Please spoil Station Eternity for me

January 31, 2025 3:07 PM

I'm not going to be finishing Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty, but I want to know how the mysteries are resolved. Please spoil it for me.

It used to be easy to find spoilers for books, with just a simple Google search! Alas, those days are gone.

The specific questions I would like answered:
Who did the murder?
What's Xan's big secret / what's he really doing on the station?
Why do murders happen around Mallory?

Thanks!

posted by meese to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

I read this a while ago so some of this is a bit fuzzy, but since no one else has jumped in, here’s what I remember:

Xan’s big secret is that he’s bonded to the shuttle that he lives on (cannot remember the shuttle name or the book’s term for “bonding” with aliens, sorry!).

The murders happen around Mallory because what she remembers as getting stung by bees as a kid was actually being bonded to the bee aliens. (I know which color of bees is relevant here but I can’t remember which, the less friendly color?) She has access to their hive mind and ends up near murders because their hyper pattern matching and love of data collection make her subconsciously aware of where murders will happen, so she’s drawn there.

Amusingly I can’t remember clearly enough to explain who did the murder! It was a complicated whodunit situation.

Hope that helps satisfy your curiosity a bit, and that someone with a fresher memory comes along to fill in what I missed.
posted by firefleet at 7:13 AM on February 1

It's been a while since I read that one, and I may be getting some elements mixed up with the sequel, but:

* In addition to being bonded to the shuttle, Xan was involved in an American military program designed to figure out how to kill symbiotic aliens; he was leaking information to an official opposed to the effort.
* As firefleet says, it's not that murders happen around Mallory; it's that she's attracted to murders that are about to occur, as a result of being stung by a Sundry scout as a child and looped (somewhat unsuccessfully) into the Sundry hive mind.
* The murder on the shuttle was done by Mallory's aunt, who is a serial killer; the guy was an obsessive fan of Mallory's books who had figured out things about Mallory's life and was coming to tell her. Mallory's aunt later kills Calliope because Calliope picked up a piece of evidence unwittingly (I think the aunt's charm bracelet, which she uses to record her kills). Am I missing a murder? The original symbiote of the station, right? I think he's not a murder victim--rather, he dies due to backlash from the station when it is connected to one of the humans when it dies, but I don't 100% remember; the anti-symbiote bioweapon may also have come into play.
posted by snarkout at 7:27 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you both! This is plenty to satisfy the itch left by an unfinished mystery.
posted by meese at 10:14 AM on February 2