Monday, May 10, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord

 





The Galaxy Game is the sequel to Karen Lord's sci-fi novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds (which I reviewed here).  However, while this is very much a sequel (see below), it is a very very different book from its predecessor.  The Best of All Worlds was essentially a scifi romance/anthropological novel, featuring an empathic heroine helping a group of telepaths whose world was destroyed visit different communities and cultures settled long ago by distant ancestors, in the hopes of saving the telepaths' race by marrying back in.  Along the way you got a really lovely and charming slow romance to go along with some really interesting examination of different cultures, as well as a few ethical dilemmas as to what to do when those examinations go very very wrong.  It wasn't a simple narrative, but it wasn't particularly hard to understand and it was oh so charming.  

By contrast, The Galaxy Game takes those same characters a few years later, particularly our former heroine's nephew Rafi, and throws them into a new story about essentially the power of connections, rather than romance in any fashion.  It's a story that takes a lot of what made The Best of All Possible Worlds into a happy ending and throws it out - and the story that it creates out of that mess is often incredibly confusing...especially due to the sheer number of perspectives we see the story from.  There's an interesting story here at this one's core, as the 2-3 main protagonists find their way in a new universe based upon their connections to other people, but it's kind of overwhelmed by everything else, and thus a bit of a miss for me.  

NOTE:  This book is in absolutely no way a stand alone.  The book is confusing enough for a reader who has read The Best of All Possible Worlds within the same week - if you don't have the background from that novel, you will be hopelessly lost here.  


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
On Cygnus Beta, telepaths as strong as Rafi Delarua don't come around that often, especially from an individual who isn't from the telepathic Sadiri or taSadiri communities.  Add in the fact that Rafi's father committed heinous crimes with his own telepathy - rape, domination of others, kidnapping, etc. - and it's no surprise that Rafi would be sent to a school, the Lyceum, to be closely watched and tested for any ill intent. 

But Rafi has no such intent, in fact he fears the very idea of being anything like his father.  And so when the Lyceum's psychic testing begins to give him nightmares, he escapes, helped along by two of his friends: Ntenman the mostly Ntshune (but psychically inert) ward of a family of powerful traders and Serendipitiy, a Sadiri girl from a powerful monastery confused by her reaction to Rafi's telepathy. 

Rafi's escape with Ntenman takes him off world to a planet where psychic abilities are not uncommon and where the foundation of society is one's connection - their social credit - to other people, from business to the planet's own sport, the fascinating game of Wallrunning.  But there's more to the eye than sport involved in the game of Wallrunning, and its complexities possess the ability, when harnessed by a person like Rafi, to change the galaxy forever....a galaxy beginning to tear itself apart in disharmony more and more by the day......
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The Best of All Possible Worlds had two point of view characters - you had a first person point of view of Grace, our main heroine, and occasional interludes from the third person perspective of the secondary protagonist, Dllenahkh.  The Galaxy Game by contrast is told in a much more complicated form, from the perspectives of almost too many characters to count, seemingly with little logic whatsoever.  The biggest perspectives are probably Ntenman (whose perspective is told in first person for no reason I could decipher) and Rafi, but we often go long pages without seeing their perspectives at certain parts, instead seeing their stories from more minor characters' perspective.  

To add to the confusion, this is a story with a LOT of moving parts.  The prologue hints at and introduces a conflict between the Sadiri, the telepathic humans from the last book, as the prime settlement on New Sadira has begun to demand that all Sadiri women come to New Sadira as breeding stock to preserve their race, in conflict with the Sadiri-on-Cygnus who have integrated into the community as seen in the last book, resulting in one character from the last book going missing.  Then we have a conflict between the other major powers - Ntshune and Zhinu - now that the Sadiri who were keeping the galactic peace and providing inter-galactic travel are gone, resulting in a more difficult galaxy to travel...and a more dangerous one.  And then we have the inter-personal conflicts between people of various clans, interference with the humans on Terra, and a whole lot more.  

This large mass of conflicts, some related directly and many not, when combined with the constant shifting of perspectives, creates a story that honestly can only be called extremely confusing.  It's hard to really get a measure of what each of the characters want, who they are, and more because we keep losing sight of them in everything else, and everything else is often so much bigger than they are.*  The story doesn't even get to Rafi's perspective till a few chapters in, and trusts the reader to understand changes as he and the others - really Ntenman who is just as much the protagonist as Rafi - grow, but it's so abrupt and mixed in with everything else that it just feels like a mess.  

*Honestly, the overall conflict of the story could probably have been resolved EVEN IF THE MAIN CHARACTERS HAD NEVER SHOWN UP, which is again part of the issue.

Which is not to say that there isn't really interesting stuff here at heart.  While the book seemingly ditches the contrast between the major telepathic types of humanity (Sadiri- telepathic, Ntshune - empathic, Zhinuvian - illusion/glamour), it introduces to a culture built literally upon social connections to other people at all levels of society.  What name you take, what people serve as your "Keys," the person who is your "Nexus", all of these relationships matter more than your own financial ability, with literal social credit being more important than anything else.  Lord's prose again makes following this a bit confusing, which is annoying, but overall she uses this system to throw Rafi and Ntenman right in in different ways, as the people they get involved with begin to attempt to use such connections, in combination with powerful telepathy to create a new system of intergalactic travel to break the conflict that is brewing everywhere before it starts. 

The Galaxy Game is a short novel, easily finishable within 2 hours, although readers may take it more slowly to try to decipher it.  And yet that short length is I think the major problem, as we don't stay anywhere long enough - or more importantly with anyone - to really build the characters and themes in a way that makes the message and themes clear.  There's certainly interesting stuff here, but I finished the prologue desperate to know what happened to a character from the first book, only to never have that answered in the epilogue that takes place in the time period, and that dissatisfaction is emblematic of my feeling of this whole book.  A miss for me.   
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