Yours Celestially
A downloadable book
I swear I write books that aren't about people kissin' robots... but this isn't one of those books.
Yours Celestially is a cozy, gay, and extra weird sci-fi that I hope you fall madly in love with. There's a biblically accurate A.I., completely bonkers visuals, and bionic penis jokes. It's set in a hopeful, queernorm, and diverse city full of plants, cute bakeries, cob houses, and found families.
Now a SPSFC semi-finalist!
After divorce, death, and having his reformatted soul uploaded into a new body, Sasha expected resurrection to be a fresh start. His time spent in digital Limbo with the program’s cheeky AI guardian angel, Metatron, was cathartic, but what good is a second life when he only sees his daughter on the weekends, he has all the same problems he had before he died, and he can’t seem to shake the ache for the married life he lost?
If that weren’t frustrating enough, a glitch in the program has given Sasha the ability to sense Metatron even outside of Limbo. And Metatron is in love. The angel’s sickly-sweet yearning for one of the souls still in Limbo has turned Sasha’s stomach into caramelized lead. It’s hard enough to move on without someone else’s feelings making the emptiness in his own life even more acute. He didn’t have playing wingman to an actual winged being on his bingo card, but he’s determined to help Metatron make a move on their crush so he can get love off of his mind.
Sasha takes a job with the resurrection company in order to covertly contact Metatron. Except Sasha’s new coworker, Mr. C, keeps showing up at the worst moments. The man is annoying, he’s pushy… and he’s incredibly hot. Sasha can’t decide whether Mr. C wants to blackmail him or be his new BFF, but he seems to know things about Metatron and the resurrection program that Sasha doesn’t. Getting close to him might be the key to solving Sasha’s problem, but if he isn’t careful, he’s going to end up catching feelings of his own.
Rep: Gay, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, and asexual characters; M/M and NBi/M romance
ADHD main character; autistic love interest; love interest with anxiety and past trauma
CWs: past drug addiction, divorce, mentions of car wreck, discussion of death, brief violence, profanity, brief mention of suicide and past self-harm, brief mentions of transphobia, mentions of Christianity and biblical iconography (seraphs, cherubs, etc.), mild sexual elements, depression and anxiety, vomiting
Length: 344 pages
Publisher and publishing date: Kraken Collective, Nov 2, 2023
Paperback and hardback: please consider purchasing here at bookshop.org to support independent bookstores
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(crossposting from my storygraph, I received an ARC of this book in 2023)
Having read & loved Seraph Ex Machina, I was quite excited to read this alternative world for the characters and it is a lovely story.
Al Hess creates a beautiful somewhat futuristic world (but in other aspects much too similar especially with the religious transphobia) and asks the question how this society might react if we had the ability to upload your soul to a server if you die and grow a new body to inhabit once you’re ready to come back. Our two focal characters of this book are Sasha, a man who was resurrected recently, and Metatron, the AI tasked with watching over the souls in Limbo.
I enjoyed the characters and I especially liked hanging out with Metatron again. We get to see a somewhat different side of them, so I would absolutely advise anybody who enjoyed Seraph Ex Machina to read this book as well. They go through a lot less trauma this time (which was good, because I cried a Lot for them during SEM), but they still have to deal with the fact that aren’t sure how to express their feelings. Sasha was a really interesting character, struggling to deal with the way his past addiction still influences his life even now that he’s clean (especially since his addiction lead to his divorce and he only sees his daughter during the weekends now) while also needing to find a way to convince Metatron to stop pinning and ask their crush out before he gets a stomach ulcer. The portrayal of adhd, autism, past drug addiction, religious fear of technical advancement and divorce set in a futuristic world was really interesting. For example, Sasha has a “stim” injected in his arm which he can use to get his adhd-meds whenever he needs it (no more remembering where you sat your pills down! God, that would be really useful!), but the drugs he was addicted to are just as easily acquirable, as they simply consist out of two perfectly legal stims mixed together. I found this really interesting, especially since staying clean under such circumstances must be really tough.
I also really enjoyed Sasha’s character as well as all his friends and that fact that a huge part of his storyline was accepting that he can and should open up to his friends as they care about him and not just his romantic feeling. He’s carrying a lot of guilt around fearing he ruined everything due to his past addiction and it was just really nice to see that people loved and cared for him the entire time. Mr. C. is also a quite interesting character and I liked him as well, he and Rodrigo are both really cute love interests.
(slight spoilers for the end of the book in the next paragraph)
I would have liked some more character building for our villain Campbell as he feels quite one dimensionally EvilTM at times (why does he do what he does? Cause he’s evil, duh!) and so did not really interest me and I think it would have been more interesting if his motivations had been explored more. And while he does get his “punishment” in the end, I do think the many people he hurt would have deserved to deal with their trauma a bit more. However, the interesting world building and the other loveable characters more than make up for it and the story is a really good one.
All in all, I really enjoyed this story, it is an interesting read with multiple twists and turns and interesting plot reveals that doesn’t shy away from examining a few tough topics. Diversity plays a huge role, not just for neurodiverse people, but also regarding genders, sexualities and races and it was just great to see it done so effortlessly. Mostly I think it is a story about overcoming adversity and healing from trauma and allowing yourself to love again and I think we can always use more diverse stories like that.