Thursday, August 26, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

 


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 September 7, 2021 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 All-Consuming World is horror author Cassandra Khaw's full length novel debut.  Khaw is known for their horror novellas, as well as their other short fiction and isn't exactly an unknown author, and I have run into their work a few times before, although never in a way that has made a big impact on me.  Still many other writers I enjoy seemed to really like Khaw's work, so I was really excited to get a shot at their first full-length novel - even more so given that it wasn't explicitly horror, a genre that is kind of hit or miss for me.  

And for the most part I found The All-Consuming World to be an incredibly well done sci-fi novel, featuring a queer cast of criminals brought back together by an abusive ringleader in a galaxy where humans are seemingly the lesser force compared to AI minds.  And the plot is very well done as to its central protagonist, the foul mouthed armed muscle Maya, who finds herself unable to say no to the gang's abusive leader...despite all the bad she has done and the relationships Maya has lost as a result.  Still while the characters and the relationships are done excellently, some of the prose and word choice didn't quite work for me, and the lack of explanations as to how this galaxy works may lose some readers.  But by the last third of the book, I was all in, devouring it all to see how it would turn out.

Trigger Warning: Abusive Relationships - This book is essentially centered around an abusive relationship between the main character (and many of the side characters) and the team's leader, who manipulates the others to her own ends.  If reading such a relationship is a problem for you, this book will not be for you.    
-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Maya used to be part of the Dirty Dozen, a gang of criminal women, using their bodies and lives and more bodies - thanks to the miracles of cloning - to rile things up in a galaxy dominated no longer by humans, but by Minds fighting for control and data.  Maya loved her comrades....and that love was reciprocated, but Maya loved Rita, their leader most of all.  And when Rita's manipulations finally ended in disaster, with Johanna, one of their number, brutally sacrificed for good and another Elise, also dead, the group broke apart, and for the past 40 years it has just been Maya and Rita all alone.  

But when Elise turns out to have somehow uploaded her mind into the ether, becoming a dangerous parasite to the detriment of the Minds, Rita tasks Maya with helping her get the group back together again....to get back Elise, or maybe instead to hand what's left of her over to perhaps the most treacherous Mind there is in exchange for access to the mysterious and legendary world of Dimmuborgir.  

But the remaining members of the Dirty Dozen have gone out and formed their own new lives....and each has clear reasons not to trust Rita's manipulations for all the harm it caused them before.  And as Maya goes out to recruit them all, she'll come to wonder what she lost with the team going away, and if helping Rita with this mission is really worth it all....assuming the Minds don't get her killed for good this time first.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gonna flip my review script a bit here and start with the bad here: I don't particularly love Khaw's prose and word choice.  It's not just that this is a story little interested in explaining how things work (humans are an inferior class of being, AI minds are the dominant form even if they have different views on how to handle the galaxy, and humans can transfer their minds into clone bodies to stave off death, both due to long-life and physical damage, for example).  It's how Khaw uses often longer words that just seem unnatural compared to shorter synonyms, like how one of their first lines is "Onwards she goes, Maya practically somnambulating down the narrow lanes."  It didn't quite fully work for me, which helped prevent this from totally working, despite it all.  

And so much of this works, despite that, and like I mentioned above the jump, I found myself tearing through the last third of this book on the train in the morning, when I usually find myself distracted from reading in tiredness instead.  So much of that is because of the book's main protagonist, Maya, a woman who considers herself the hired muscle of her gang, the Dirty Dozen, even as the gang has disbanded.  Maya had relationships with the other members, she had desires, and some of those desires were reciprocated in kind.  Yet she subsumes her own self under her role as the "muscle", as if she doesn't matter, and uses her cyborg body's ability to tamper with her own internal body chemistry to reduce the amount she feels of these emotions at times.  And even worse, she puts Rita above everything else, even knowing full well how much wrong Rita is doing, and how manipulative and cruel and monstrous she is.  

And Rita is tremendously monstrous, as monstrous as any of the Minds could ever be.  She tells, often through Maya, the various members of the dirty dozen different stories as to how she found out Elise was still somewhat "alive", and pushes all their buttons, without caring that they will eventually find out, because then Rita will have gotten what she wants.  She's fully willing to use Maya as a living bomb to smoke out one such member, Ayane, and her control is such that at least two of the dirty dozen subsumed their own identities as non-binary or trans individuals under Rita's preferred idea of badass bitches.  And as Maya recruits each of them once more for another abusive scheme, she realizes how away from Rita a few were able to have satisfying successful and happy lives, lives Maya couldn't have imagined or even understood (and a few instead chose death and couldn't make it - recovering from the abuse isn't quite that easy).  

This character work of Maya over the course of the plot, as she and her fellow non-Rita members of the dirty dozen get back together, get put into a rock and a hard place as Rita's plans put them into the targets of not just the parasitic version of Elise, but also the dangerous AI minds, is absolutely tremendous, and it leads to a triumphant ending that makes it all mostly work.  Do not expect, as you might from the name of the group the "Dirty Dozen" this to wind up being a full on heist novel, the story is more interested in using its interesting and out there setting to showcase the themes of abuse and the difficulty of getting out from under it (the Minds themselves show this, with one of their central concepts being that the word is "Obey").  

Recommended, even if I had some issues with the prose.  Will definitely be trying to pick up more of Khaw, because I can live with the prose if this is the result - wildly imaginative, with incredible characters handling a deadly serious theme.  

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)