Warm, imaginative and often funny, Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers thoughtfully examines the price and cost of corporate colonialism and humanity’s ever-present need to expand.
In the distant future, Destry, a ranger who works for the Environmental Rescue Team on planet Sask-E, discovers a hidden city. Destry and the rest of her team are tasked with ensuring ecological stability on Sask-E, which is owned by the terraforming corporation Verdance, before Verdance sells plots of the planet’s land to the highest bidders. The ERT thought they were the only inhabitants of Sask-E. But the city Destry discovers is populated by an entire previous generation of terraformers, and she and the ERT consider whether to stand against Verdance and their murky motives. Centuries later, while a planetwide conspiracy threatens everything the ERT has done to turn Sask-E into a hospitable planet, the fallout from Destry’s conflict with Verdance resurfaces.
The Terraformers is an expansive, entertaining book, full of comprehensive world building and exacting detail. Every living thing in the terraformed areas of Sask-E provides data that flows back to the ERT: Messages can be sent through blades of grass or through water. Robotic drones converse with people, and genetically enhanced animals can communicate via text message. Newitz giddily explores the convergence of digital and ecological systems, and their enthusiasm is infectious. The Terraformers is full of parallels to contemporary issues (corporate greed versus environmental sustainability, the intersection of machines and humans), and while Newitz intensely examines these topics, the reader will never feel lectured, bored or disconnected from the characters.
But once TheTerraformers concludes, the questions it poses remain. In our race to remake the universe for ourselves, what kinds of stewards will we be?
Entertaining and full of thorny questions about the fate of humanity, Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers explores a distant, corporation-controlled future.
Leta McCollough Seletzky, author of The Kneeling Man
Counterpoint | April 4
In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., one man is kneeling down beside King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, trying to staunch the blood from the fatal head wound. This kneeling man, Leta McCollough Seletzky’s father, was a member of the activist group the Invaders, but he was also an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities of this group.
Seletzky is a former litigator turned essayist and a National Endowment for the Arts 2022 Creative Writing Fellow, and in The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she reveals the story of her father, who went on to work at the CIA, and reflects upon the full weight of these revelations.
Alejandro Varela, author of The People Who Report More Stress
Astra House | April 4
Last year, Alejandro Varela published his first novel, The Town of Babylon, and it became a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Varela is following up his hot-out-of-the-gate success with an overlapping story collection centering on the intersecting lives of a group of mostly queer and Latinx New York City residents. The stories explore many of the same themes as Varela’s novel—systemic racism, gentrification and economic injustice—and since his graduate studies were in public health, he brings deep insight to these topics and balances them with crisp humor and a lot of heart.
Emily Tesh, author of Some Desperate Glory
Tordotcom | April 11
Emily Tesh won acclaim and a devoted readership with her Greenhollow duology of novellas, the first of which, Silver in the Wood, won a World Fantasy Award. The Greenhollow duology was a romantic take on age-old English folklore, but for her first novel, Tesh switches gears to science fiction and heads into darker moral territory. Set in a future where Earth has been destroyed by aliens, Some Desperate Glory follows Kyr, a young girl growing up in an isolated, militaristic community, where she is being trained to avenge the planet. She soon discovers that the rest of the universe is far more complex than she imagined and that she has a lot further to go to become the hero she wants to be.
Sarah Cypher, author of The Skin and Its Girl
Ballantine | April 25
After two decades as a freelance book editor, Sarah Cypher is making her fiction debut with a novel that draws from her own Lebanese American family’s history, which can be traced back to the incredible Kanaan Olive Soap factory in Nablus, Palestine. On the day of the factory’s (actual) destruction, a Palestinian American girl named Betty is born with bright blue skin in The Skin and Its Girl; as an adult, Betty begins to read the journals kept by the family matriarch, which reveal her aunt’s choice to hide her sexuality during the family’s immigration to the U.S., a discovery that helps Betty follow her own heart.
It’s pretty incredible when a short story collection becomes an instant New York Times bestseller, and doubly so when it’s a debut, as in the case of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s devastating and nightmarish Friday Black (2018). With his highly anticipated first novel, Adjei-Brenyah continues in the realm of brutal, dystopian surrealism with one of the most audacious premises of the year: Reality television meets America’s for-profit prison system in this story of two female gladiators, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, who fight for their freedom from a private prison reality entertainment system.
Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog
Forge | May 23
Jamie Loftus is best known as a comedian, TV writer and podcaster, including co-hosting “The Bechdel Cast” with screenwriter Caitlin Durante on the HowStuffWorks network. Loftus’ debut book, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, is part memoir and part social critique that recounts her cross-country road trip in the summer of 2021 to investigate that backyard barbecue staple, the illustrious hot dog. Along the way, Loftus delves into all the ways hot dogs embody issues of class and culture in the United States, illuminating the complex history of this quintessential American food with her signature mix of intellect and unhinged humor.
Photo of Seletzky by Gretchen Adams. Photo of Varela by Allison Michael Orenstein. Photo of Tesh by Nicola Sanders Photography. Photo of Adjei-Brenyah by Alex M. Philip.Photo of Loftus by Andrew Max Levy.
These up-and-coming authors are going places, and we will be hot on their heels.
The main character of Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh’s debut novel, is a vicious, ambitious teenage girl brought up in an isolated community of humans intent on avenging the destruction of Earth. Kyr is anything but “likable”—and, according to Tesh, that’s the point.
A few years ago, I had an idea for a novella. I thought of it as something squarely in my comfort zone: a cute little queer romance between two very different people, one of them Large and the other Chatty. (If you have read my Greenhollow Duology, cute queer romance novellas about Large Gruff Type x Chatty Weirdo is about as precisely my style as it is possible for a story to be.) The fun part of this one would be the setting—in space!—and actually, perhaps there could be a cute alien involved? And I’d just been rewatching “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which contains one of my favorite villain-to-awkward-teammate arcs of all time, so could I maybe do a Zuko thing?
I wrote one scene: the protagonist reenacting the death of the Earth, racing against time to save a doomed world, sacrificing their own life and still failing. It’s still the opening scene of the book, almost unchanged from that rapid first draft. But after I got 500 words into my cute little romance, I thought: This isn’t cute. This isn’t little. And this would be better if it were about the Zuko-esque character’s awful sister.
“Girls don’t get to be shitheads. And if they are, they don’t get any sympathy.”
I’d spent years mostly writing stories with male protagonists. But I changed all the pronouns in my opening scene, and suddenly I had a monstrous, cruel, ambitious, abused, horrendously angry beast of a character: Kyr. She began as an echo of Azula, a major antagonist in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” who unlike her brother, Zuko, never gets a redemption arc or a second chance.
Kyr is awful. She really, truly sucks. I found that being subtle about it didn’t work; we have expectations about teenage girl characters, words like “relatable” and “likable.” Male characters are allowed to be complex, difficult, morally gray, even outright shitheads and still get sympathetic antihero arcs. But female characters aren’t supposed to behave that way. Girls don’t get to be shitheads. And if they are, they don’t get any sympathy.
I didn’t want anyone to mistake Kyr for “relatable” and “likable.” If you want to write a villain redemption arc, you have to start with a villain.
Kyr is the villain. The monster girl, the unlovable and unworthy. I remember writing an early scene in which she mercilessly bullies a small child in a glowing triumph of self-righteous arseholery and thinking, is this clear enough? Will they even let me do this? Do I have to tone her down? I was a long way outside my creative comfort zone. But you can feel it, as a writer, when the thematic underpinnings are locking into place: justice or vengeance, heroism or self-destruction, the past or the future. Kyr proves in that original opening scene that she can do what every lovable teen protagonist has to do sooner or later: sacrifice herself to save the world. I had to spend the whole book turning her inside out, remaking her, undoing her, until she finally found a way to do the opposite: sacrifice her cruel and narrow and hateful world in order to save herself.
Picture of Emily Tesh by Nicola Sanders Photography.
In Emily Tesh’s ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’-inspired debut, Some Desperate Glory, a teenage girl realizes her community is a militaristic cult.
People love an underdog story: A hero or scrappy gang of misfits prevailing against nearly insurmountable odds. But in Some Desperate Glory, author Emily Tesh takes this trope in a dark direction, illustrating how single-minded zealotry can spiral into overt fascism.
Some Desperate Glory follows Kyr, a girl born into an extremist human sect living on the fringes of known space. In Tesh’s universe, humanity accomplished interstellar travel and encountered the majoda, an alien confederacy ruled by an interdimensional, reality-warping artificial intelligence known as the Wisdom. Earth tore through the majoda’s military, and in response, the Wisdom had the majoda deploy a weapon that destroyed the planet. Completely broken and scattered, most of the remaining humans submitted to majoda rule.
But the people who live on Gaea Station, where Kyr was born, have dubbed themselves the saviors of humanity. Children and adults alike hone their bodies and minds in order to become the avenging angels of their destroyed planet. Joy and relaxation are luxuries, as the admirals ruling Gaea Station demand their people give everything to keep the cause alive. In their mid-teens, people are assigned to permanent roles, which can be anything from combat service, to maintenance to keep the station afloat, to bearing sons in the Nursery to keep the community supplied with soldiers. It’s as abhorrent as it is absolute, but Kyr thinks this system is righteous, a necessity of the ongoing war against the majoda.
Tesh describes Gaea Station in impressively revolting detail without losing focus on Kyr’s growth as a character. A talented and devoted warrior, Kyr finds herself at odds with her cultural programming when she is assigned to the Nursery. And after her brother leaves the station under mysterious circumstances, she defies her orders and takes off after him, a quest that thrusts her into the wider universe. She meets an alien for the first time and starts a grueling journey to peel back years of programming. As she learns more about the rest of the universe, Kyr realizes she must confront the sinister underbelly of the shiny, nationalistic Gaea Station, which is beginning to look more and more like a cult.
While heavily invested in Kyr’s personal struggle to find meaning and purpose, Some Desperate Glory is also rife with rich settings and history. The majoda are fascinatingly inhuman, composed of refreshingly distinct alien species. (Don’t worry, there aren’t any “They’re basically humans but their skin is blue” races in this story.) Tesh takes readers on a wild tour through her universe, defying any expectations they may have based on the setting and characters in surprising and unique ways.
An examination of the dangers of unchecked nationalism, Some Desperate Glory will resonate with readers looking for messy morality and antihero redemption arcs.
Rife with rich settings and refreshingly distinct alien species, Some Desperate Glory will resonate with readers looking for messy morality and antihero redemption arcs.
Space opera fans, rejoice! Megan E. O’Keefe’s The Blighted Stars delivers futuristic technology, a power-hungry ruling class, a bit of mystery, a sprinkle of the macabre and a compelling, complicated relationship between its two leads.
In the distant future, the Mercator family maintains a tight control over humanity’s life among the stars. The Mercators mine “cradle worlds,” planets that are lush and unspoiled, for resources, but the side effect is a fungal bloom that eventually kills the planet.
Idealistic, passionate Naira Sharp is a member of the Conservators, a resistance group that tries to save these cradle worlds through sabotage and guerrilla warfare. Tarquin Mercator is the heir to his family’s empire, but he’s a scientist at heart, and he wonders where the planet-killing fungus comes from. Their worlds collide when Naira poses as Tarquin’s bodyguard in order to infiltrate and destroy the Mercators from within. But when their ship crashes onto the newest cradle world, Naira and Tarquin are faced with the supposedly impossible: The planet has already been devoured by the fungus. Together with the other survivors of the crash, they must work together to survive and uncover the truth.
O’Keefe is a master world builder, and The Blighted Stars has one of the most fascinating sci-fi concepts of the year. In her universe, people can load their consciousnesses into new bodies. Get killed out in the far reaches of space? No problem, your neural map can be beamed back to civilization and placed into a new 3D-printed body right away. (Though sometimes neural maps don’t load properly, resulting in grotesque and zombielike monsters.) Before beginning her mission, Naira uploads her consciousness into a printed body of Tarquin’s bodyguard without anyone on the doomed ship knowing. O’Keefe finds multiple ways to have fun with this plot device, and the payoffs of Naira’s secret identity are well earned.
The Blighted Stars would be a terrific starting point for anyone interested in dipping a toe into the space opera subgenre. O’Keefe largely restricts herself to Naira’s and Tarquin’s points of view, which brings an immediacy and focus to the story that is echoed by the relative simplicity of the plot. The complex and engrossing relationship between Tarquin and Naira holds everything together; the fresh world building and interstellar intrigue wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying if not for the believable relationship at the book’s core.
If future entries in O’Keefe’s Devoured Worlds saga are as exciting as this book, sci-fi fans will be thanking their lucky stars for years to come.
Megan E. O’Keefe’s The Blighted Stars has one of the most fascinating sci-fi premises of the year: People upload their consciousnesses into 3D-printed bodies.
Nick Harkaway fuses a broody noir mystery with a cyberpunk dystopia in Titanium Noir. Set in a fictional American city tucked away in the mountains, Titanium Noir follows Cal Sounder, a detective who helps the police with only the most unique of cases: those that involve Titans, people who have attained the closest thing to immortality that capitalism can provide. After taking a drug named T7, a human is “reset” to adolescence, then, rapidly and painfully, they sprint back through puberty, resulting in a rejuvenated body. Since they start their second puberty as a fully grown adult, they become much larger, their bones denser and their muscles thicker, hence the name Titan.
Titans are almost exclusively ultrarich or highly influential, their physical stature often merely a reflection of their broader social power. Stefan Tonfamecasca, the creator of T7 and controller of its distribution, is now impossibly huge as a four-dose Titan. Cal is Stefan’s liaison with law enforcement, sparing the police from dealing with the ruling rich of the city while also keeping Titan problems from escalating out of control. But Cal’s latest case is especially challenging: A Titan has, somehow, been murdered.
Harkaway colors each character and vignette with just enough detail to keep things interesting, while assembling the setting and unraveling the mystery in a steady stream of information. Cal’s sardonic and witty internal monologue helps keep the reader from losing track of important details, with Cal himself acting as a necessary anchor as Harkaway introduces new characters and reveals new plot points on nearly every page.
Titanium Noir’s fast pace drives home just how much Cal is floundering, a very small fish in a very large pond, doing his absolute best. There are several well-choreographed, graphic but not gratuitously bloody fights and several tense negotiations with very powerful figures, each leaving Cal increasingly feeling like the odds are stacked against him. Yet, he relentlessly pursues the truth, flirts with rebellion and even performs some mild blackmail on the way. (What is a little extortion between friends, anyway?)
With its likable narrator, explosive action, noir-style rumination and just the right amount of twists, Titanium Noir is an entertaining sci-fi mystery that never overstays its welcome.
With its likable narrator and explosive action, Titanium Noir is an entertaining sci-fi mystery that blends a broody noir whodunit with a cyberpunk dystopia.
Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series is suffused with the kind of philosophical explorations typical of high-concept speculative fiction, including the nature of conflict, the desire for community and what it means to be human. But these books have also posed another question, one left tantalizingly unanswered: What are the Presger? The terrifying, technologically advanced but rarely seen aliens hover on the edges of the series, their former habit of ripping into spaceships and people alike held at bay by a long-standing treaty with humanity.
In Translation State, Leckie’s latest standalone installment in the Radch universe, three characters approach the question of the Presger from different angles. Enae is a human diplomat tasked with finding out what happened to a missing Presger emissary. Reet is an engineer who discovers he may be the scion of the long-lost leaders of an oppressed people. And Qven is a juvenile Presger Translator, one of the strange creatures that the Presger bioengineered to communicate with species they consider to be Significant, or worthy of a diplomatic relationship. Looming over it all is the approaching renegotiation of the treaty that keeps humanity safe from the Presger.
In some ways, Translation State reads like a witty, action-packed retelling of “The Measure of a Man,” a classic “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode that debates whether the android Data is legally a person or a machine. The question here is not whether the characters think of themselves as Significant, but whether the Presger will think they are. Although the explicit stakes are legal, the terms of the debate are closer to theology than anything else. The Presger are essentially gods, with their treaty of nonviolence toward Significant species a particularly abstruse gospel. It brings to mind the Tarthenal from Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, who prayed to gods only to ask them to stay far away. Every party must make decisions regarding the Significance of other species based on not only what serves their own interests but also what will prevent the Presger from tearing everything apart.
Despite the existential nature of its conflict, Translation State still has an essential optimism. Every character’s motivations are understandable, even if they are not sympathetic, as each person is genuinely trying their best under challenging and potentially lethal circumstances.
Translation State also has an absolute whirlwind of a plot. An aristocratic family’s fortune vanishes at a funeral in the first chapter, and later, Qven vivisects and devours multitudes of their fellow juveniles in what is, apparently, a normal part of Presger Translator development. (This book is not for the squeamish.) As ever, under all the excitement and plot machinations, Leckie uses contact among different species and cultures to discuss complicated constructs such as gender. For example, Qven’s initial confusion over how gender works mirrors the Radchaai inability to distinguish between genders in Leckie’s original Radch trilogy.
However, if you are the kind of reader who wants all their questions answered, beware: I still don’t really know what the Presger are.
Translation State, Ann Leckie’s latest Imperial Radch novel, is an ever-fascinating whirlwind with tantalizing clues about some of the series’ biggest mysteries.
The Holy Vaalbaran Empire has ruled the small moon of Koriko for nearly a generation, imposing its will over her people with an iron fist. Like the rest of Koriko’s inhabitants, scribe Enitan has adapted to imperial rule, becoming fluent in the empire’s holy language. When her former lover is assassinated and her sibling, Xiang, goes missing, Enitan travels into the heart of the empire to search for Xiang. Once there, she is caught between two enormous forces. On one side, the Ominirish Republic, the Vaalbaran Empire’s only rival, asks her to spy on the empire in exchange for help finding Xiang. And on the other, the newly crowned Imperator Menkhet, God of the Vaalbaran Empire, has asked for Enitan’s help in exchange for the freedom of Koriko. To save her sibling and liberate her people, Enitan must strike a delicate balance and play a game of intrigue far more challenging than she ever anticipated.
The Splinter in the Sky is an engrossing novel that captures, in impressive prose, the deep discomfort of living under occupation. Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s present-tense writing pulls readers deep into Enitan’s rich inner life, behind the mask she is forced to wear in order to survive. To achieve her goals, Enitan must stay silent in the face of being told that she’s not like the “other savages” and smile as members of the imperial elite auction off her people’s priceless religious artifacts. The result is a firmly anti-colonialist novel that doesn’t balk at examining how even the best intentioned colonizer can cause real harm to real people.
Ashing-Giwa’s world, where even the God-Emperor is subject to manipulation and betrayal, is filled with political intrigue. However, it’s also a world where hope still exists. Even in the darkest moments of her journey, Enitan is propelled forward by hope—hope that Xiang is still alive and hope that she may be able to fulfill her mission and free her people.
The Splinter in the Sky is an engrossing sci-fi novel that captures, in impressive prose, the deep discomfort of living under occupation.
Lauren Beukes’ Bridge begins with Jo, a young mother on a desperate cross-country trip to acquire something she refers to as the “dreamworm.” When combined with other visual and auditory stimulation, the dreamworm allows a person to swap consciousnesses with another version of themselves from an alternate reality. A brilliant neuroscientist, Jo thinks she can use the dreamworm to find a way to defeat her cancer diagnosis. As a child, Jo’s daughter, Bridget aka “Bridge,” fully believed in her mother’s quest; as an adult, she understands it to have been a combination of her mother’s epilepsy, her cancer and the delusional imaginations of a desperate woman and her child.
In modern-day Portland, Oregon, Bridge is trying to organize her mother’s belongings after Jo’s death. While going through the house, Bridge finds the dreamworm and realizes her mom may have been telling the truth. Bridge quickly dives into the drugs-and-rock-and-roll version of astral projection her mom was studying, with her friend Dom along for the ride as an ever-faithful ally.
Bridge is a mystery and a family drama wrapped in the trappings of science fiction, with Beukes spending most of the book examining the difficult and complicated relationships between her characters. Beukes impressively paints each individual with a highly realistic level of detail and a clear-eyed perspective on their faults; there are no overblown types or caricatures to be found. The cast provides a full spectrum of human foibles, ranging from “Well, this character’s probably being the best friend they can reasonably be,” to “Wow, this character is somehow worse than a serial killer.”
Beukes drops clues about the dreamworm and the mysterious forces trying to claim it for their own throughout, and while readers will be able to piece some or all of these mysteries together, the twists are still surprising and the payoffs still satisfying. Searching for the answers will gnaw at the reader; it’s impossible to stop reading until they find out if their theories are right or wrong, even if that discovery comes at 2 a.m. and they will certainly regret it at work later that day. Ahem. Some readers may experience this, anyway.
In Bridge, Lauren Beukes wraps a mystery and a family drama in the trappings of science fiction, specifically a drugs-and-rock-and-roll version of astral projection.
The Earth is about to die. A single ship will travel to a hospitable planet far beyond our solar system where the 80 original crew members and their children will begin a new chapter for the human race. But in Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky, those plans go horribly wrong. The passengers aboard the Phoenix might not be having a good time, but readers certainly will be as the pages in this exhilarating, smart sci-fi mystery rocket past.
Asuka doesn’t feel like she belongs on the Phoenix. The last member to join the ship, she’s merely an alternate to the other 79 crew members, even though she graduated from the same highly competitive school. Perhaps it’s because she’s an afterthought that she’s asked to investigate a strange object on the surface of the ship. Just as she and a teammate reach the object, a massive explosion tears through the ship, killing several crew members and blowing the Phoenix dangerously off course. Now, in a race against time to correct the Phoenix’s flight path, Asuka must uncover the truth about the explosion . . . even if it implicates someone on board.
It’s a pitch-perfect setup for a space thriller, and the stakes could not be any higher: The fate of the human species relies on the Phoenix’s ability to make it to the new Earth. Alliances change and suspicions shift as Asuka’s investigation proceeds and propulsive chapters often end in cliffhangers. Flashback scenes set at the school that selected the Phoenix’s crew counterbalance the mystery, revealing just the right amount of information about characters’ history and corresponding with important story beats in the present. In both timelines, Asuka wrestles with her parental relationships, childhood grief and complex feelings about her Japanese-American identity. While these sections deepen the character, they occasionally feel like an interruption of the more suspenseful moments aboard the Phoenix.
The Deep Sky feels very close to our own reality: The Phoenix has landing modules and solar shields, rather than laser cannons. That said, Kitasei’s Digitally Augmented Reality (DAR), which allows crew members to adjust what they see around them through their visors, is a brilliant device. Rather than seeing the stark white hallways of the Phoenix, they could choose a lush rainforest or the deck of a pirate ship. Kitasei gets a lot of mileage out of DAR, especially in some key moments in the later parts of the book.
As interested in where we came from as where we’re going, The Deep Sky is a study in belonging and how Asuka’s intersecting identities (Japanese-American, crew member, classmate, friend, daughter and woman) buttress her during the most important moments in her life. Pick up The Deep Sky to discover how Asuka, and the Phoenix, rise from the ashes.
A Hail Mary effort to save humanity goes awry in Yume Kitasei’s smart and exhilarating sci-fi mystery, The Deep Sky.
When 24-year-old Bridge arrives in Portland, Oregon, to sort through her mother’s belongings after her untimely death, she discovers a magical artifact in the back of the freezer. The “dreamworm,” as her mother, Jo, referred to it, is the key to traveling between alternate realities, and Jo’s seemingly delusional quest to find it defined Bridge’s chaotic childhood. After eating the dreamworm, Bridge embarks on a universe-hopping journey to understand what really happened to her mother. We talked to author Lauren Beukes about the allure of the multiverse and what she’s learned about herself since publishing The Shining Girls.
I love the idea of the dreamworm. How did you come up with the idea? Oh god, it’s the last decade(s) of turmoil in the world, the realization that we all live in completely separate and conflicting realities that feel true to us. I’ve been horrified by the tip towards fascism and far right politics of hate, anti-vaxxers and anti-trans legislation, the reversal of abortion rights, shareholders’ profits-over-all, climate-change deniers. So, we already live in different dimensions to each other.
Also, psychedelic experiences like Dreamachine in London, which was hallucinatory without any additives except light and music, my lifelong love of Narnia and that simplest and most profound act of reading, which transports you into other worlds and other lives.
What about it appealed to you as a writer? It’s the appeal of the road not taken, all the might have beens in your life and the choices you didn’t make. How useful would that be, to be able to audition other versions of you, correct your mistakes, learn from your successes?
This is a (mostly) plausible alternate reality story in that all the universes are compatible with ours, similar enough that it’s easy to slip between the other lives and other versions of you. There are no Spider-Hams or sausage fingers, for example, to shout out those other two perfect multiverse stories of late.
“We already live in different dimensions to each other.”
This book required a fair amount of neuroscience knowledge. What was that research process like? The research is the best part of writing for me! Any excuse to hang out with interesting people and pick their brains and have them geek out about their specialties, including Cape Town, South Africa, neurosurgeon Dr. Sally Rothemeyer who talked me through epilepsy and tumors and my friend Dr. Hayley Tomes, who lent her name to the fictional disease Tomesians. The chapter set in the neuroscience lab is based on my visit to Hayley’s lab, and I couldn’t resist including all the good science and weird trivia. I did pick up excellent facts, but my favorite thing to come out of this was a physical memento.
After spending half a day with Hayley looking at slices of rat brain and mushed-up tapeworm larva under the confocal microscope, she asked me if I wanted a piece of rat brain to take home. I said, “Obviously!” I keep it in my 1930s medical cabinet with other writing mementos like the vintage My Little Pony from The Shining Girls, the Zoo City-inspired sloth scarf I wore to the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the cheap “satanic” jewelry I was gifted by Detective “Auntie Ghostbuster” from South Africa’s Occult Crimes Unit. My rat brain slice looks like a tiny piece of dried snot on a glass slide in a plastic case. Naturally, I named it Pinky.
The characters in Bridge have an impressively realistic balance of admirable qualities and concerning flaws. Did you have any core inspirations for Bridge and Jo? Did one come into focus earlier than the other? Bridge is a departure from most of my protagonists, because she’s so uncertain, so adrift in her life. Part of that is in reaction to growing up with Jo and Jo’s obsession with a reality-switching artifact, partly it’s being young in the 2020s in a world that feels very chaotic and scary right now. She’s trying to come to terms with her mother’s death, that the weirdness of her childhood was maybe real, not one of Jo’s delusions, and who the hell she’s supposed to be. She’s always been paralyzed by choice, but the situation she’s catapulted into is going to force her to make some really big ones.
Jo was easier to write because she’s dead set on what she wants, but that single-mindedness exploring other realities has cost her a lot in this one, including her relationship with her daughter.
It’s been 10 years since you wrote The Shining Girls. What have you learned about your writing along the way? This is a big one. In the last year, I got my adult ADHD diagnosis! Which explains why I’m probably never going to write a sequel (because it’s not shiny and new), the magpie nature of my novels, the weird places my research takes me and how it all comes together—and also why there were five years between Broken Monsters and Afterland.
Post-divorce in 2014, I was, like Bridge, lost, thrashing around, unable to settle on one thing, paralyzed by choices: wheel-spinning in the parking lot on the motorcycle of doubt. To be fair, I was also rebuilding my life from scratch, and I wrote two graphic novels and put together a short story collection in that time. But it turns out big life changes like divorce can throw people who have coped with their ADHD all their lives.
Since I’ve started medication and all the good lifestyle things around sleep and exercise and eating well, my depression and anxiety are basically gone and writing is a joy again. Still tricky, still sometimes like wading knee-deep through taffy swamplands, but doable. I think a lot of that experience is reflected in who Bridge is as a character, just as the creators of Everything Everywhere All at Once have talked about it as an ADHD allegory.
I don’t know if I’ve learned anything new about writing. Rather, I’ve come back to something I always knew: the most important thing is to finish the work and allow yourself to be messy and rough in the first draft. Stop wheel-spinning, stop doubling back, stop wondering if you should have taken the other exit. There’s a profane South Africanism that works here. Vokvoert. Literally fuck-forward, but really, fuck it, do it, go.
“Stop wheel-spinning, stop doubling back, stop wondering if you should have taken the other exit.”
You’ve written several serial killer mysteries and, without spoiling too much, there are some measured and practical, yet still quite violent scenes in Bridge. What attracts you to these scenes and/or characters? Why is violence such a compelling artistic subject? I grew up in apartheid South Africa, an incredibly violent society, and I’ve seen the repercussions of that kind of ruthless repression: the deep, historical, systemic issues that can’t be magically undone with a democratic election, even almost 30 years later, even with one of the best constitutions in the world. It’s the air we breathe, filled with knives. South Africa has the highest wealth inequality in the world and one of the highest rates of gender-based violence, especially against women of color and even more so if they’re queer or trans. That goes back centuries, to colonialism, to the slave trade and capitalism and the channels of power. Violence—personal, systemic—has shaped the world. It always will.
The people who perpetrate violence will always find ways to justify it to themselves, as the antagonist does in Bridge. I’m interested in those moral contortions, in what violence is and what it does to us, the choices we make.
What are some of your favorite pieces of media you experience this last year? There has been so much incredible TV, from season two of “The White Lotus” to the gleeful genre-mashup mystery of “The Afterparty.” “Better Call Saul,” “Barry,” and “Succession” were perfect and I may be slightly biased here, but I thought “Shining Girls” was such a smart, beautiful, thoughtful adaptation by showrunner Silka Luisa that was true to the bloody heart of my book. But the best thing I saw this year was “Search Party.” It’s such a weird wonderful show that gets progressively more batshit but absolutely consistent with the characters. (Of course, of course, that is where they would end up.)
Movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once (natch), Triangle of Sadness, Men.
Books: Nick Harkaway’s plutocrat mutant murder, Titanium Noir; Catriona Ward’s meta mystery puzzle box, Looking Glass Sound; Lisa Taddeo’s remarkable Three Women; two books by dear friends (again, slightly biased)—Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen’s ’90s riot-grrrl small-town horror, Girls of Little Hope which wears its bloody heart safety-pinned to its teen punk T-shirt and Sam Wilson’s The First Murder on Mars, a fast and sharp sci-fi thriller. Oh, and Louie Stowell’s third middle grade Loki book, which she wrote and illustrated, is my favorite take on that excellent trickster (just like Lego Batman is the definitive Batman in my universe).
What’s your favorite way to work? I rent a studio space with a bunch of illustrators, animators, designers, filmmakers and writers in the hip East London neighborhood of Dalston. Writing is such lonely, in-your-head work it’s really important to me to have other people around and specifically other artists. It’s really social, but also focused and it means I can separate work and home, keep normal hours and get lots of freewheeling thinking time as I cycle in.
If you could pick one author from the past or present to have tea with, who would it be? I’m lucky to have a lot of author friends and I’d jump at any chance to spend more time with them. But among people I don’t know personally: Atwood, for her words, her insight, her curious mischief.
What’s next for you? I have an original TV show in development with two of my closest friends, Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen (I did say I was slightly biased above) and I’ve just started germinating a new novel, but what I’d really love to do is write an immersive theater project. I was blown away by Swamp Motel’s Saint Jude where you’re assigned to help guide a coma patient through their memories, and Phantom Peak, which is Punch Drunk-meets-“Westworld” with less sex and murder and more cosmic platypuses.
Photo of Lauren Beukes by Peter Kindersley.
The author of The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters returns with Bridge, a thriller that’s trippy in more ways than one.
Kel has worked carefully to assimilate into the culture of her adopted homeworld of Loth. She’s a daredevil climber of xoffedil, the local megafauna, and is a somewhat dour friend to Lunna, a cheerful youth from the nearby village. But Kel has a secret buried under the floorboards of her house—the kind of secret best left right where it is, for everyone’s safety. However, when a derelict war machine left behind by an expansionist interstellar empire mysteriously reactivates, Kel’s best option is to dig out her old weapons and hope she doesn’t have to make use of them.
Valerie Valdes’ Where Peace Is Lost reads like Star Wars co-written by Scott Lynch and Tamsyn Muir. Kel and Lunna are soon joined by Savvy, an appropriately named space captain, and Dare, Savvy’s strong and silent companion. The four mismatched leads try to solve a problem that’s locally a very big deal, but beneath the notice of galactic politicians and imperial commandants. Along the way, there are hijinks at varying levels of violence, some involving the loquacious Lunna charming their way out of (or into) trouble, others involving Dare hitting things with a high-tech claymore. And then there’s Kel, whose secret could solve all their problems, but also create newer, much bigger ones.
Where Peace Is Lost could easily be the first book in a series revolving around this volatile quartet as they traipse around the galaxy, solving problems with implausibly big swords and amusing chatter. Valdes ties up the main plot without answering several significant questions about her core characters and their respective histories, perhaps leaving room to flesh things out in sequels. Or perhaps she’ll just . . . leave it at that. When the characters and their relationships are as well-drawn as they are in Where Peace Is Lost, a reader’s imagination can easily fill in the gaps.
Where Peace Is Lost, with its ambitious, imaginative brand of escapist social commentary, is part of the current resurgence in optimistic speculative fiction, where the good guys are actually good and some of the bad guys might be decent deep inside. Readers will forgive a few just-so plot twists and predictable romances in order to spend time in this gift of a story where nobody locks their doors, the greedy get what’s coming to them and and the artifacts beneath your quiet, secretive neighbor’s floorboards can save the world.
Where Peace Is Lost is an ambitious, imaginative space adventure with an escapist, soothing brand of social commentary.
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