Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆
This may be a first, in that the heroine here is non-human – contrary to what you (and, indeed, I!) might expect from the cover. I think I may have covered various crypto-humans before, such as vampires or elves. But this is likely the first entirely alien species. I began to suspect on page 1, when I read that Sah Lee “sank her pin-sharp teeth through the thick fur of the calf’s throat, and tasted the sweet metallic tang of its young blood.” This is clearly not your average twelve-year-old. And so it proves. The story really kicks under way two years later, when Sah Lee leaves her rural village on the planet of Aarn to attend school in the city of Aa Ellet.
She is out of town on a class trip, when demons descend from the sky, causing massive death and destruction. Of course, they’re actually an alien tribe known as “outcasts”, who specialize in this kind of thing. But Sah Lee being a pre-first contact civilization, demons it is. Eventually, the rest of the galaxy, led by the super-advanced group known as “the People”, come to the rescue, but by that point, the planet is uninhabitable and most of the Aarnth dead. Sah Lee is taken aboard a ship, and vows to take revenge on the outcasts by any means necessary, which involves joining one of the galactic armies. But there will be a period of sharp adjustment from the pastoral life she had on Aarn, to being an interstellar soldier. Not drinking out of the toilet will be a start.
It’s not quite clear what Sah Lee is. Mammalian, to be sure – and that’s significant, since one of the features of the universe depicted here is that it is peopled not just by mammals, but reptilians, avians and even insectoid species, generally (but not universally) getting along. Thank heavens for universal translators. Anyway, something cat-like is probably my best guess, though quite how… furry she is, is never established. It doesn’t matter much though: her story is what’s important. And this is at its best in the relatively early stages: seeing an alien invasion from the side of the natives, then following Sah Lee as she has to adjust to a radically new and unimaginably different life. It makes me wonder what first contact will be like for Earth, when it finally happens. Potentially not good.
It’s rather less effective one she settles in, becoming fairly standard space opera. Through a special relationship with the People, Sah Lee has a cutting-edge AI and tech which does make her a bit super-powered. She breezes through every situation, even getting harshly disciplined after breaking military protocol (albeit for good reason). I’m also very unsure of the timeframe here. By the end, she’s basically in charge of her own army, and I’m guessing she is no longer a teenager. Not least because the galaxy as a whole has more or less conquered disease, meaning that violent death is about the only thing preventing near-immortality, with one character being over 172,000 years old. But again, it’s just not clear.
It is, at least, a self-contained story, rather than being volume one of a saga. The book reaches its end at an appropriate and generally satisfying point, which could go on, yet doesn’t have to. I’d have been very interested at the half-way point, when this was offering a different and original perspective on a super-advanced society – looking at it from the bottom up. Now Sah Lee is no longer in that position, she has become considerably less appealing.
Author: Andrew Maclure
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, as an e-book only.