The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe

Published by Orbit on ‎ June 3, 2025

The protagonists of The Two Lies of Faven Sythe are strong women. Whether they are entirely human is a separate question.

Bitter Amandine sounds like the name of an herb, but it is actually the name of a pirate. Bitter’s ship, Marquette, is unlike most other vessels for reasons that are only revealed late in the story. Like other spacefaring ships, it is powered by a lightdrive. A breach in the drive’s shielding can lead to lightsickness, a condition that makes the mind fuzzy and might lead to delusional thought.

The other protagonist is a navigator, Faven Sythe. Navigators are able to map the pathways through space that make interstellar travel possible. Every time they use that power, they add new scales to their body and shorten their lives. Sixteen starpaths are available for everyone’s use, but other starpaths must be custom ordered from navigators at significant expense.

The scales that grow on navigators are known as cryst, as is the glasslike shielding that surrounds drives. Hulls are also plated with cryst to protect people in a ship from radiation. The “ancient species” known as the cryst left behind technology that enables navigators to map starpaths. Navigators appear to be the descendants of humans who used that technology to merge with the ancient cryst.

When the cryst want to reproduce, they meditate. Sometimes they are rewarded with a growth beneath their skin that is “plucked free to be nurtured into a woman, or something like a woman.” Reproduction doesn’t seem to be happening in recent years, one of several mysteries that will be resolved by the novel’s end.

Shortly before they are entirely covered in scale, navigators pose themselves in the posture they will assume for eternity. As the story begins, Faven’s mother has become fully crystalized and deposited in a location where she will have a nice view, like a statue in a park.

As she is coping with her mother’s crystallization, Faven learns that her mentor, Ulana Valset, has been reassigned to a distant space station. Navigators (and by extension, space travel) are controlled by the Choir of Stars, sort of a council of elder navigators. Ulana is one of several navigators who have recently been sent to inconvenient locations, never to be seen again.

After engaging in a clandestine and forbidden investigation, Faven learns that Ulana’s starpath actually took her to the Clutch, a “dark fist of a dyson sphere seized around a whimpering star” that has become “the graveyard of their predecessors.” The Clutch is also the location of a “derelict ship called the Black Celeste.”

Faven wants to follow Ulana in the hope of discovering the truth underlying her fictitious reassignment. To that end, she engages with a pirate named Tagert Red without realizing that he plans to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Bitter foils that plan but can’t prevent the Choir and its army of enforcers (known as Blades) from capturing her and taking her to the Clutch.

The space opera plot follows Bitter and her crew through a series of action scenes as they attempt to reclaim possession of Faven and learn why navigators are disappearing in the Clutch. Their discoveries lead them to a new understanding of the ancient cryst and the true nature of navigators. Bitter also discovers the true nature of the Marquette and its crew.

While navigators don’t reproduce sexually, their sexual desire becomes apparent when Bitter and Faven develop the hots for each other. Their personalities in other respects are developed in as much detail as space opera requires. Bitter doesn’t say “arrr” or wear an eyepatch, but she has the swashbuckling fearlessness a reader would expect of a pirate, as well as a moral sense and willingness to make sacrifices that traditional pirates lack. Her dialog suggests that pirates of the future have adopted the grammar of high school dropouts from the 1950s, although Bitter seems to be brighter than her crew. Faven has a bit less personality but is nevertheless a sympathetic character.

Science fiction writers often put all their energy into worldbuilding and pay insufficient attention to plot construction. Megan O’Keefe creates an interesting universe while building an intriguing mystery about the Clutch and the Choir of Stars. In the grand tradition of science fiction, the mystery holds a threat to the continued existence of humanity, the kind of threat that only a plucky pirate and her scaley lover can prevent. The story moves quickly and gives the reader a fun ride on its way to a resolution that, if a little too neat, is nevertheless satisfying.

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