A death-monk in space, musing on what it means to be alive, and to be conscious... with a little bit of murder just to get things going.
If, like me, you read and enjoyed A. D. Sui's last published book - The Dragonfly Gambit, [Neon Hemlock, 2024] - then you'll have been just waiting for this one to drop. Sui has already shown they can handle space opera with flair, so give them not just a whole novel but a whole series in which to do it? Sign me right up.
The Iron Garden Sutra, which begins the Cosmic Wheel Series, follows Vessel Iris, a monk of the Starlit, whose role is to help the dying and deliver the dead to their final rest. The story opens with him in his home monastery, from which he is called to attend a very rare event - the discovery of a generation ship from old earth. One of many dispatched from a struggling planet long ago, it, like its siblings, is expected to be a tomb for its pioneering crew. Iris' job is simply to lay that precious, lost cargo to rest. It's a lonely job, but one he relishes, in the company of the AI assistant embedded into his brainstem. But when he gets there, he finds he isn't alone after all - a group of academics have been granted access to this monumental find, and he'll have to work alongside them to complete his task. Them... and whoever (or whatever) starts killing them off one by one.
A space opera, thriller, murder mystery situation - hurrah!
However - and I'm going to tackle this before I get to the positives because I think it's kind of important - I am not sure how well that "mystery" piece is handled. It really comes down to how much you value surprise, and the slow revelation of plot, piece by piece, over the course of a story. Which I think is an important, but not only critical, factor in this sort of story.
The problem comes from how the information is delivered to the reader, and how much we can reasonably expect of it to be accessible to the characters. For me as a genre reader, as someone who has consumed thriller and mystery content, I unfortunately found the solution to the situation pretty obvious early on, and was never surprised by the mystery (key point, I'll come back later), all the way to the end. I wasn't even in doubt, at any point, once I settled on what was happening. The joy of mysteries, for me, is in the guessing as I read them, even if I'm not amazing at it, so losing out on this strand of the tapestry was a little disappointing, and doubly so because the resolution yielded very easily to narrative logic, rather than being as a result of information presented that the characters themselves had access to. It made sense, within the story, that the engineers didn't come to the solution until close to the end - nothing of the knowledge we know them to have sets them up to come to the right conclusions. Their pool of information is made pretty clear - Sui does a great job setting their context up in that regard - and it makes very intuitive sense that they wouldn't make the jump needed. But that leaves me, the reader, sitting there with a solution nonetheless.
But this story isn't purely a mystery, there's more to what it's doing and where it's drawing its tonal and generic shape from, and so if one were to read it thinking of it in a different light, one where plot revelation pacing is less critical... I can see that this might be less of a concern. But for me, it slotted itself straight into mystery, and I could not but read it with that context in mind.
However, in everything else it was doing? Very few such complaints.
One of the primary other foci here is the character study - of Iris in particular, and of his relationships with both his companion AI (which, in this world, is both a rarity and somewhat of a taboo that his role as a monk is an exception to) and with the strangers he meets on the generation ship Counsel of Nicaea (yes I loved that joke too). Here, for the most part, is where the good work is, and where the obvious connection to Sui's previous book lies. The Dragonfly Gambit, for me, was a triumph of messy characters having messier relationships. While The Iron Garden Sutra is more restrained on that front, the DNA connection is still very clearly there.
Iris is... a mess, to be quite frank. He has spent a lot of his life isolated for a number of reasons, and struggles with having to operate around the new people he finds himself with, while at the same time yearning for their companionship. He is constrained by rules and vows, and also by his own nature that struggles to come to terms with his desires in this context. There are some beautifully described moments, where Sui has a real knack of conveying emotional state and of putting the reader truly inside Iris' head. He dissociates, he panics, he stresses, and all of those feel very embedded in his character and reactions to the (increasingly stressful and horrifying) situation in which he finds himself.
These moments, as well as the early character sketches that introduce us to the others, and the environmental descriptions that persist throughout, are where Sui's prose shines brightest. Right away on boarding the Nicaea, I got a vivid sense of the atmosphere of the place - not just the look, the carpet of moss and the hanging vines, but the feel. There's humidity and warmth, there's the soft floor against bare feet, there's the sweat dripping down the back of a neck. If one is prone to full immersion when reading, this is a book primed to deliver that most generously.
The inter-character relationships too have a good, immediate quality too them - people slot into place amongst themselves quite naturally, and then develop into something more complex from there. By far the best of these is Iris' relationship with his AI construct, referred to as VIFAI. VIFAI is a distinct character in his own right, absolutely a living thing as far as the novel is concerned, and a little bit snarky with Iris when needed. They have the warmth of two people who know each other intimately, and are also occasionally frustrated by one another, having to deal with a stressful situation together, and that stays lovely to read throughout the book.
The relationships with the academics are given less time and less depth, but there's still plenty worth enjoying, especially with the initially-antagonistic Engineer Yan, who clearly has a problem with the Starlit but won't explain why. He, too, gets character development and revelation well worth watching, and makes more and more sense in his responses the more time he gets on the page.
Where the character work falls down a little - only a little! - is in two regards. The first is that contextual information is sometimes delivered in such a way that it... not quite contradicts but definitely gets a little in the way of the natural-feeling progression of character. For example, there's a sequence relatively early that is clearly meant to be there to explain to the reader that this is a world in which AIs are considered living beings, whose autonomy is respected and protected by law. However, this is presented via Iris having a little revelation about how he's been treating VIFAI, that simply doesn't makes sense for the fact that the two have them have been together for more than half Iris' life. It feels as though it comes out of nowhere... except that it's the exact point in the plot where I needed that information, and the protagonist-AI relationship was the best vector to provide it. It doesn't happen enormously often, but there are a few moments like it throughout the story, and each was just a little grit in the eye for an otherwise lovely view.
The second regard is incredibly minor (ha), and yet also one that nagged at me the whole way through the story. There are two students with Engineer Yan as part of his team - and specifically students who have at least and undergraduate degree, possibly more, so they are at the very least in their twenties. These two are universally referred to as children throughout the book, and treated very differently than the "adults", even compared to the non-academics, so it's not even a matter of intellectual snobbery. It's just... a weird quirk. But one I couldn't get away from.
But aside from those? Wonderful. We get some revelations about Iris and VIFAI's early relationship towards the end of the story, and they're the sort of extra contextualising that just clicks everything into place. It's excellent. Likewise, some of the final character interaction scenes are an excellent encapsulation of the journey those characters have undergone, and the changes it must necessarily have performed on them. That growth and change is one of the absolute standout aspects of the book.
Which doesn't mean all the interactions are smooth. I liked The Dragonfly Gambit for its mess, and that mess is here too, though in a different form. Iris, in particular, makes some bad choices in how he responds to and reaches out (or doesn't) to the people around him that are sometimes heartbreaking, but come from a very natural-feeling place for the information we have, increasingly, about his background.
And, coming back to the point, while I may not have been surprised by the mystery, I was sometimes surprised (in a good) way, by some of the character decisions, especially at the climax and aftermath of the story. There is one, in particular, which is devestating in the moment, coming seemingly out of nowhere, but which feels entirely right in contemplation after the fact. And that, more than anything, feels like character work done right - even when they surprise you, it feels entirely unsurprising.
For a book restricted predominantly to the walls of a single (albeit large) ship, we do get enough of a sense of the world to ground it, to make sense of where all the pieces of this puzzle come from. Sui is, unsurprisingly, interested in the history from earth to the generation ship's appearance, and in giving us enough of a sense of the line between the two to make it feel like a part of the wider world.
One of the ways this is done best is in religion, in fact. For all Iris is a member of the Starlit, this is not a single future religion, alone and unchallenged. This is a world that has, at least, muslims, mormons, catholics and a rabbi living alongside the space-death-monks. And for me, religious plurality is an incredibly important marker for a credible space future. Too many stories expect me to believe in monocultures - whether that's a single planet, a single religion, or a single faith - and there is nothing about my experience of the world that has me expecting anything from humans other than plurality in all things. And so, when a story gives that, it's always a pleasant surprise. But moreover, in this space-faring world, where space travel still carries inherent risks and dangers, it makes a lot of sense that something like Iris' Starlit would exist to operate within that niche. The world is shaped in such a way that Iris and his context make instant, intuitive sense to me, and that felt important too. His religion is given shape and depth throughout the story, in his actions, his possessions, his habits and in interstitial texts that tell us more about scripture and beliefs. It is a thing whole, one that forms part of the fabric of human life, and provides something that could conceivably nourish the soul - it is a religion where I can understand why people follow it. Very easily. This is rarer than perhaps it ought to be.
Between the world, the characters, the prose and the very real sense of place, there is a lot to love about The Iron Garden Sutra. I have my quibbles with parts of it, but none of those ever stopped me from wanting to devour it, page after page. I found some of the magic in it that drew me to Sui's previous work, and more than enough to draw me onwards into the rest of the series. I am desperate to know what happens next, but, more importantly, keen to see the characters who go one from the end of this volume, and to see them continue to grow into whatever comes next.
--
The Math
Highlights: excellent characters and their relationships, lovely neat turns of phrase, excellent descriptions of place and atmosphere
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10
Reference: A. D. Sui, The Iron Garden Sutra, [Erewhon Books, 2026]
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
