The Iron Garden Sutra

A.D. Sui
Completed 6/23/2026, Reviewed 6/24/2026
3 stars

Don’t believe the online blurb about this book.  This is not cozy in any way.  It’s a Sci Fi-Horror novel that uses many tropes that are popular right now.  It’s similar to the Alien franchise as people are killed one by one by something in a spaceship.  There’s a lot of body horror here.  There is a monk, but unlike Becky Chamber’s placid monk, this one is miserably self-loathing.  However, after I got about 50% of the way through, I started to really enjoy it.  I like reading horror.  And I liked the enemies-to-lovers romance-in-a-horrible-situation-movie that very slowly evolved.  This book was for online book club, so it was a quick break from the Hugo nominees.  

A generations ship has returned to a human docking station after a thousand years in space.  Everyone aboard is dead.  The Starlit monastery sends Vessel Iris to the ship to perform the soul releasing ritual for the thousands of dead.  He has an AI implant which helps him remember things, like breathing calmly and recalling the hundreds of years of sutras he studied at the monastery.  When he arrives at the ship, he finds a research team already there and it is full of moss, vines, trees, and other plant life.  He tries to avoid the team but inevitably, they interact---a lot.  Some are friendly, but some hate him for having the implant or simply because he’s a monk for the dead.  Vessel Iris senses beats on the ship, like a pulse or heartbeat, that no one else mentions.  So he keeps it a secret, the first of many.  As people die one by one, he keeps his theories to himself because the others aren’t receptive to him.  But his secrets may hold the key to the mysteries of the ship and the reasons for the deaths.

Vessel Iris is a miserable person.  He had a horrible childhood, being orphaned and taken to the monastery.  He believes he is a failure in everything he does.  However, between his senses, the AI (called VIFAI), and the discoveries made by the team, he is the only one who figures out what’s going on the ship.  You expect him to be a hero, but he’s not.  He’s a horribly insecure person.  That made reading through the first half tough.  It’s hard to develop empathy for him because of these personality traits.  Fortunately, the pace picks up and annoyance of Iris must compete with the accumulating body count.  

The character of the VIFAI was strange.  I felt like he was on the verge of having a robust personality, but it mostly seemed one-dimensional.  It’s sort of like a slave/guardian angel but he treats it as an equal.  I didn’t develop any empathy for VIFAI either.

Of the other characters, Riyu Alo was the nicest.  She’s the exobiologist.  Ishtan Ora was cute as the bumbling older archeologist, specializing in ancient, returned generation ships.  Tev and Jesi, the engineer’s interns didn’t seem multi-dimensional until near the end.  There are two guards we don’t know much about, but Iris feels guilty about not knowing their names.  Finally, there’s engineer Yan Fukui who is brash and downright mean to Iris (I just got that his last name might be a self-referential joke).  Because of this animosity, we get a better sense of who he is.  We also get background information about him, providing much needed insight into this belligerent character.  Probably the best developed character, but not the easiest to empathize with for quite a while.  But to me he was the most authentic and realistic human in the group.  He also played practical engineer devil’s advocate to Iris’ theories about the ship.  

I thought the prose was fine, but the world building was not detailed regarding the science.  There was a lot of hand-waving about the mycelium network and generations ship engineering.  During book club discussion, there was a lot of “What was that about?” i.e., vague science.  Despite all this, I was very engaged in the last hundred pages or so.  I liked the climax, but I somehow missed the “Book 1” on the top of every page, ending up shocked that it left some pretty huge loose ends.  It’s not a cliffhanger, but there’s a lot to be resolved.  And it seems to me that the resolutions will come in the form of going back to the ship with the remaining characters, the tired trope used by Alien and Aliens and countless other horror flicks.  When it came to rating this, I wavered between a 3 and a 4 because, by the end, I really liked it, but I also recognized that it had the above flaws.  So I settled on three stars out of five.  But I liked it enough that I will probably read the sequel.