For 41 cycles over thousands of years, the wizard Merlin has had the same agenda: Find Arthur, train Arthur, and nudge him onto the nearest throne. Then Arthur is supposed to defeat the greatest evil in the universe and unite all of humankind. Every cycle so far, Arthur has died and Merlin has aged backward—until this 42nd reincarnation of the once and future monarch.
This time, Arthur is a teenage Arab interplanetary refugee who was taken in by an adoptive brother named Kay and his two moms. Arthur is also a girl named Ari. And, like nearly everyone else in this futuristic world, Ari is queer.
Familiar characters and places from the legend are here in new guises. Gweneviere is the multi-racial leader of a rebel planet, Lamarack is gender-fluid, and Camelot is a combination of a run-down spacecraft and a world where medieval entertainment takes center stage. The greatest evil in the universe is a mega-corporation known as Mercer that’s led by an unforgiving Administrator. When a quest to reveal Mercer’s dark side—and to rescue Kay and Ari’s moms—goes awry, Ari and her friends must draw on previously unrecognized strengths to save themselves and the universe, and the stunning conclusion leaves room for future stories.
Authors Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, best known for their Rainbow Boxes project to stock libraries and shelters with fiction featuring LGBTQ+ characters, bring the King Arthur story to life in an entirely new way, complete with space battles, steamy romance and high adventure.
