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Thanks to their folkloric storytelling and galaxy-spanning scale, 鈥渟pace operas鈥� have always been near to science fiction鈥檚 heart. Even the chilliest of them 鈥� Olaf Stapledon鈥檚 Last and First Men, written 87 years ago 鈥� can still bring a lump to the throat. Subsequent writers have pretzelled space opera into countless unexpected shapes. Think of the broad satire of Harry Harrison鈥檚 Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, or the psychogeographical horror underpinning Light by M. John Harrison. And those are just the 鈥淗鈥漵.

Naturally the influence of space opera, and its role as a site for innovation and experimentation, has waxed and waned over time. At the moment we are inundated with intriguing, often envelope-pushing space opera, and Kameron Hurley鈥檚 The Stars Are Legion is exemplary. Where most space opera, acknowledging its icy origins in Last and First Men, exists at a chilly remove from humanity, The Stars Are Legion is fleshy and messily organic. It is set in the Legion, a sort of biomechanical Dyson sphere, where spaceships exist in symbiosis with their passengers, who grow replacement parts to meet the ships鈥� needs. The gap between person and machine is practically non-existent: in one scene, heroine Zan patches a tube with a length of intestine sliced out of a nearby corpse. It鈥檚 a jaw-dropping bit of shorthand that stresses the frightening vulnerability of Kameron鈥檚 characters, who are surrounded by death and mutilation with no possibility of escape.

This overheated, bloody setting hangs on a fairly straightforward narrative scaffold: Zan, an amnesiac general, is tasked by Jayd, a conniving and secretive princess, to save the disintegrating Legion. Quite how is clear neither to Zan nor to us at the outset, but one thing is known: this is not Zan鈥檚 first stab at the problem, and if she can鈥檛 restore her memories, then she, Jayd, and the entire Legion may be doomed.

The novel is most successful in its long central segment, in which Zan, who has been 鈥渞ecycled鈥� 鈥� dumped into the core of the ship to be taken apart for raw materials 鈥� 聽makes her way back to the outer layers, aided by a coterie of misfits and weirdos. All are women, as indeed are all the inhabitants of the Legion, a point about which Hurley is refreshingly nonchalant.

Alas, she never quite manages to sell the urgency of the Legion鈥檚 impending doom, and that鈥檚 down in part to the clockwork nature of her plotting. We鈥檙e never in any doubt that Zan will return to Jayd鈥檚 side when she needs to and not a moment sooner, and when the details of Zan鈥檚 past are revealed, they feel more than a little overdetermined. The Stars Are Legion doesn鈥檛 amount to more than the sum of its parts, but those parts are so inventive and bizarre that it鈥檚 more than enough to be going on with.

A hero who isn鈥檛

Joe M. McDermott鈥檚 The Fortress at the End of Time shares with The Stars Are Legion a sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped in a hostile, predatory environment outside of which there is only the vast coldness of space. But that is very nearly the only quality, aside from their genre, which the two books share. The Fortress at the End of Time is sterile in both setting and tone, and although its main character dreams of being a hero, he succeeds only in stumbling into, and disrupting, other people鈥檚 stories.

Ronaldo Aldo is a soldier and a clone. While his original remains on Earth, a duplicate is transported instantaneously to humanity鈥檚 furthest outpost, the Citadel. It is technically the last line of defence against aliens with whom humanity has fought a terrible war, but the post turns out to be thoroughly demoralised. Most of Aldo鈥檚 fellow officers, obsessing over internal politics and personal enrichment schemes, doubt that the war ever happened. The priggish Aldo quickly earns enemies by refusing to countenance corruption and abuse, but he is too vain and self-absorbed to ever be a hero, and ends up alienating even those he claims to fight for.

The Fortress at the End of Time presents itself as Aldo鈥檚 confession and justification for the terrible crime to which the narrative is leading. But though McDermott is very good at sketching the dysfunctional social dynamics of the Citadel, it becomes too frustrating to spend so much time inside Aldo鈥檚 head, and the crime he keeps promising us doesn鈥檛 live up to his grandiose promises (which, in fairness, is completely in character).

Afrofuturist homecoming

Somewhere between McDermott鈥檚 sterility and Hurley鈥檚 effusiveness lies Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor鈥檚 sequel to her Hugo Award-winning 2015 novella Binti. In this instalment, the eponymous heroine returns to her native Namibia from the extraterrestrial Oomza University, accompanied by an alien, Okwu, who in the previous story attacked a transport carrying Binti and hundreds of others from Earth. Binti must confront not only people鈥檚 suspicion of Okwu but disapproval from her own family, who believe that by leaving Earth she has betrayed her community and abandoned her role in it.

As with the original story, much of Home鈥榮 force comes from Okorafor鈥檚 assured Afrofuturist vision, which is here complicated when Binti learns that even her insular community, an ethnic minority in Namibia, has its own mysterious sub-group, with access to possibly alien technology. Much of this, however, will have to wait to be explicated in the next instalment in the series, due next year. Home places Binti in her new setting, and introduces many new complications, but it isn鈥檛 a complete story in its own right. What鈥檚 left to enjoy is Binti鈥檚 strong personality in face of multiple challenges, and the complicated themes of acceptance and self-knowledge that Okorafor weaves through the story.

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