The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord | review by Stephen Theaker

Rafi Abowen Delarua, Moo to his friends, also known as Rafidelarua, lives on the planet Cygnus Beta. For the last year he has attended the Tlaxce National Lyceum, and he’s getting bored, even though it’s a school for training “rogue and random psi gifted” to use their powers wisely. He is only fourteen when the book begins, but everyone is worried about him: his notorious father was immensely powerful, and did not use his powers for good.

Staff at the Lyceum leverage Rafi’s interest in the sport of wallrunning to persuade him to wear a cap, which will let them monitor the development of his powers more closely. The results are worrying: his psi powers manifest when he dreams about sex, and the dreams come with “a truly astonishing amount of fear”. He sneaks away from school over the weekend, and heads offworld, to the planet Punartam, where he’ll wallrun for shady Baranngaithe.

The galactic background to all of this is that the planet Sadira was devastated by a surprise biological attack, leaving “its biosphere locked in toxic regeneration for centuries to come” and its people scattered. Old Sadira had been the “leader of the galaxy… or at least policeman and judge and occasional executioner”, in part thanks to the psychic abilities of its people. Their absence from galactic affairs leaves a power vacuum and opportunities for the ruthless.

The government of New Sadira is desperate to bring female survivors to their new world. As a result “Sadiri women are now the galaxy’s rarest and most valuable commodity”, whether they like it or not, including those in a community of Sadiri recently established on Cygnus Beta. Meanwhile, Terra is out there, until now cut off from all these shenanigans, to allow us time to reach full maturity. The myths claim that endangered branches of humanity were brought long ago from Earth to Cygnus Beta to thrive in safety.

This was a disappointing book, for reasons that are a bit difficult to explain: it has what should be a satisfying array of mysteries, interplanetary politics, future sports, and interesting societal structures. Being lost for the first tenth of it didn’t help. The prologue is five thousand words long, a flood of information that simply serves to obscure the book’s main plot: a boy who leaves his home planet to play sports just as the galaxy gets crazy; it’s like the beginning of the Alan Smithee Dune, if each planet had names in three different languages.

That’s not the only aspect of the book that felt unnecessarily obfuscatory and foggy. For example, certain passages about a minor supporting character, Ntenman, and only him, are in the first person. The novel explains itself as a compilation of information recovered from datachips, audioplugs, data vaults and filigree, so perhaps the in-story explanation is there, but why him and no one else? It leads to the confusing assumption that he will be much more important to the plot than he really is.

Stories of future sports can be thrilling – they feature for example in Ben Bova’s The Duelling Machine and Jack Vance’s Trullion: Alastor 2262 – but wallrunning doesn’t sound particularly compelling. Two teams of players must run from the bottom of a wall to the top, guided by a strategist’s signals, conveyed through grav-bands on their wrists. Rafi plays as a booby, a deliberately useless player who lets everyone else practise how to handle team-mates’ mistakes. His skills don’t improve, but the teams around him do, almost preternaturally so.

Though the walls can sometimes be tilted by the players’ concerted movements, and some courses feature gravity twists, it sounds pretty much like bulldog’s charge with everyone running in the same direction, which is hard to imagine being much fun to play or watch. That the sport is also known as Forerunner is perhaps too big a clue to where the book will take it, and this heavy-handed hint is offered long before the reader has had a chance to start caring about the sport or its secret purpose.

Maybe that is what makes it a hard book to like: it assumes from the beginning that the reader is fully invested, in all its information, in all its characters and planets, in their multitude of names, in everything it wants to say. The plot takes a while to get going, and starts winding down with a quarter of the book still to go. However, the plot pieces do fall into place neatly towards the end, and a later scene where Rafi watches Dllenahkh, a Sadiri, return briefly to his home planet was extremely moving. I wouldn’t mind reading more from the author, but I’d want to start with the first in the series. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #258.

Book notes #11

Notes and ratings from TQF50 and TQF51 for books I didn’t review for TQF. Credits from Goodreads; apologies to anyone miscredited or missing.

The Goon, Vol. 0: Rough Stuff (Dark Horse Comics), by Eric Powell. A mob enforcer is secretly also the mob boss, and his main rival is the leader of a zombie gang. These collect very early issues, from before Eric Powell was really happy with it, but it seemed pretty good to me. ***

The Goon, Vol. 1: Nothin’ But Misery (Dark Horse Comics), by Eric Powell and Robin Powell. More adventures of the Goon. It’s like a cartoonish, supernatural version of Sin City. ***

The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (Cheeky Frawg Books), by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. Brief but amusing book exploring whether various imaginary animals would be considered kosher or not, and how one might cook them. ***

The Last Demon (Penguin Books) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Three excellent stories in a Penguin Mini Modern, two of them fantasy. “The Last Demon” is about a demon who relates his frustrating attempt to persuade a rabbi in the town of Tishevitz to sin. “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” is about a girl who wants to study the Torah rather than get married and darn socks, and the trouble into which that leads her. “The Cafeteria” is about a troubled woman who survived the Holocaust but now sees Hitler alive on the streets of New York. *****

The Last Rakosh (self-published) by F. Paul Wilson. Jack, an experienced monster hunter, spots a dangerous creature at the circus: a rakosh, a cross between a gorilla and a shark. This one is weak, because it’s being kept in an iron cage and isn’t being fed properly. One hearty human supper later it becomes a real problem. I’d heard good things about the Repairman Jack series, but this story didn’t quite sell it to me. We don’t see what makes him or the series special. He seems to be a typical tough guy, and the story is told in a straightforward way. ***

The Many Adventures of Miranda Mercury: Time Runs Out (Archaia), by Brandon Thomas and Lee Ferguson. Space adventure. Enjoyable, but falls a bit short of its very high ambitions. ***

The Portent: Ashes (Dark Horse Books) by Peter Bergting. Warrior wood nymph Lin returns from the spirit realm to find much time has passed. Her wood has been razed to the ground, and the land is divided between three warring parties, two of whom she has a history with: her former mentors, a warrior wizard and a witch. Lovely art. ***

The Unquiet House (Jo Fletcher Books), by Alison Littlewood. A woman moves to a haunted house, and we travel back in time to find out who haunts it and why. Several terrifying scenes. Reviewed for Black Static #43. ***

The Very Best of Kate Elliott (Tachyon Publications) by Kate Elliott. Reviewed for Interzone #257; I enjoyed it a lot. I think it might be her complete short fiction rather than a selection of the best, but I wouldn’t have guessed from how good it all was. ****

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett / review by Stephen Theaker

In City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway Books (US); Jo Fletcher Books (UK), ebook, 9396ll) the cruel, capricious gods have been killed by the people they oppressed and all the miracles they performed have been undone, leaving a world that no longer quite makes sense, and is ruled by their former slaves, the Saypuri. Bulikov, former capital of the gods’ empire, has been left in a particularly curious state, with transparent walls, staircases that lead nowhere, and other weird anomalies. It is the year 1719 and a Saypuri investigator has taken it upon herself to look into the murder of a friend. Like Columbo, her plain appearance conceals a sharp mind. Dangerously sharp: it’s going to get her into a lot of trouble. Bulikov is rife with conspiracies and secrets.

This is a book I loved to bits; it entertains on every level. There is the plot, of course, the mysteries uncovered one by one, the revelations and twists and discoveries. There are echoes of our world – it’s a bit like Taiwan and China, a bit UK and India, a bit USA and Mexico – but for a nice change it’s not a bit like medieval Europe. At the end of many chapters the reader is simply left dazzled by the pace of events in them – the sheer volume of cool stuff. Dead gods, vile monsters, lost kings, fractured realities, politics, oiled-up battles on frozen rivers, sex and hopeless romance – it is rich without ever feeling too much. This is exactly what I want when I read a fantasy novel: a strange new world where thoroughly interesting things that could never happen here are happening.  ****

A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

A Cold Season (Jo Fletcher Books, pb, 342pp), by Alison Littlewood, is the story of Cass and her son Ben, and what happens when they move to Darnshaw, the town where she grew up. She’s a young widow looking to reboot her life, he’s an angry little boy who misses his dad, lost to the war in Afghanistan. But when they arrive at their new home, theirs is the only apartment in Foxdene Mill that’s been finished and let, even though newspapers are piling up at the flat next door. It’s a bad start to a new life that only gets worse for Cass: bit by bit she loses the means of travel, her connection to the outside world, her ability to put food on the table, her relationship with her employer, and, worst of all, her connection to her son. All of these things have perfectly reasonable, non-supernatural explanations – snow has blocked the roads and downed the lines – but as friendly old Bert tells her, “It allus comes in like this, when he wants it.”

However terrifying things get, Cass has a tendency to rush back to bed (this is to some extent explained later in the story), but then it isn’t really the big, supernatural scares that are tearing her up – she could cope with those – it’s the awkwardnesses and embarrassments of quick conversations at the school gates; with overbearing mums she has no choice but to trust, or with Mr Remick, the nice teacher who seems to like her. It’s wondering whether a message has been passed on to her client; her son not wanting to talk to her, or swearing when he does; and knowing she’s been unfair to Bert and his lovable dog Captain. It’s an accumulation of small emotional wounds that leave her oblivious to the sword dangling over her head.

Over the last few years Alison Littlewood has provided a series of interesting stories to magazines like Black Static, Dark Horizons and my own Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (so do bear in mind my possible bias). Each story I’ve read has been so different from the others that I had little idea what to expect from her first novel in terms of themes or even genre, though I knew to look forward to it. The book didn’t let me down; it’s a strong debut novel with potentially wide appeal, and the publisher has I think been wise in marketing to the mainstream. My mum, for example, would enjoy it at least as much as I did; probably more, since she’s had to deal with her own pair of Bens. Any parent will empathise with Cass’s struggle to understand the moods of her son, and any freelancer will relate to the very modern horror of losing their internet connection, but what I think this book does best is convey the horror that Cass feels at not being in control of her environment, her social encounters and even, ultimately, her actions.

Though the supernatural elements of the plot might not break much new ground, seeing how they affect this particular character in her particular circumstances does much to make them fresh. It’s a fairly quick read, consisting of thirty-eight short chapters, the text generously spaced, with all events seen from Cass’s perspective. The absence of the possessive “s” after Cass’s name throughout seemed a little old-fashioned to me (as did a web developer who uses floppy disks and hasn’t heard of Dropbox), but it’s a novel that is otherwise unfussy and clear. Not simplistic – it sent me to the dictionary a few times – but simply direct. Two images from the book soon turned up in my nightmares. The first would be a spoiler, but you’ll know it when you see it, out at the witch stones. The other is that one finished apartment in that part-renovated mill, its loneliness and isolation a physical symbol of what is happening to Cass.

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Black Static #27, back in 2012.