She remembered dimly what it was like to be Ev. Constantly seeing and feeling the Truth. Constantly punished for saying so. Shocked, slapped, drugged, trained like a dog until she denied her own reality at every opportunity. Because what she naturally saw and felt, what she couldn’t have escaped from if she tried, was a heresy. [p. 323]
Yasira Shien is a scientific prodigy, working on a new type of reactor that will free the Pride of Jai space station from reliance on technology provided by the AI Gods. Yasira has a horrible feeling that something's going to go wrong, but she can't articulate it. She's anxious that, after all, she didn't understand everything her mentor, the vanished Dr Talirr, tried to teach her. And she's right: disaster strikes, lives are lost, and Yasira is held responsible. The Gods are angry, and Yasira is spirited away by an Angel of Nemesis, Akavi.
The angels, of course, carry out the will of the Gods: and the Gods are especially down on heresy, which can be defined as 'encroaching on the technologies of the Gods'. (There is an economic aspect to this. The Gods feed on human souls, or what they term souls: and humans can pay in souls for Godly technology.) There is another aspect to heresy, though: dealing with, and understanding, the eponymous Outside, a place separated from normal space-time by 'ways of being which defied all rational thought'. The term may also apply to entities, or consciousnesses, which inhabit that realm. Yasira's neurodivergence (she's autistic, as was Dr Talirr) may be to her advantage in understanding the Outside: but even attempting such an understanding is heresy, a capital crime.
Yasira hypothesises that Dr Talirr's work related somehow to the Outside: but does that mean that Yasira herself has invited its attention? Akavi, forcing her to seek out her lost mentor, surely does not have Yasira's interests at heart, and he regards heresy as a contagion, something that must not be passed on to others.
Yasira is tremendously relatable as a young woman with a certain degree of imposter syndrome and a burning desire to fulfil the promise she's always been told she has. She depends on her girlfriend Tiv (short for Productivity) for love and support, but when Akavi abducts her she's left without anyone who understands her unique blend of vulnerability and brilliance.
Yasira is also very clearly neurodivergent -- I think she uses the term 'autism' -- and her experiences of sensory overload, her coping strategies and her unusual perspective are vividy written. Yasira's neurodivergence is an integral part of her character, and her story arc: the novel begins with her difficulties in communicating what she believes or knows, and concludes with her facilitating communication between opposing forces.
Fulfils the 'By a neurodivergent author' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2021 -- it's an #ownvoices book.
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