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Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi

Very little science fiction has been translated from Arabic into English – in fact, I knew of only one other author, Emirati Noura Al Noman, and she hasn’t been published since 2014. Ahmed Khaled Tawfik wrote several sf novels, most notably Utopia (2008, Egypt), and a little hunting revealed it had been translated into English – but with his name spelt Towfik. There’s been plenty of fantasy translated from Arabic, however, from Alf Laylat wa Layla to Naguib Mahfouz, and a number of contemporary writers. Having said that, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq) was not published as category sf, and likely only deserves the label because its central conceit references Mary Shelley’s novel, a proto-sf novel. (The English title, incidentally, is a direct translation of the original Arabic title.) It was nominated for both the Arthur C Clarke Award and the International Booker Prize.

The central conceit of Frankenstein in Baghdad is actually not at all rigorous as science fiction. It’s a neat twist on the original – the monster (because of course Frankenstein is the doctor) in Saadawi’s novel is made from the body parts of victims of IEDs in post-invasion Iraq, and the monster’s mission is to avenge those deaths. But Saadawi seems more interested in telling a more general story about life in present-day Baghdad, as seen through the eyes of a handful of characters. Chief among these are the junk dealer Hadi, who originally creates the monster in some sort of fever dream; Mahmud, a young journalist, who takes Hadi’s tales of a monster semi-seriously, but is more interested in becoming like his rich and powerful editor; Elishva, an old Armenian woman who mistakes the monster for her long-dead son; and General Majid, who runs a secret police bureau of astrologers and magicians who predict bomb attacks in the city.

The novel bounces around between these characters, and a handful of others, mostly centred around the area of Bataween, and occasionally focusing on the monster. Who has discovered that once it avenges the death of one of the people whose parts make up its body, that body part rots and falls off. So the monster needs new parts – and it reaches the point where, with its own small army of followers, it too begins murdering people to keep itself together (so to speak).

The monster is a great invention, and there’s so much commentary that could be attached to the concept, but Frankenstein in Baghdad doesn’t seem all that interested in it. It’s more like an introduction, or a framing narrative, to the personal stories of the book’s cast. Which is a shame. It’s a good novel, don’t get me wrong, and its descriptions of life in post-invasion Baghdad are both heart-breaking and enraging.

A good novel, but one that feels like it failed to capitalise on its central idea.


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Creation Node, Stephen Baxter

Back in the late 1990s, a friend complained that deciding to collect books by Stephen Baxter was proving more expensive than expected because he was so prolific. Baxter is still going. I’m not sure my friend’s collection is. But never mind. I later made the same mistake – and I’m still going: I buy Baxter’s books in hardback on publication. I have rather a lot of them. But I have also read rather a lot of them.

Creation Node (2023, UK) is, if I’ve counted correctly, Baxter’s forty-eighth novel (including three YA novels, one co-written with Alastair Reynolds, four with Arthur C Clarke, and five with Terry Pratchett). And then there are the collections and novellas. Creation Node is much like his other more recent novels – an exploration of some cosmological puzzle by people not far removed from ourselves, and a tendency to feel a little juvenile in places.

After a climate crash, Earth has partially colonised the solar system. There are three political blocs – Earth, the most powerful and mostly conservationist; the Lunar Consortium, which believes in exploiting whatever natural resources are available in the solar system; and the Conservers, who are hardline conservationists and refuse to use any resource that is not immediately renewable, such as sunlight. The Conservers sent a spacecraft, propelled by a solar sail, to the ninth planet, a journey which took 35 years. And they discovered the planet was actually a black hole. And it was emitting Hawking radiation that was… structured.

So they sent a message into the black hole. Which promptly expanded. Until its outer shell had a surface gravity of 1G and a 15C surface temperature. And a weird sarcophagus containing a living teenage birdlike alien…

Earth sends a ship out to Planet Nine – with a brief stopover, and much excitement, at a station orbiting Saturn, where the ship converts from a slow fission drive to a fast fusion drive. Over a decade has passed by the time representatives from Earth – and one from the Lunar Consortium, plus the Conserver’s chief legal counsel – reach Planet Nine. Which prompts the discoverers to attempt sending another message…

This triggers the appearance of an enigmatic black globe, which calls itself Terminus. It proves to be a Boltzmann Brain from the quantum substrate in which all universes are created. It gives the human ambassadors a brief lesson in speculative cosmology, and then offers the human race eternity, ie, continued existence after the heat death of our universe. For a price. It’s how Baxter’s novels tend to work – a story based around a big idea, a plot with a payload, if you will. Which often prompts a momentous decision on the part of the cast.

Baxter does his homework, and the ideas he bases his novels on are fascinating. If Creation Node’s extended timescale results in a number of longeurs, there’s still plenty to like here. Creation Node may suffer from Baxter’s typical weaknesses – that tendency to use teenage protagonists, which often drops the narrative into YA territory – but it also displays his strengths: making huge mind-expanding ideas easily palatable. Lots of sense of wonder, but the human dimension may be a little flat. On the other hand, Baxter is nothing if not consistent – which is why I probably keep on buying his books…

Incidentally, I should point out my takes on the books I review on this blog (and my other blog) are not always typical. My views may be individual, but that doesn’t mean they’re not open to question. So I welcome conversation about what I write. Feel free to leave a comment, or start a discussion.


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The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor, Bryan Talbot

I’ve been a fan of Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (1989, UK) for years. When I was at college in Nottingham in 1985, I often visited a comics shop on Mansfield Road before catching the bus home. I forget the name of the shop – and I can’t find it on Google. (I also visited a games shop, a grubby place in a courtyard, around the same time, and bought copies of the Laserburn RPG rules – Tabletop Games, possibly?) Anyway, I recall buying an issue or two of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright from that comics shop on Mansfield Road, although I didn’t read the completed series until buying the omnibus trade paperback many years later.

Not long after I read Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland (2007, UK), and thought it very good. I also kept up with the sequels to Luther Arkwright. So yes, I’d say I’m a fan of Talbot’s independent work, even if I’ve not been obsessive about keeping up with his oeuvre (it’s difficult with comics anyway; I much prefer to wait for the omnibus edition). Which is all slightly irrelevant as I’d missed Talbot’s Grandville series, five graphic novels set in the late 1800s in a UK that has been ruled from France since the Napoleonic Wars and in which all the characters are anthropomorphic animals.

The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor (2025, UK) is set in the same universe. It’s a clear homage to Sherlock Holmes – his deerstalker is something of a joke in the book. Hawksmoor, named for the architect – and the novel by Peter Ackroyd is also name-checked – is a detective at Scotland Yard. He recognises that not all of his colleagues are honest. But even he is shocked when he discovers links between some of them and the terrorists responsible for some of the most heinous crimes of recent years.

When Hawksmoor’s brother, a man he hasn’t spoken to in years, commits suicide in an open field near his house, Hawksmoor reluctantly investigates his brother’s life in an effort to understand why he killed himself. Hawksmoor is also investigating a series of murders linked to the Angry Brigade, the terrorist wing of the Resistance Movement, and which seems to have gone rogue now the French are pulling out of Britain and allowing home rule.

It’s all linked, of course, and the result of corruption in high places in the British establishment – plus ça change, and all that. Although framed as a Victorian whodunnit, much like its inspiration, Talbot has a put a lot of effort into working out his world. Not just the politics within a Britain that has been ruled by the French for over a century, but also the way the characters’ animal species impacts their behaviour, and the relations between the various species.

It’s excellent stuff. Recommended. But now I have to go and buy all the Grandville graphic novels. Oh look, there’s an omnibus edition available…


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The Underpeople, Cordwainer Smith

The Underpeople (1968, USA) follows directly on from The Planet Buyer (1964, USA), although four years separates their publication. In fact, both were published in magazines in 1964, but the second wasn’t published as a paperback until 1968, two years after Smith’s death. The two books were later merged and published as a single novel, Norstrilia (1975, USA) – and it is that version which has been reprinted a number of times since, including in the SF Masterworks series in 2016.

The Planet Buyer left Rod McBan, of Norstrilia, the wealthiest man in the universe, and the new owner of Earth, newly arrived on Earth, where he is met by C’Mell, a catwoman and girlygirl and one of the underpeople. McBan, incidentally, is disguised as a catman.

There’s no real plot to The Underpeople, just a series of incidents which sort of lead to a conclusion and an implied resolution. The latter is the freeing of the underpeople, who are little more than slaves (the callousness with which they are disposed of is quite disturbing). The former sees McBan back home on Norstrilia, happily married, and Earth no longer in his ownership.

There are things to like about Cordwainer Smith’s oeuvre. He certainly built a unique universe, and had a distinctive voice. And it worked well in his short fiction. But both The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople read like badly-welded together collections of short stories, and in that format they’re not so impressive. Also, I really hate poetry and songs in narrative unless they’re part of the plot.

I am… undecided about Smith’s fiction. Some of his short stories are very good, even if the language is a little cringeworthy at times. Norstrilia, ie, The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople, has some good ideas. But it’s all too haphazard and never really quite links together. I wanted to like The Underpeople more than I did. There is a book out there somewhere, possibly even The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979, USA), which is in the SF Masterworks series, which presents the best of Smith’s fiction in a way that displays what’s good about it. The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople do not. 

Which may well be why they’re no longer in print (although perhaps the corridor of naked bottoms played a part).


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The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

This was a reread, although I don’t recall when I previously read the book. Some time in the 1980s, I suspect. Everyone knows Ringworld (1970, USA), it was even No. 60 in the SF Masterworks series. Niven admits he had never intended to write a sequel, but he’d received so much correspondence about the novel – a lot of it pointing out where he’d got things wrong. Earth famously rotates the wrong way in the opening chapter of the novel (updated in later editions), but the chief complaint was that the ringworld was unstable. It needed attitude jets to keep it in orbit. So Niven decided to write The Ringworld Engineers (1979, USA), which is all about the attitude jets. Mostly.

Twenty-three years after the events of Ringworld, Louis Wu is a wirehead. He and his kzinti companion on that trip, Speaker-to-Animals, now called Chmeee, are kidnapped by a Pierson’s Puppeteer. Who is actually the mate of the Pierson’s Puppeteer from Ringworld, and was the leader of the race, the Hindmost. He was ousted and now plans to win back his position by fetching a “treasure” from the ringworld, a transmutation device.

Which doesn’t exist and never existed. But that proves irrelevant because the ringworld has been knocked from its orbit and will impact the sun in a year or so. The City Builders, the most powerful race on the ringworld, had removed the attitude jets from the ringworld’s rim, the jets that kept it in orbit, in order to power their spaceships. Hence the current situation.

Wu decides there must be a Repair Centre, a sort of central control complex for the ringworld. If he can find it, then he can prevent the ringworld from being destroyed. But first he has to find it.

The humanoid races on the ringworld have created, and maintained, treaties and coalitions through “rishathra”, which is sex between people of different hominid races. Niven obviously likes writing about sex, or rather the easy availability of it to males, but this is commercial science fiction so it’s either alluded to or entirely off the page. Nevertheless, it leaves a bad taste.

The other problem is the distances – the ringworld is huge. Absolutely fucking enormous. With a surface area equivalent to three million Earths. Most of the action in The Ringworld Engineers takes place around the Great Ocean, an ocean so large it features archipelagos which are full-size maps of various planets in Known Space (including Earth, Mars and Kzin), and which are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. After a while, the distance gets wearying, it’s almost like some sort of scale fatigue sets in. It becomes meaningless, just words. Niven uses the right words, but there’s no sense of wonder attached to the vast scale of it all.

The Ringworld Engineers fixes the issue with the ringworld’s unstable orbit, and even identifies its builders – linking back to an earlier novel by Niven. He returned to the ringworld seventeen years later with The Ringworld Throne (1996, USA), and then again eight years after that with Ringworld’s Children (2004, USA). Five prequel novels, the Fleet of Worlds series, then followed.

The ringworld is a great creation, one of science fiction’s most memorable. The plot of the novel which introduced it doesn’t really matter. Same for its sequels. Dune (1965, USA) had great world-building, but its plot helped bring it to life. The plot of Ringworld is irrelevant, the Big Dumb Object exists in spite of it. And so it is for The Ringworld Engineers. Which presents a disappointing, and unconvincing, explanation as the answer to the question of who built it, and never really manages to really evoke the scale of it all.


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Gráinne, Keith Roberts

Winner of the BSFA Award in 1988. There doesn’t appear to have been any shortlist that year, so I’ve no idea how it was chosen. The Eastercon in 1988 took place in Liverpool and was three years before my first Eastercon.

Gráinne (1988, UK) is the name of a princess from Irish mythology, who at their betrothal party dumped the man she had been promised to and ran off with Diarmuid instead. In Roberts’s novel, it’s the name of a young woman the narrator, Alistair Bevan, meets, has a mostly platonic relationship with, and who then leaves him… and several years later appears on television as the presenter of a documentary series on the brand new Channel 5. By this point, Bevan works for an advertising agency, which Gráinne hires to promote a series of “clinics” to empower women.

This narrative is framed by, and interspersed with, short scenes of an old man in a hospital bed, explicitly telling the story of his life to a doctor and nurse. I’ve no idea if the resemblance was intentional, but there’s a lot in these sections that reminded me of John Fowles’s Mantissa (1982, UK)

Most descriptions of the novel classify it as semi-autobiographical, and while I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s fiction, I know little of his life – but perhaps enough to for the classification to ring true. (His careers in illustration and advertising, for example.) Other aspects, especially the gender politics and attitude to women evidenced in the novel, are definitely the same as in Roberts’s other writings (cf ‘The Natural History of the P.H.’).

Roberts’s main thesis seems to be feminism and women’s lib are a waste of time because women should not be trying to fight for equality with men but simply fighting for their own variety of rights. Which sort of ignores the fact of the patriarchy, a concept Robert never appears to have taken onboard. And it does render the central element of Gráinne’s plot, the empowerment centres, somewhat moot. On the other hand, they do make Gráinne something of a messianic, or a Valentine Michael Smith-type, figure.

Of course, it all ends badly. It always does for such figures. The narrative hints at unsavoury backers who helped Gráinne financially, perhaps hoping for the social and economic disruption she eventually causes in the UK, but it doesn’t go any further. The final section also implies a post-apocalyptic Earth, perhaps after a nuclear war, but it’s only a single sentence and ambiguous.

The reviews of Gráinne I’ve read online seem mostly to have missed the point of the story. It’s not a fantasy about a Celtic goddess who has a love affair with a human man. Gráinne may be more than human, but that’s from Bevan’s point of view. Her later influence is a mixture of clever television (much cleverer than Channel 5 ever proved to be, or indeed the bulk of British tv in the mid-1980s), deep pockets and a mishmash of Eastern religions. Even then, her empowerment centres proved more disruptive than intended.

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961, USA) follows a similar story although, given it’s American, it reads like a carnival novel, and its central protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is a thinly-disguised carnival freak. Roberts’s novel, however, uses Irish mythology rather than US carnival folklore, and focuses on female empowerment and not free love. Heinlein wrote prose that was extremely readable and smooth, but Roberts’s style is more literary. British sf produced a number of excellent prose stylists in the 1970s, not part of the New Wave but almost certainly adjacent to it, such as Coney, Cowper, Compton, Lee, Saxton, Watson…

I’ve no idea why Gráinne, published by small press Kerosina Books, was given the BSFA Award. Other notable sf novels published in the UK in 1987 include Banks’s Consider Phlebas (1987, UK), Mann’s The Fall of the Families (1987, UK), Wolfe’s The Urth of the New Sun (1987, USA), and even Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade (1987, USA). Certainly, a shortlist could have been drawn up. Perhaps it was.


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Oka Rel 1: The Courtesan Prince, Lynda Williams

I bought a copy of this book back in 2009 but never got around to reading it. I don’t even remember why I bought it. I’ve a vague memory of corresponding with the author, but that may be confabulation. I was interested in writing space opera, and had been for a number of years, and The Courtesan Prince (2005, Canada) is the first in a ten-book space opera series, so it may have been no more than that.

It could be argued that space opera, more so than any other branch of science fiction, succeeds or fails more on its world-building than its story. They all pretty much use the same story, anyway. Oka Rel starts from a future history and a, mostly, hard-ish sf universe, but by the time this first novel opens, Earth is lost and there are two mostly antagonistic human polities, which lost touch 200 years earlier. The Oka Rel universe plays off on the difference between the two polities – the Reetions are technological and progressive, the Gelacks are a semi-feudal empire ruled by the descendants of genetically-engineered humans.

After two centuries of separation, and all the two groups know of each other is legend and rumour, they finally meet up at a neutral space station. Von is a courtesan and dancer ordered to impersonate a member of the aristocracy during the first Gelack meeting with the Reetions. Ann is a hot-headed Reetion pilot who falls for Von, and then becomes involved in Gelack politics. Because Von is really a long-lost son of the emperor, although he doesn’t know it.

The Courtesan Prince tries hard with its world-building, but doesn’t quite make the grade. Possibly because the two groups are too much the opposite of each other. It’s all a bit too binary. It doesn’t help that Von is simply far too good a character to be entirely credible, despite the violence inflicted on him. Some of the sensibilities haven’t aged particularly well in the last twenty years but, to be fair, there is worse being published even now. It all feels, in many respects, a bit like Cherryh, but the details seem harder to visualise. In fact, now I think about it, there’s a lot of Cherryh in there. Which is no bad thing, of course. I’m a big fan of Cherryh’s fiction.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue with the series, although I’m a sucker for a series. I’ll read anything if it comes in three or more books with a single over-arching story. But, as I said earlier, space operas succeed or fail on their world-building more than their story, and I’m not all that taken with the Oka Rel universe, to be honest.


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The Corporation Wars 1: Dissidence, Ken MacLeod

This was a reread – I read it back in 2017 – but never got the chance to read the two sequels before I put the books in storage when I moved. Earlier this year I bought an omnibus edition of the trilogy, intending to finally finish all three. 

I actually wrote a review of Dissidence (2016, UK) on my blog back then. For some reason, I wrote that it took place on a moon of Jupiter, which was complete rubbish – the author even called me out on my mistake. I’ve no idea why I wrote that. The terms exoplanet and exomoon are used throughout the novel, and it states several times that it takes place in a planetary system 25 light years from Earth. So sorry, Ken: I’ve no idea why I wrote that and I’d like to make it clear the novel is set in another planetary system.

Anyway. Two companies are exploring the mineral wealth of an exomoon using robots. One of the robots, through a sequence of events, becomes self-aware. And so causes other robots, in both mining companies, to become self-aware. They rebel. So the AIs which run the mining companies unöeash their legal AIs on the “freebots”. Everything in the planetary system is run by AIs, based on a mission profile originally sent from Earth at sublight speeds.

Carlos the Terrorist was responsible for killing thousands in London during the undeclared war between the Acceleration (left-wing, basically) and the Reaction (right-wing, basically). He finds himself reincarnated in a simulation running on an AI in the same system as the aforementioned freebots. He, and several other resurrected and uploaded war criminals from the Acceleration, is there to fight those freebots on behalf of the legal AI that represents the mining company to which the robots belonged.

Except, it’s slightly more complicated than that. Is the simulation Carlos and his team experience really a simulation? Why does the legal AI representing one of the mining companies break off relations and start a war?

The story is surprisingly fast-paced, given all the ontological discussions, but MacLeod keeps the focus tight on Seba, the first robot to gain self-awareness, and Carlos. There’s a few bait-and-switches before the novel finally reveals its plot, but it’s the first of a trilogy. There are few authors I’d trust with political science fiction, but MacLeod is definitely one of them. True, I have more in common with him politically than most sf authors (especially US ones, past and present), but also because he writes sf to his politics, not despite them.

I’d happily recommend any novel by Ken MacLeod. Some are better than others. If you read them all, there may be a few disappointments, but on the whole you’ll be impressed. The Corporation Wars trilogy, based on just this first novel, seems to be somewhere near the middle, so definitely worth reading.


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A Fire Born of Exile, Aliette de Bodard.

Or, de Bodard does Dantès. Not that A Fire Born of Exile (2023, France) is the first science fiction novel to be inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo (1846, France). Gwyneth Jones’s excellent space opera, Spirit (2008, UK), also borrowed the plot from Dumas’s novel.

In A Fire Born of Exile, a naive scholar was tricked into expressing sympathy with the rebels during the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising and promptly executed by being thrown out of an airlock. But against all odds she survived. Ten years later, using the name Quỳnh, the Alchemist of Streams and Hills, she arrives at the Scattered Pearls Belt to exact her revenge. The official who sentenced her to death is now prefect of the Belt, and Quỳnh’s lover of the time, who did nothing to save her, is now a general.

Minh is the daughter of the prefect and completely under the thumb of her overbearing mother. She is being groomed to become a scholar and follow in her mother’s footsteps, but she doesn’t really want to do that. In the panic following an incident at the Tiger Games, bandits try to kidnap Minh but she is saved by Quỳnh. The two become tentative friends.

Hoà is a technologist, low caste, who bumps into Quỳnh at her dead sister’s shrine, and it turns out Quỳnh knew her. The two are immediately attracted to each other. Hoà has been contracted by Minh and her friends to fix the mindship Flowers at the Gates of the Lords (or rather, Hoà’s sister has, but she’s ill so Hoà, who has no skill in mindship repair, has to do it instead – with help from Quỳnh). Flowers at the Gates is actually Minh’s Great Aunt and the head of the family lineage, meaning she has control of all the family funds. But she was badly damaged during the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising.

Quỳnh easily unseats the general by revealing an ex-lover who was a serial killer known to, and ignored by, the authorities. The prefect is a much harder target. Quỳnh has evidence of punishments that were over and above what the law decreed, such as execution instead of exile, including her own execution, but that’s not enough. She tries to manipulate Minh into declaring unfilial piety, but Minh is too browbeaten. There’s Flowers at the Gates too, of course, who is head of the family, but will she be fixed in time?

Quỳnh underestimates the prefect’s power, but the prefect in turn underestimates Flowers’, er, power. It comes to a head when an Imperial Censor visits to make the prefect the head of the lineage.

Dantès had it much easier than Quỳnh, and not just because the prefect comes across more like Malificent than Danglars. There’s plenty more going on in A Fire Born of Exile, and it’s all built up from the relationships between the various characters. As in the other Xuya novels and stories, there’s lots of food and drink, and lots of detailed descriptions of heavily-decorated clothing – this is a lush and lushly-described universe. I liked the novel preceding this one, The Red Scholar’s Wake (2022, France), a great deal, but I liked this one more. I’m frankly surprised A Fire Born of Exile didn’t make any award shortlists in 2024. Recommended.


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Wave Without a Shore, CJ Cherryh

The back cover blurb of Wave Without a Shore (1981, USA) describes it as “a different sort of interplanetary novel by the author of Downbelow Station (1981, USA) and The Faded Sun” trilogy (1978-1979, USA). Which is almost true. It certainly doesn’t resemble the two titles mentioned – for one thing, it’s set entirely on the surface of a single planet. So, not really “interplanetary” either, I guess.

The world of Freedom was settled by humans, even though it already had a native population, the ahnit. The humans built a city, Kierkegaard, and settled down to develop a way of life that resulted them in not seeing things which do not fit their worldview or “reality”. Such as the ahnit. Who more or less become invisible to them. As do humans who drop out.

Herrin Law considers himself the cleverest person on the planet. He becomes a sculptor at the university in Kierkegaard, where he meets Waden Jenks, son of the world’s First Citizen, and almost as clever as Herrin, if not equal in intelligence. Jenks’s cleverness, however, lies in politics. There’s also a third super-smart student, Keye Lynn, who starts out as Law’s girlfriend, then after Jenks has seized power from his father, moves in with Jenks.

Jenks commissions a statue of himself from Law, which Law turns into a series of carved domes, within which is the statue, in Kierkegaard’s only square. Meanwhile, Freedom’s sole contact with other worlds, a freebooter merchant, threatens Jenks and Kierkegaard, and Jenks responds by shopping him to the military… who then start building a station in Freedom orbit.

Much of the first half of the novel is taken up with philosophical discussions between Law and Jenks. Everyone on Freedom is solipsistic to the degree they can choose what and what not to see in their surroundings. But when Jenks, encouraged by the visiting military, tells Law to never sculpt again, and then has his goons break Law’s hands to make sure… Law is driven into a crisis and begins to “see” the ahnit.

It’s a neat concept – and reminds me a little of Miéville’s The City & the City (2009, UK) – but Cherryh spends so long setting up the characters of Law and Jenks, and describing the underpinnings to the Freedom humans’ solipsism, the story drags badly for much of its length. Nor is it helped by both Law and Jenks being so arrogant and self-centred and unlikeable. It also reminds me a little of other novels by Cherryh, such as Voyager in Night (1984), and while it’s set in her Alliance-Union universe, it’s on the fringes of it, like The Faded Sun trilogy and Angel with the Sword (1985, USA). So, probably one for completists.