For October’s book club session we read Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. Honestly, this book was not great, which is a rare takeaway for me (reading is one of my favorite pastimes and I cannot think of a time I didn’t finish a book I started or find something genuinely enjoyable about it). True to form, I will start with what I loved: the author’s imagination. The world-building in this novel is inventive, playful, and frequently smart in quiet, understated ways. The central premise—a sentient space station serving as a diplomatic and social hub for dozens of alien species—is fresh and full of promise. Each species is given its own logic, culture, communication style, and relationship to humanity, and the book shines most brightly when it allows those differences to collide.
Some of the most engaging moments come from seeing humanity reflected through alien eyes. Humans are perceived as emotional, volatile, and strangely self-destructive—qualities that both fascinate and alarm the station’s nonhuman residents. These observations feel sharp and thoughtful rather than judgmental, and they offer a compelling lens on first contact, cultural misunderstanding, and the uneasy power dynamics that emerge when humans are no longer the dominant or even the most rational species in the room. I also appreciated the glimpses of Earth-side politics: the factions, opportunists, and shadowy interests eager to control or manipulate humanity’s role in this new interstellar ecosystem. Those threads hinted at a much larger, more complex story unfolding just beyond the page.
Another standout element is the station itself. Station Eternity isn’t merely a setting—it’s a character. Its sentience, emotional responses, and symbiotic relationships with its inhabitants add a layer of intimacy and strangeness that sets the book apart. The idea of a living structure that cares, reacts, and occasionally misjudges its residents is one of the novel’s most compelling achievements, and I found myself wishing the story had lingered there longer.
Where the book faltered for me was in its central murder mystery. Rather than feeling integral to the story, the mystery felt like an imposed framework—one that went through the expected motions of bodies, suspects, and reveals without the investigative rigor or narrative momentum that makes a mystery satisfying. The clues didn’t accumulate in a way that invited real engagement, and the eventual solution didn’t feel earned so much as delivered. For a novel so rich in speculative ideas and alien psychology, the mystery itself felt oddly flat and underdeveloped, as though it had been bolted onto a much more interesting science fiction novel rather than arising organically from the world.
To be fair, I’m not a devoted murder-mystery reader, and it’s entirely possible I wasn’t the ideal audience for that aspect of the book. But even accounting for that bias, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Station Eternity would have been far stronger if it had trusted its own strengths more fully. The politics of alien coexistence, the emotional isolation of being human in a mostly non-human society, the station’s evolving consciousness—those elements felt alive, layered, and full of unrealized potential. Instead of elevating them, the mystery often seemed to weigh them down.
In the end, Station Eternity struck me as a fascinating world trapped inside a less-than-fascinating plot. I didn’t dislike it because it failed to imagine boldly—it absolutely did—but because it seemed to pull its punches on the very ideas that made it unique. I came away wishing Lafferty had written a different book set in the same universe: one more focused on the strange, political, emotional, and philosophical implications of shared space, rather than a mystery that never quite justified its place at the center of the story.