In the near-future China of Maggie Shen King’s (Harper Voyager), the country’s one-child policy has resulted in a shortage of eligible women, and a vast, unmarriageable male population. Viewing this as a potential source of civil unrest, the government vastly restricts people’s rights and freedoms, and encourages them to enter into polyandrous marriages. Forty-something Wei-guo has finally saved enough money to enter into negotiations to become the third husband of May-ling, already married to brothers Hann and Xiong-xin. The novel switches between their four points of view in order to explore the stresses of such an arrangement, as well as the social forces that can make it advantageous and even desirable.

One can sense the influence of Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in King’s construction of her future society, particularly her use of neologisms and the repressive social policies they stand for, designed to “solve” the problem of the excess male population. Gay men are dubbed Willfully Sterile, forced to either register or be hospitalised. Men who have difficulty socialising or have autism are designated Lost Boys and can be institutionalised and sterilised. Single men like Wei-guo are assigned Helpmates for impersonal “hygiene sessions” in which the authorities prescribe the precise extent of sexual contact.

Despite these policies and the unhappiness they cause, An Excess Male is less a dystopia than it is a novel of manners, in which each of the characters must navigate norms both old and new in order to arrive at that holy grail of so much fiction: a good marriage. King and her characters are open about the flaws of the novel’s social structures; the later chapters focus on a terrible act of abuse, which the characters struggle to expose. But An Excess Male also suggests that the exigencies of its premise have opened the door to new definitions, not just of marriage, but of masculinity.

Far from devolving into brutality and violence, as their government fears, the societies that arise in the novel give men the opportunity to be nurturing and supportive. Polyandrous marriages, similarly, offer the male characters companionship not just with their wives, but with each other, as exemplified by Wei-guo’s fathers who, though straight, remain married even after his mother’s death. While King can hardly be said to be advocating the society she describes, which victimises and entraps both men and women, An Excess Male does end with the creation of a new family: one that requires all four spouses to function.

A different combination of dystopia and romance can be found in M. T. Anderson’s Landscape With Invisible Hand (Candlewick Press).

When Earth is discovered by the alien vuvv, they initially claim to have come in peace, offering technological breakthroughs in exchange for resources. The reality, however, is the type of colonisation and exploitation familiar from Earth’s own history. As the economy collapses, a tiny sliver of the population live like kings, serving the vuvv, while the remainder are left jobless and scrambling for survival.

Since the vuvv exoticise and fetishise human behavior, teenager Adam and his girlfriend Chloe decide to broadcast their relationship to an admiring alien audience, selling a vision of romance carefully tailored to appeal to the vuvv’s simplistic understanding of human customs.

Adam also hopes to win an art contest organised by the vuvv. The vuvv, however, are put off by his choosing to depict the ravages caused by their arrival. After all, they explain, they can see vuvv installations anywhere, and they much prefer the “wild” Earth depicted in Adam’s more fantastical paintings.

The resulting story feels like a cross between The Hunger Games and the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits”, pondering the cost of selling yourself to an audience that does not recognise your humanity. Adam and Chloe’s relationship crumbles under the strain of having to model what the vuvv take human love to be, and Adam is inevitably forced to choose between artistic integrity and his family’s future. The speed with which the characters go from middle-class security and self-confidence to bare subsistence might strike adult readers as a little overdetermined. But the combination of non-standard sci-fi ingredients, such as the focus on art and reality TV, and an extremely dark sense of humour, give Landscape With Invisible Hand a flavour all its own, one that will appeal to readers of any age.

Leaving Earth for the far reaches of outer space, Dave Hutchinson’s novella (Tor.com) focuses on Duke Faraday, the reluctant president of an anarchic space colony that has for centuries been relentlessly pursued by Earth’s Bureau of Colonisation. His job, run on the principle that only people with no interest in politics should be entrusted with public office, is usually a light one. But when a BoC probe appears in the colony’s system, he must corral a population of independent-minded geniuses and misfits to arrange an evacuation that will leave Earth clueless as to their new whereabouts.

Readers familiar with the political slant of Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence will be puzzled to find him writing about a Robert Heinlein-esque libertarian utopia, and perhaps fatigued by the dozens of paragraphs of explaining the colony’s workings. Not surprisingly, then, the story ends with a twist, but this, alas, is delivered so abruptly as to leave one feeling even more wrong-footed. Lost in space, as it were.

, the second volume in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy, and sequel to the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke-nominated Ninefox Gambit, continues its predecessor’s heady combination of space opera, fantasy, Korean folklore and mathematics.

The Hexarchate, a repressive space empire, derives its power from “calendrical weapons”, which rely on the acceptance of a particular calendar to power devices that bend and break the laws of physics. Since opponents, from within and without, create their own calendars to depower the Hexarchate’s weapons and drive their own, much of the government and military’s work involves suppressing “heresies” and “calendrical rot”.

As in Ninefox Gambit, this is a powerful metaphor for the coercive power of an authoritarian regime. The conceptual framework imposed by the repressive government powers the agents tasked with propping it up. Meanwhile, any rebellion must, in order to succeed, infect the populace with its own competing world view.

The action continues to follow the melded personalities of Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedao. Cheris, an infantry captain with prodigious mathematical skills, has had the ghost of Jedao, a military genius who went mad and slaughtered his own men, grafted onto her consciousness. For most of this book, Cheris/Jedao are viewed from the outside, through the eyes of their underlings and opponents, all of whom try to work out which personality is dominant, what plan they have for the Hexarchate, and whether rebellion is even possible. It is an oddly decentering device for a space opera, and one that does a great deal to undermine some of the genre’s gung-ho traits.

What, if any, possibility is there for moral agency under such a system? It’s a point that Lee frequently belabours, leaning a little too heavily on the regime’s atrocities, and on the nobility of those who serve in the faint hope of allaying some of these horrors. The absence of those who are complicit in the system, or indifferent to it, feels particularly unpersuasive. The novel’s climax, though, shakes the Hexarchate to its core, and sets up an interesting premise for the trilogy’s conclusion.

Power of words

Lee’s consensus reality is determined by maths. Reality in Karin Tidbeck’s debut novel is determined by words. Colonists live on a planet where the only raw material is a kind of gloop that can be formed into structures, tools, clothing and even food. The catch is that the material is psychoactive, so objects must constantly be reminded of what they are through naming and tagging, lest they melt away – or reform into something different.

The society that results is highly conformist and literal-minded. Books in Amatka must have completely descriptive titles, and place names are chosen from a list of nonsense words, to avoid the risk of metaphor and allusion.

Our hero, Vanja, exists on the very outskirts of acceptability for such a society, performing the conformity expected from her while chafing against it. When she arrives in the settlement of Amatka, she learns of a breakaway group that sought to embrace the planet’s fluctuating nature, rather than imposing order on it. But how can you trust a journey to discover the truth about your world, when the very desire to find that truth might cause it to pop into existence?

As the story of an individual who doesn’t quite fit into society, Amatka follows fairly familiar grooves. What elevates it is the skill of Tidbeck’s execution and the sheer weirdness of a world in which the very building blocks of reality depend so completely on how we perceive them.

Agreed falsehoods

Nina Allan’s second novel outdoes the other two books by suggesting that all reality is consensus reality. Many of the book’s characters drop out of society, not through the urging of supernatural or alien forces, but simply by sinking into their own obsessions. The world, Allan seems to be saying, is far less solid than we would like to believe, a collection of approximations and agreed-upon falsehoods. People who try to dig past that consensus to the bedrock of absolute truth frequently end up making themselves unfit for most human society.

It’s a danger that hangs over sisters Selena and Julie. Twenty years ago, the disappearance of teenager Julie tore her family apart. When she reappears, the story she tells isn’t one of kidnapping or rape, but of having been whisked away to an alien planet. The reasons for her “abduction” remain unfathomable. The dilemma facing Selena is not whether she can believe her sister, but whether she and Julie can come to an accommodation that will allow them to be a part of the world while still holding to what they believe to be true.

Despite the danger of sinking into their own world, the sisters can only start living worthwhile lives when they let a bit of madness into them, and refuse to be completely guided by what everyone around them defines as reality.

[book_info title=”Raven Stratagem ” author=”Yoon Ha Lee ” publisher=”Solaris” title_link=”http://www.solarisbooks.com/post/1830″]

[book_info title=”Amatka ” author=”Karin Tidbeck” publisher=”Vintage” title_link=”http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546226/amatka-by-karin-tidbeck/9781101973950/ “]

[book_info title=”The Rift” author=”Nina Allan” publisher=”Titan” title_link=”https://titanbooks.com/the-rift-8618/”]

Post-crisis gentrification

Greatest hits

Thanks to their folkloric storytelling and galaxy-spanning scale, “space operas” have always been near to science fiction’s heart. Even the chilliest of them – Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, written 87 years ago – 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’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, or the psychogeographical horror underpinning Light by M. John Harrison. And those are just the “H”s.

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’s 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’ 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’s a jaw-dropping bit of shorthand that stresses the frightening vulnerability of Kameron’s 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’s first stab at the problem, and if she can’t 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 “recycled” – dumped into the core of the ship to be taken apart for raw materials –  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’s impending doom, and that’s down in part to the clockwork nature of her plotting. We’re never in any doubt that Zan will return to Jayd’s side when she needs to and not a moment sooner, and when the details of Zan’s past are revealed, they feel more than a little overdetermined. The Stars Are Legion doesn’t amount to more than the sum of its parts, but those parts are so inventive and bizarre that it’s more than enough to be going on with.

A hero who isn’t

Joe M. McDermott’s 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’s stories.

Ronaldo Aldo is a soldier and a clone. While his original remains on Earth, a duplicate is transported instantaneously to humanity’s 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’s 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’s 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’s head, and the crime he keeps promising us doesn’t live up to his grandiose promises (which, in fairness, is completely in character).

Afrofuturist homecoming

Somewhere between McDermott’s sterility and Hurley’s effusiveness lies Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor’s 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’s 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‘s force comes from Okorafor’s 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’t a complete story in its own right. What’s left to enjoy is Binti’s strong personality in face of multiple challenges, and the complicated themes of acceptance and self-knowledge that Okorafor weaves through the story.

[book_info title=”The Stars Are Legion” author=”Kameron Hurley” publisher=”Saga Press” title_link=”http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Stars-Are-Legion/Kameron-Hurley/9781481447935″]

[book_info title=”The Fortress at the End of Time” author=”Joe M. McDermott” publisher=”Tor” title_link=”http://www.tor.com/2017/01/17/excerpts-the-fortress-at-the-end-of-time-joe-mcdermott/”]

[book_info title=”Binti: Home” author=”Nnedi Okorafor” publisher=”Tor” title_link=”http://www.tor.com/2017/01/24/excerpts-binti-home-nnedi-okorafor/”]