Monday, July 13, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Worst of All Possible Worlds by Alex White


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 28, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
The Worst of All Possible Worlds is the third and final book in Alex White's space opera "The Salvagers" trilogy, which began with A Big Ship at the End of the Universe (Reviewed here) and continued with "A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy" (Reviewed here).  I enjoyed the first book in this series a good deal, but really loved the 2nd.  Both novels are fun space opera romps, featuring a disparate cast of oddballs each with a different magical power and some really fun dialogue - the books have been compared in reviews and the press clippings to "Firefly" and the comparison actually works.  So I was really really excited to get an advance copy of this novel and to dig into it.

And well, The Worst of All Possible Worlds may be the best in the trilogy, and if it isn't, it's pretty damn close. The characters remain tremendous - particularly Boots and Nilah, our two main point of view characters - as they face their toughest test yet, a really fun new character is introduced and the dialogue remains absolutely fantastic, causing me to crack up repeatedly, while occasionally saying something poignant to go along with it all.  The result was so much fun - even when the plot gets very very dark - that I simply could not stop reading, and before I knew it, I'd finished this roughly 600 page book in a single day.  So yeah, highly recommended.

More specifics after the jump:


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
The crew of the Capricious has managed to perform the impossible repeatedly - defeating a number of the "Gods" of the Harrow, who sucked out an entire planet's magic to power their own.  But the Gods' leader, Henrick Witts, is still out there with a number of his conspirators, and the crew's government contacts have made it clear that Witts has been building something huge and powerful for his grand schemes to remaking all life in the galaxy.

And sure enough, after one of the Gods' children is executed, they strike: with one god attacking Nilah's loved ones and Witt himself launching a deadly assault, it seems all may be lost: until the crew discovers ties between Witt and the secret of Origin: the place humanity and all its power once came from.  It's a place Boots - former treasure hunter herself - once thought only as legendary, but it clearly marks the only chance the crew, and perhaps the Galaxy has at stopping Witt.

But to get there, the crew will have to face not just the gods, but also the forces that have conspired to keep Origin hidden for generations - forces armed with strange powerful magic like they have never seen before.  And that's to say nothing of the crew's own internal problems, as the pressure of the situation, and the danger to all they love, threatens to crush them with despair.  It will take everything they have, all the resources they can find, and more in order to even have a chance......or the galaxy may fall.
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As with the prior two novels, The Worst of All Possible Worlds alternates telling its story between the perspectives of Boots and Nilah.  The two have come a long long way from where they were at the start of the trilogy: Nilah is no longer than naive young girl - now toughened up quite a bit after all their experiences, even if she is a lot more compassionate than some of the crew; meanwhile Boots is no longer the extreme cynic scrapping through life and looking for peace - to the point where Captain Cordell even turns to her as his first choice for being his new XO, to help motivate the crew.  At the same time, it's kind of a weird choice to stick with here, as several other characters have key roles in this novel, and we're dealing more with an ensemble here than just those characters' journeys, even if Nilah in particular has a good bit of the spotlight here.  I could do my usual bit in these reviews and talk about how great each of the old characters are and how they've changed in detail - Nilah the most - but honestly, you should know that already through two books.

What this book definitely does do is provide new circumstances in its plot to put these characters through the ringer, forcing them to make choices and character developments that are often very extreme.  Thankfully again the old characters are terrific and White does a fantastic job writing the dialogue and actions between them.  This is some of the snappiest and most entertaining dialogue you'll find anywhere, to liven up a plot that often sees innocent people die in horrible ways and some very serious themes about power and what people will do to gain and control it.  Especially when you add in the one prominent new character, a being named Devil who is an absolute riot of laughs, this book never ceases to be tremendously fun and enticing from beginning to the very end.

It's a plot that wraps up the narrative fairly well, with a lot of very solid plot twists from time to time, and surprisingly leaves a lot of potential sequel hooks wide open.  A narrative featuring two of the main cast comes to a head in the finale, but the conclusion of that plot thread leaves open a number of questions that the book skips out on answering.  Similarly, not only by my count should there probably be at least a few surviving Gods out there (admittedly I lost count at some point), but there are two new entities introduced in this book with mysterious designs upon the galaxy and mysterious means, and the book leaves them still out there by the end.  This is not to say the book isn't satisfying in its conclusion - it's a very solid and enjoyable conclusion for this trilogy and I am absolutely not disappointed.  I just hope the open plot threads mean we might get more in this universe in the future....

So yeah, I'm kind of sorry I don't have more to say on this one - I really could go on about the old characters and the development and whatnot.  But honestly, this is more of the same great fun we saw earlier, taken to maybe another level - I think this is funnier than the earlier books at times, and honestly the weakest part to me of the prior books was understanding really the romance between Nilah and Orna, and we're past that point here, so whatever I don't need to worry about how we got here, and the developed romance here works fairly well.  So yeah, read this series, you won't be disappointed.
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