Heaven’s Vault (Novels)

Jon Ingold

★★★★☆

There are many paths through the Nebula, and many ways to reach a destination. The novels based on Heaven’s Vault, by the same writer as the game’s narrative, tell the story of one such path, and what comes after (and before).

The first two books, The Loop and The Vault, follow archaeologist Aliya and her robot Six through a story close to, but not quite the same as a play-through of the game. Side quests are left out, some incidents are rearranged, and flashbacks tell the story of El and Oroi exploring the decaying buildings of Elboreth as orphan children, and how Aliya found the Nightingale. You get to meet a couple of her older robots, including the very talkative Three, and a (thematically appropriate) seventh robot from before Iox.

They’re different enough from an actual playthrough that it still feels like you’re experiencing something new if you’ve played the game, and tell a solid enough narrative that you don’t need to have played the game to read them (though I imagine the target audience is mainly people who have).

Sailing the rivers is much more physical than the calm, flow-state experience in the game, more like actually sailing a small boat. Aliya strains muscles, the boat crashes into the occasional rock (and moon), she gets injured, the boat needs to be repaired.

Translating Ancient

Ancient writing is woven throughout the books. Fragments introduce some chapters, along with the numerals. Scene breaks use the glyph for separation.

The experience of actively translating is, well, translated to prose by showing Aliya and Six puzzling out the meaning based on how the glyphs combine. Some bits are translated completely, others partially, some left as extras for the reader. At one point in book three Aliya spends several pages trying to work out whether it’s even possible to translate names from written Ancient to modern Ioxian or Elborethian, aside from the one name, Mazwai, that has survived the ages with context intact.

Occasionally a chapter is introduced with passages from Mazai’s writings, credited here as being translated by Huang or Aliya.

Before and After

The third book, The Flood, gets weird.

It picks up in the aftermath of one of the endgame choices (you can probably guess which one from the title), as Aliya and the people of Elboreth attempt to deal with their new reality of too much water instead of too little. A secondary story thread follows Mazwai herself in another age. It gets into some of the bigger questions about the Loop: Is it real? If so, is time a literal loop in which the future becomes the past, or is it linear, but with similar events recurring? Are people really reborn time and time again in different ages? And just what does a robot’s Ethical Core mean, anyway?

Book four is coming later this year. I’m looking forward to reading it. For now, I’m playing through the game for the third time.