(Originally posted 25 Dec 2014 at trenchkamen.livejournal.com.)

Umayama was terraformed thousands of years ago by settlers from the moons who originally left an ancestral planet lost to memory. The twin suns burn cancers into anybody unwise enough to go unrobed for a few hours and most of the planet is a brutal desert. Most of the settlers followed the same Earth religion and though their vernacular languages differ, they all speak the same prayer language, that in which their holy book is written. Immigration has been halted for all of living memory and approaching ships, with strategic exception, are shot out of the sky. Magicians have control over the copious insects comprising the major fauna of the planet, with varying levels of skill. Technology is organic and bug-based, everything from organic vehicles that spit and cough bugs and fluids to herds of beetles that act as radio transmitters. There are healing bugs and bugs to produce fire and bugs to keep things cold. Architecture is molded from bug secretions. Medicine has progressed to the ability to replace lost limbs and reanimate after death, to a point. There are bugs to clean wounds and repair flesh and insects are the major source of protein in the human diet.

What may once have been an attempt at the establishment of a homogenous and therefore peaceful society didn’t exactly work. Nasheen and Chenja have been locked in a brutal war for generations and while other nations grow rich on arms deals, or try to play both sides to their advantage, the two nations in question have lost an entire sex. In Nasheen all boys with the exception of those with a knack for insect magic are required to go to the front from the ages of 16 to 40, and most don’t last more than a few years. Those who desert are assassinated by Bel Dames, an all-female semi-autonomous government cadre. The only men in the country are young boys or old men, all of the latter psychologically and psychically scarred from surviving their time at the front. Nasheen is unique in that it coped with its lack of males by giving women full freedom and autonomy, essentially becoming a matriarchy where boys are disposable and women frequently take other females as lovers. In other nations including Chenja women remain oppressed according to the mandates of their religion, forced to cover their heads and defer to men in matters of import, and suffer levels of oppression ranging from what is currently seen in the Middle East to serfdom. But ultimately it is the boys who die at the front, and the boys who die for dubious political gains masked in the righteousness of a religion the source of which nobody remembers.

Nyx is an ex-Bel Dame who lives her life in a potential state of fight, flight, or fuck, unless (or even when, depending) she’s drunk, which she frequently is. Rhys is a chaste, deeply religious Chenjan man living in exile in Nasheen, and a middling magician but ultimately better than nothing, and cheap, and that is why he ends up on Nyx’s ragtag team of misfits. They’re bounty hunters and soldiers of fortune, a respectable profession for a collection of unrespectable and often wanted people. Nyx’s team lives perpetually in the bad part of town, whatever town they’re in, and in a society with such stark economic stratification the bad part of town is pretty damn rough. I love Nyx’s interactions with Rhys, given that they span decades and there are several time jumps during which they both live their lives separately before meeting again, never under auspicious circumstances. Rhys becomes a family man and Nyx is… Nyx. They are deeply mismatched people and the story does not gloss over that. But they’re drawn to each other even though it only results in pain. This is also a deeply feminist story in many regards but of note in the way Nyx’s attraction to Rhys is handled—she isn’t softened or tamed but is still drawn to this strange, idealistic, pacifistic, conventional creature, so utterly alien to herself.

The series also brings up something rather uncomfortable: a men’s rights movement that actually has a legitimate complaint. This is explored in the most detail in the third book. Hurley explores the uncomfortable shift that occurs when a society has learned to adapt to a significant portion being absent, and that portion all coming back at once. There aren’t enough jobs, enough housing, enough places. And you get the feeling that even though the returning soldiers were fighting for the comfort and quality of life of the civilians (debatable), nobody wants to be bothered with their presence and just wishes they’d evaporate, or that more had died at the front. The rich live in guarded compounds, leaving the returning vets to fight with the poor for whatever scraps are left. These are truly surplus men, and the inevitable banditry results that comes of a people not having any chance at obtaining employment or integration. But people see them as a nuisance. This isn’t much different than the way we currently view our returning vets, especially if they are damaged, especially if they don’t have a place waiting for them.

This isn’t a preachy book, which is noteworthy given that it is a book dealing primarily with war and religion. The observations speak for themselves. War is hell and ultimately it is innocent people suffering to better the position of those in power. The prevailing interpretation of a single book dictates quality of life and circumstance for whole peoples. This would be considered literary science fiction, and while that term carries with it a stigma of insufferable douchyness, if you’ve read a lot of sci fi you know exactly what I’m talking about. While the worldbuilding is thorough and fascinating it is ultimately the characters that drive the story, and for that it is well-written and compelling. People didn’t stop being people just because they traveled across the stars. A lot of science fiction seems to forget that. Or at least sucks at that aspect. And though it’s certainly not the first and won’t be the last time the adaptations of Earth religions to space have been addressed, the form of Islam that has evolved after 3,000 years on a strange planet, long after Earth and Mecca were forgotten, is quite interesting. Some facets are shockingly durable and others are shockingly plastic. It’s Space Muslims but the Spice isn’t flowing and we have a new take on an extraterrestrial Caliphate.

Night Shade Books has an amazing track record with book selection (though not, as the author herself notes, with the business of publishing itself) so I’ve come to trust their judgment much the same way I do that of Vertical with their manga. I haven’t yet read a bad book they put out. I admit their lovely cover design and book packaging is what initially drew my attention, and I was pleased to see these were not dud books in lovely jackets. I’ve read a lot of wonderful books in fuck-awful fantasy/sci-fi packaging (always with the huge stretched-out embossed font taking up half the cover), so it’s nice to for once see cover quality match book quality.

There is a lot I would love to discuss but I would rather the reader get these things through the story itself. It takes a great deal of artistry to convey complex and profound realizations and characterizations without lengthy exposition and Hurley achieves that, and I would not spoil her work by nattering on about this that and the other thing and the character dynamics I noticed hit very close to my heart. Night Shade may have gone under/been bought out/actually I’m not sure what you’d call it and Hurley did not take the deal to remain signed on with them when Skyhorse bought them out, but in a blog post she mentioned that she would still get royalties if people bought the Night Shade copies, and frankly I fear any future book design would be tacky as hell. Most sci fi book designs are. But I’ve noticed a trend lately of science fiction and fantasy book covers improving dramatically, so I guess we’ll see.