Tuesday, April 20, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

 




The Best of All Possible Worlds is the second novel by author Karen Lord, author of Redemption in Indigo (Review Here) and Unraveling (Review Here).  I read Redemption in Indigo earlier this year and really loved it, and after seeing a few people mention The Best of All Possible Worlds online, I had to reserve it from my library.  Lord's work with her characters in the prior two books I read was always fascinating and really well done - with Redemption in Indigo in particular being positively delightful and charming - and with this book moving from fantasy to scifi, I was really interested in seeing how it would turn out.  

And well, The Best of All Possible Worlds is a really delightful and charming hybrid of multiple genres - most notably of anthropological scifi and romance.  The story features an telepathic offshoot of humanity, their home destroyed, coming to a planet where some of their ancestors/cousins settled to try to find a way to rebuild their race, forcing them to discover all the ways those ancestors' cultures have changed over the ages.  It also features a scientist native of the planet trying to help the main diplomat of the telepaths around, and the two slowly falling for each other, despite their very different cultural ways.  The characters and peoples shown within are really well done, which makes this one yet another winner from Karen Lord.  

Trigger Warning: One small part features a character using telepathy to control his family, in a parallel essentially to using emotional abuse/manipulation in our real world.  I doubt it'll cause any concerns for most people, but it's there.  

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
The Sadiri, an offshoot of humanity known for their calm dispassionate ways along with their powerful telepathy, as well as their advanced technology and presence in the galaxy.  And then their world was destroyed by a jealous rival faction, leaving them searching both for a new home and a way to save the future of their race.  And so they came to Cygnus Beta, the home of pioneers and refugees, where stock of every human race have intermingled. 

Grace Delarua was a biotechnician in the Cygnus Beta government, one with a fondness for studying languages and cultures.  And so she finds herself playing tour guide to the Sadiri delegation, led by the stiff man Dllenahkh, as they try to find other humans with similar genetic profiles, the taSadiri - having come from Sadiri who left their home planet for Cygnus Beta generations before.  And when Delarua makes a suggestion as to how the Sadiri can go about it, she finds this becoming her actual job: to show Dllenahkh the settlements and cultures his people's cousins have built on Cygnus Beta, to see if potential matches can be made.  

But when Delarua and Dllenahkh discover are settlements that range from tame to utterly wild and incoherent, more than even Delarua could have expected despite it being her own planet.  And then there's what the two seem to find in each other, as Delarua's power of empathy meets Dllenahkh's calm telepathy, and produces a relationship like none could have possibly imagined.....
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The Best of All Possible Worlds is written in a structure that reminded me a bit of Marie Brennan's work.  Each chapter - occasional interludes from Dllenahkh's third person perspective aside - features the first person perspective of Delarua as she and her team accompanies Dllenahkh and his team to a new settlement on Cygnus Beta where the taSadiri has seemed to have settled and intermingled into a new and different form of culture, and features Dllenahkh and Delarua trying to figure out those cultures as they see whether the people will be interested or appropriate with mingling with the Sadiri.  And those cultures vary significantly, with one group of people for example imitating old Fae myths (complete with a Faerie Queen and fight between the Seelie and Unseelie Court), one group living in a hidden monastery, one group featuring a slave-keeping society, etc, which challenges ethics of the protagonists, etc.  

These cultures, and how the protagonists - Delarua, who is a very thoughtful and insightful (and empathic) woman with a bit of a hot streak and Dllenahkh, the Sadiri telepath who is nearly always cool headed and hiding his emotions  - interact with them, along with the other members of their team really makes this book work.  The explorations of each of these cultures and how they've evolved and changed is really fascinating, especially as the characters all try and figure out if everyone they meet is crazy or if this actually makes sense.  And as the book goes on, we also stop in the city to see how a theatre trope that uses telepathy/empathy to enhance the performance, see the dangers of telepathy and manipulation using it in a family setting, etc.  Add in the fact that Cygnus Beta is made up of humans of mixed race of the four races of human presented in this book, not just the telepathic Sadiri, but the empathic Ntshune, the addictingly attractive and bodily manipulative Zhinuvians, and of course, the Terrans (that's us) who possess the possibilities of all of them, and you have a story that really thrives in showing us the possibilities of the mixtures of the same in all the very different ways.  

But what really makes this even more delightful is the relationship and eventual romance between Delarua and Dllenahkh, two absolutely charming characters in their own ways.  Delarua first acts incredulous at the Sadiri arrogance that they can just come to Cygnus Beta and try to have children there, but she's caring and honestly kind of falls in love with guiding them around and trying to help them.  She also has relationship issues stemming from her old boyfriend (and now brother in law) trying to use his telepathy to manipulate her - which isn't helped by everyone seeming to think she and Dllenahkh are in a relationship from the very start.  By contrast, Dllenahkh is impassive and quiet - at least to others (Delarua can see through him with her empathic skills) - and constantly trying to restrain himself (for reasons that are eventually revealed) and desperate to save his people....while also afraid of committing even the slightest bit of impropriety.  And yet despite all that, he's absolutely not a stick in the mud as you might originally suspect (despite the obvious "Spock" comparison, he's far more emotional than Spock ever was), and is positively charming in his own ways.  The two characters have incredibly fun and charming chemistry, as they try to figure out ways to help the Sadiri people, figure out their own people, and slowly come to realize they mean more to each other than they could care to admit.  

It's not a book with a sex scene on page, or even much kissing, but the romance works really well, and well, Lord makes even hand-touching incredibly sensual on page.  And the side characters, who I've barely mentioned in this review, and the adventures here, all work really well to complement them - this is far from just a romance, but it's really hard to explain.  If I could try, I'd say this is the story of two people coming from a desperate situation (the near destruction of an entire race) working together to find a way to help the survivors recover and trying to do good in the meantime, even at significant personal and professional cost.  And that works really well.  

If this book has a single weird point I could point to, it's that while the Cygnus population is often LGBTQ-friendly (Delarua's mother is bi and interested in a poly relationship, one of the team chooses to live "without gender", etc.), the Sadiri are seemingly only interested in heterosexual relationships, and this conflict doesn't really come into play, which is a little awkward.  Still, The Best of All Possible Worlds is otherwise delightful, charming and so much fun and I highly recommend it.  

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