Book Review | The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord

For years, Rafi Delarua saw his family suffer under his father's unethical use of psionic power. Now the government has Rafi under close watch but, hating their crude attempts to analyse his brain, he escapes to the planet Punartam, where his abilities are the norm, not the exception. Punartam is also the centre for his favourite sport, wallrunning— and thanks to his best friend, he has found a way to train with the elite.

But Rafi soon realises he's playing quite a different game, for the galaxy is changing; unrest is spreading and the Zhinuvian cartels are plotting, making the stars a far more dangerous place to aim. There may yet be one solution... involving interstellar travel, galactic power and the love of a beautiful game.

***

Like The Best of All Possible Worlds before it, The Galaxy Game is a restrained space opera committed to splitting the difference between sweeping themes and smaller, sweeter story beats by focusing on unsuspecting characters caught up in machinations more elaborate than they can imagine—a pretty typical trajectory, to be sure, but don't be fooled, folks: this is the most normal thing about these extraordinary novels, which take the tropes of science fiction as starting points and twist them both conceptually and intellectually.

In place of the love story of Karen Lord's last, The Galaxy Game gives us a study of spacefaring infrastructure-cum-coming of age chronicle of a boy from The Best of All Possible Worlds. The son of the previous protagonist's sorry sister, Rafi Abowen Delarua also happens to have inherited the same ability to influence his abusive father made such dubious use of, so for a year he's been left to languish in the Lyceum.

The sinister facility's mandate—"to bring together all the rogue and random psi-gifted of Cygnus Beta and teach them ethics, restraint and community" (p.29)—is simple; deceptively so, Rafi realises, when his masters make plain their plans to cap him.

Only "the crazies, the criminals and the ones who'd set themselves on fire by accident" (p.32) are watched in this way—only those who would harm themselves or others have their prospects so summarily scotched—yet Rafi has done nothing wrong. If anything, he's overdone ordinariness; he's been so very well-behaved that his supervisors are singularly suspicious, and I'm afraid there's no dissuading them.

If he had remained at the homestead, he could have used his majority to take up work at another homesteading with no need for permission or blessing. If he had remained there and the past two years had not happened and there was no cap with his name attached to it. If he had remained there and never had a father—only a mother, a sister and a normal household with the ordinary struggle of selfishness and love. 

But he had a family that was not normal and a brain that was not normal and the government [of Cygnus-Beta] was too interested in both. (p.75) 

Thus, Rafi runs.

Book Review | The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression, and the survivors have no choice but to reach out to the indigenous humanoids of their adopted world, to whom they are distantly related. They wish to preserve their cherished way of life but come to discover that in order to preserve their culture, they may have to change it forever.

Now a man and a woman from these two clashing societies must work together to save this vanishing race — and end up uncovering ancient mysteries with far-reaching ramifications. As their mission hangs in the balance, this unlikely team - one cool and cerebral, the other fiery and impulsive - just may find in each other their own destinies... and a force that transcends all.

***

As a reader, and a reviewer, I like to think that I practice reasonably equal opportunities.

I suppose there are some sub-genres I struggle with, and a select few I have a particular passion for, but by and large, I could care less about categories. The tropes of a certain type of text mean little to me. I wouldn't even say story is my focus. How a story's told, on the other hand—and the way in which those tropes are brought forth? Makes all the damn difference.

But perhaps I should explain what this preamble has to do with Karen Lord's new novel.

Well, take widescreen, galaxy-spanning science fiction. I'm as excited by spectacle as the next person, and assuming they're astutely put, I can absolutely get behind big ideas to boot. But it's the little things that I really, truly love, and The Best of All Possible Worlds has an abundance of all of the above. Equal parts tragedy and romance, psychic fantasy and soulful SF, it's like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms meets a disarmingly charming 2312, as written by someone with a still more impressive sense of perspective.

A bilingual biotechnician by training, Grace Delarua is a single civil servant under the auspices of Central Government on Cygnus Beta, a colony known across the cosmos as "a galactic hinterland for pioneers and refugees." (p.7) Of late, she's become something of a liason to the secretive Sadiri people, or rather the few who survived the unprovoked attack on their planet: an act of terrible genocide in no uncertain terms, and in recent memory yet.

A year on from the horror on their homeworld, however, change is in the air:

"A lot of people act like misfortune is contagious. They don't want to be exposed to it for too long. They'll take you in and make all the right gestures and noises, but when the months wear on and you're still in their house or their town or their world, the welcome starts to wear a bit thin." (p.8)

To make matters worse for the Sadiri who have settled on Cygnus Beta, most of those remaining are male, and they are all too aware that unless something is done about this embarrassing imbalance, their race faces imminent extinction.