Storyline Book Club: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club

Join us for a discussion of The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui.

About the Book

Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical, locked room murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding…

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the meaning he finds in his work and the comfort of AI companionship, his relationships with the living leave him longing for deeper connection.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years, its passengers reduced to dust and bone. A relic of Earth’s dying past, its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.

Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship. Iris’s religious rituals are met with bemusement by the scientists—and outright hostility by engineer Yan Fukui.

But the plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI enhancement may be their only hope for survival. . .

IN OUTER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOUR PRAYERS

About the Author

A.D. Sui is the Nebula Award–winning, Ukrainian-born author of speculative fiction, including The Dragonfly Gambit and The Iron Garden Sutra. Their work is supported by the Ontario Arts Council, Government of Ontario, and Canada Council for the Arts, and their Sturgeon and Pushcart-nominated works of short fiction have appeared in several notable venues including Augur, Haven Spec, and Baffling. A failed academic and retired fencer, they live in Canada and can be found online at TheSuiWay.ca on social media @thesuiway.