn’t want to be recruited. The love poems contain a coded message telling the spy to flee.
How many Imperial spies are currently on board? We meet two who pose as a married couple, but the implication is that many more are on board. The empire have matched the Lamplighter transmissions to the planets visited by the Abeona, and have come to make an arrest – the Lamplighter if they can find them, or the entire staff if not.
What is the true purpose of the Problem Solver’s conference? The academics are split into teams, and asked to solve the meaning of a mysterious code. The code has permeated all radio transmissions, but is gradually fading. A linguist and mathematician work together, and realise that the code is an alien language – a message sent by a non-human intelligence. This contradicts Imperial propaganda that humans are the only intelligent life in the universe.
In a scene that ties together the two plot lines, the hotel manager Carl set the Abeona adrift to allow the Lamplighter time to escape. It looks like an engine failure, but actually he sets the ship on a course for the source of the signal – a slow but deliberate reply.
And perhaps most importantly – who is driving the ship? It’s implied that the navigator is a recluse, but we later discover (if I understood correctly) that the ship is on autopilot, following a course set by the ship’s previous manager Nina.