AN EXCESS MALE THE WILL TO BATTLE
by Maggie Shen King
(Harper Voyager, $35)
In a China that has embraced polyandry as an official solution to two generations of sex-ratio skewing, 40-year-old Wei-guo desperately hopes to become a third husband. When a matchmaker introduces him to the lovely 22-year-old Mayling and her much older husbands Hann and Xiong-xin, he thinks this might finally be his chance. But the family harbours secrets and Weiguo has his own problems with government officials who are not above quietly culling unmarried men when they get the chance. An Excess Male is a smart and plausible take on changing, yet resilient, Chinese culture, with its Advanced Families, Wilfully Sterile and Lost Boys. Our understanding of the characters and their relationships keeps changing as viewpoints switch, mirroring the negotiations the characters constantly dance through. Shen’s light touch means this dystopian tale is not without hope and the satisfaction of survival.
BARBARY STATION
by R.E. Stearns
(Simon and Schuster, $29)
In this fun within-solar-system space opera, Adda Karpe and Iridian Nassir take up space piracy to pay their student loans. They quickly discover the crew they are auditioning to join is not living the high life on an evacuated space station but instead are squatting in its substructure because they have not been able to override the security AI. To survive, let alone earn their place, they are going to need all of Adda’s programming abilities and Iridian’s military experience. It may be a natural pitfall for a pirate story but the protagonists come across as somewhat ethically challenged. While they do give their hijack victims time to abandon ship, they are callous or in denial about the violence inherent in their chosen profession, even as they debate the morality of killing AIs that may have become self-aware. Despite some plot strands that are never resolved, Barbary Station has all the joie de vivre of a first novel and I look forward to future books by R.E. Stearns.
AUTONOMOUS
by Annalee Newitz
(Little Brown Book Group, $25)
Jack’s piracy is altruistic; she reverse-engineers patented drugs so they are available to the masses. But when one of those drugs starts causing devastating accidents she needs to create a cure fast while staying one step ahead of Big Pharma and the law. Neewitz contrasts androids raised like human children with human slaves indentured from childhood and bots programmed for happy service with humans drugged to enjoy their jobs, in a future where almost everything you touch and use is bioengineered nanotech. The most interesting part is the journey to self-awareness of military cyborg Paladin, tasked — along with his homophobic robosexual partner Eliasz — with hunting Jack down. The story is not particularly memorable but the idea-rich world building is solid. by Ada Palmer
(Head of Zeus $33)
Ada Palmer’s complicated, Enlightenmentmodelled far-future of flying cars and geographically unmoored nations continues to build towards an apparently inevitable world war. The Will to Battle is very much a middle act, at least until Utopia takes action and then the story flows thick and fast. The philosophies of Hobbes and Voltaire come to the fore, lionhearted Achilles becomes the Hives’ military advisor, more of J.E.D.D. Mason’s divine nature is revealed and a short term truce allows the Summer Olympics to take place in Antarctica. We are faced yet again with the unreliability of the narration — made more meta by the first book being written while this one plays out. The plot contrivances by which a paroled serial killer is present at every significant meeting of important personages is starting to wear thin, and Mycroft’s sycophancy and idiosyncratic misogyny feels even more grating, but these complaints seem petty against the scope of this tale. Terra Ignota still has many mysteries and I have no idea what the final act will reveal.