Fiction Reviews
Requiem
(2025) John Palisano, Flame Tree Press,
£20 / Can$34.95 / US$26.95, hrdbk, 247pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58954-4
“In space, no one can hear you scream.”
(Christopher Fowler for Alien, 1979)
In recent years I have felt that there seems to have been a resurgence of stories dealing with the potential horrors of space – you know, heat, cold, airlessness, aliens, cosmic horror. I guess that it is because humans are grappling with the idea of the unknown frontier again, and the point that most people don’t know what’s out there - within scientific limits, anything is possible. Or is it just the fact that we are looking at sending humans beyond our Earthly confines once more?
Or perhaps this increased interest is just because space travel may now be available to humans once more. Certainly, recent activities have suggested that in the future space travel may be available to all, being accessible and less dangerous than you might think. The work of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and the like have emphasised this.
With this in mind then, John Palisano’s Requiem looks to a future where we have a major cemetery floating in space. It is 2112 (RUSH fans, please note!) Above the Earth is Eden, built by the Vita Nova company, a moon-sized space station designed to keep dead bodies and so to reduce the pressure for space on the Earth. By keeping the bodies there in a particulate fluid, they can maintain the cadaver’s appearance in perpetuity. They can even store memories and recreate the person digitally, with those memories.
For visitors there are also churches chapels and temples for all faiths, Gardens of Rest and artificial parks, auditoriums, hotel rooms and about 5,000 loved ones at present, with room for more.
As the book begins, we are told that the station has developed a problem. With thousands of bodies kept there in proprietary fluid, it seems that recently in a major incident the fluid system has failed, and bodies were lost. The escaping fluid was highly toxic so the station has been left abandoned by its skeleton crew whilst the artificial intelligence (AI) on Eden (named Eden) repairs itself. Now Vita Nova want a human crew to go back up there and check that it is again running smoothly, and hopefully regain the public’s trust in Eden and Vita Nova.
Sent to sort out the problem are a varied group of travellers, all ‘free spirits’, with few connections to tie them to Earth. It is a deliberately diverse group. Some are experienced space veterans, others are travelling for the first time. Ava Armstrong Duvay is the reluctant manager, trying to make them all work together. Dr. Derek Poole is the Medical Officer, there to manage the group’s wellbeing and to see if there are now any issues with the cadavers stored at Eden. Sanjay Akhila and Ken Lee are there to check the Communications. Midori is a Humani – a virtual intelligence robot, or artificial human, there to assist them all. Lastly, there’s Tessa Nightingale, a Special Guest Composer charged with the task of writing a new musical composition for Eden’s visitors and tenants – for who wants to be reminded of the disaster by hearing the old theme, right? I thought of her as Taylor Swift – or perhaps Katy Perry – seemingly there to create publicity and public awareness that Eden was now back in business.
With all of the characters introduced in the first chapter, the book has fairly little preamble. There’s some talk of how and why the habitat is there and why a team is needed to go there in the first few pages. It’s only a couple of short chapters before the group are heading out there.
Of course, once they get there, the crew start to experience hear sounds and music and experience hallucinatory visions, perhaps triggered by the oddly discordant Requiem music Tessa has written. Things all go a bit HAL 9000 at this stage, as the AI, Eden, who runs the whole spaceship, starts doing things like cutting off the heating and the oxygen.
With communications between Eden and Earth severed, the visions become weirder. Ava sees her dead husband Roland on board the habitat, even though he died in a mission Ava was the sole survivor of. (Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, anyone?)
The story then focuses on what these strange things are and why they are happening. Are these strange events caused by mechanical malfunction such as a lack of oxygen and hypothermia or could it be that the stress of space travel and the situations the characters are put in have created mass hysteria? Is it an alien attempt to communicate? A signal from the retrievable memories of the dead bodies already on Eden? The reader is left to ponder on these things in the latter part of the novel.
And it was in this last section that I began to lose interest. At a point when the ratcheted-up tension should be making the pages turn, I found that I was instead becoming less and less bothered. Even though the short chapters focusing on different characters kept things moving along, the lack of depth to the characters meant that I was less interested with them as I should have been.
It didn’t help that the rather deus ex machina ending felt a little contrived and didn’t entirely work for me. Without giving it away, anyone who has seen The Abyss will feel they have been there already.
In the end, Requiem is solid enough. You pretty much get what you might expect, including the weirdness at the end. I can see that some readers might be reading this just to see who dies and in what particularly gruesome way. They may be disappointed.
Nevertheless, Requiem is a decent read from which undemanding readers will get pretty much what they want. It’s not particularly challenging, nor particularly original (see other material I’ve referenced), but it is a pretty good representation of the space horror idea and is accessible and readable.
Mark Yon
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