SEMIOSIS Sci-fi & fantasy
by Sue Burke (Voyager, $25) The colonists on Pax hoped to leave behind the worst excesses of humankind and create a new community but their numbers dwindle while they try to adapt the planet’s ecology and they find some behaviours hard to leave behind. Burke has created a fascinating ecosystem, in a story that builds over seven generations, reminiscent of C.J. Cherryh’s Forty Thousand in Gehenna — though not as strange. A cast of characters is introduced with a deft hand, even though the story’s genre changes as the colony does. Semiosis is a story in conversation with some of science fiction’s greats, Jo Walton, Ursula K. Le Guin and Kate Wilhelm, to name just a few, and it is an absorbing tale of first contact and recognising sentience. I do wonder if a story where colonists travel to somewhere where the ecology did not evolve for them, name it for peace and then fight the people who arrived before them may seem a little on the nose for New Zealand readers, though I am not sure the author intended the resonances to be that literal.
THE EARLIE KING & THE KID IN YELLOW
by Danny Denton (Granta, $33) The Earlie King has a backstory straight out of Irish legend but here he is actually the leader of a drug cartel that controls bedraggled Dublin in a dystopian future where it never stops raining. When his daughter dies in childbirth, the Kid in Yellow comes for the baby and sparks whispers of miracles, of armageddon and of hope. No matter who wins the inevitable confrontation, everything will change. Denton has written a grand tale full of grungy noir, Catholic imagery and urban legends; a story told after a digital collapse scraped together from text-messaged poetry, the script of a stylised play and a journalist’s painstakingly assembled journal of gang killings. There is no shortage of original beats: a firebug vigilante named St Vincent Depaul and an angel of death named Mr Violence are background bogeymen. And there is a solid story underneath all the fairytale and folderol.
SCALES OF EMPIRE
by Kylie Chan (HarperCollins, $35) Corporal Jian Choumali has been shouldertapped to join the second-generation ship expedition to leave an Earth that will be unbreathable within 60 years. Before they can depart, a space-faring dragon-alien returns the first, failed generation ship and offers to help humanity on the first steps to joining its galactic empire. Jian jumps at the chance to be a companion to the dragon but starts to worry her choices have been compromised. Jian has to help determine whether the technological marvels the dragon offers are worth the price that may be extracted. Scales of Empire has a light, playful tone, even as the dangers of not being alone in the universe start to surface. The storytelling varies; the dialogue is often stilted and characters are described as extraordinary even as they seem quite ordinary, sometimes venal in their actions. The ideas are most interesting when exploring the dragons’ ultra-convenient technologies and positing an empire that has never had a military force.
CARAVAL
by Stephanie Garber (Hodder & Stoughton, $20) Scarlett has pinned her hopes on an arranged marriage to get herself and her sister Donatella far away from her cruel father, but Donatella manoeuvres her into first taking part in Caraval, a magical game that happens once a year, where nothing and no one is quite as they sees. To win, Scarlett will have to outwit Gamemaster Legend and rescue her sister. Set in an island empire with a Spanish background, there is not much description of the “real” world Scarlett comes from: Garber saves her descriptive flair for the world of the game, but the magic underpinning the game is left unexplained. The sisters’ relationship is at the centre of the story but they are separated for much of the book. A lot of the story is too dependent on Scarlett not knowing what is going on and never asking the right questions— though the payoff does hold up.