A Candle for Malka by Louise Carey

Publisher - Absinthe Books

Published - Out now

Price - £18 hard cover £2.99 ebook via https://www.pspublishing.co.uk

A Candle For Malka is a bit of a hybrid beast; part cosmic horror, part science fiction… and all heart, dealing with a future where the Earth’s natural resources have been depleted and—not content with destroying our own planet—big business is now expanding its search for oil further out into the solar system. The story is told from the viewpoints of a brother and sister, Malka and Bram Schulman, as each seek to navigate the results of one such expedition, to Europa. Except this story is so much more than that. It’s a story about family, faith, strength, greed and where it takes us...A Candle for Malka is a novella to be proud of.

In shorter fiction depth is tricky. You never get the space to give lengthy detailed histories of characters, worlds and the past. When you do get a complex tale that can talk about multiple themes at once I always take notice and A Candle for Malka by Louise Carey brings successfully together the themes of sibling love and rivalry; greenwashing science and the wonder of experiencing other worlds into a tale that manages to be both full of love, pain and fear that I found highly captivating.

In the late 22nd Century humanity is starting to get to the far reaches of the solar system. A long proposed candidate for life is Jupiter’s moon Europa with its hidden seas under a world of ice life may be found. Unfortunately for science the expedition that goes there finds nothing alive…but it does find oil. A new oil rush commences and Europa is now the focus of a bigger expedition to bring in a lucrative new fuel source. Back home this disgusts Bram Schulman lecturer and eco-protestor but things get worse when his older sister Malka who specialises in astrobiology tells him she will be working on the ship as it is a research opportunity too good to miss. An argument explodes and before reconciliation tragedy strikes. Bram has to try to piece what has happened to his sister but her sinister employer is very keen Bram is not told everything.

Carey has a great knack for seeding the plot very early on and making us work to pull the pieces together. At the very start we have Bram warning us of something terrible; we get to know very early on Malka’s fate and yet here the tale has rather than revealed its hand too early kept us guessing all the way to the end as to what is really going on. This ia fascinating mix of SF exploration and a cosmic horror where the actual source of the horror is in the shadows waiting for us to detect it. For me this works because Carey has worked hard to give each strand of the tale its unqiue flavour and depth.

The heart of the tale is Bram and Malka’s relationship. Siblings who do love each other and yet manage to annoy each other too. Bram is the angrier of the two and puts their principles in action supporting protests. Malka is the explorer and I really liked how Carey made her a religious character - a very liberal Jew. It’s refreshing to see a character use their religion as a principle to do good and also providers her with perspective. On top of that as Bram discovers her video logs from her doomed mission we get Malka’s voice sharing her sense of wonder and also trepidation as the one person doing a job not for commercial gain and one that could potentially derail a mission. Carey puts Bram through the winger as disaster strikes and we get through his own words a sense of grief ranging from anger, guilt and solitude that is quite tangible.

Alongside this is the bigger SF plot. We get the traditional slimy corporation trying to make profit out of everything and the efforts they take to stonewall Bram are as we know from our own time fairly standard. But Carey also seeds a bigger mystery on Europa that starts to reveal itself linking itself to the fate of Malka and ultimately a price will be paid. Bram helps us out the pieces together.

A Candle for Malka is a really good SF tale of relationships, corporate greed and horror that keeps you guessing all the way to the end as to how events will finally unwind. Carey continued to be an author I am very interested in seeing what they will do next.