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Jvstin
, February 10, 2011
(view all comments by Jvstin)
“Bugs, Blood and Brutal Women. All the best things in life.”
So was signed my copy of God’s War, by debut novelist Kameron Hurley. I entered an online contest to win a copy of the novel, now out, and was delighted that the author had taken the time to personalize it in this way. It was a good omen to start the book off.
God’s War is set during a perpetual war on Umayma, a distant planet in an indistinctly far future where two polities, each dominated by a rival descendant sect of Islam (never mentioned directly as the ur-religion). God’s War is the story of Nyx. Once upon a time, she was a Bel Dame, a government agent used to stop deserters, lethally if necessary. She lost that position on a bad job, and now scrapes together a living as a bounty hunter, having cobbled together a team of misfits to help her with her work. Primary and most important amongst these is the other main viewpoint character, Rhys. Rhys is a refugee from Chenja, the nation on the other side of the eternal war with Nyx’s Nasheen.
This hardscrabble existence for Nyx and her team gets a kick in the pants when the Queen of Nasheen makes an offer Nyx can’t refuse—find a missing person, and a rare one at that: a visitor from another planet who has slipped the custody of her Nasheen hosts. A person who might have the high technology that Nasheen or Chenja could use to end the perpetual conflict for good. And so starts a multi-sided scramble to find the missing offworlder…
The strong points of God’s War are three: world building, the characters and descriptive, tight prose that invokes and evokes her wonderfully visualized world.
World building: Interesting and real-feeling descendant forms of Islam, a dry and hostile planet, the strange and wondrous bugpunk technology and biotechnology. The lack of exposition may turn off some. There is plenty of world building, but a relative lack of anything resembling infodumping, and a lot of things are taken as is, with the bug-dominated “Bugpunk” technology being first and foremost. A lot of it is “handwavium” of the first order, and Hurley does not give us any real chance to get up to speed on it. It’s been a while since a novel truly has chucked me in the deep end. However, I found the experience invigorating and satisfying once I started to puzzle things out. Hurley has a strong and vivid imagination.
Characters :
Well drawn and interestingly contrasted characters ranging from Nyxnissa, Bel Dame turned bounty hunter, to Rhys the foreign magician, the rest of her crew, and her opposition. Nyx doesn’t seem to know what she wants in life beyond her next piece of bread, but rather than vacillating or doing nothing, she is an active character, brawling, brutal, and bloody as she carves her way through the world. The other characters, too, have lesser well defined but still concrete needs and agendas, some of which are only revealed in flashback after we have seen them in action for a while. This slight non linearity forces the reader to pay attention.
Prose: Hurley writes to a well constructed third person viewpoint that mainly focuses on Nyx and her doings. The times where we break away from her or Rhys feel a little off to me, though, an almost unwelcome variation on the theme. Despite this, the alien natures of Umayama and the humans that inhabit it and their cultures are exceedingly well done. You can feel the heat, taste the sweat of the fighters in the gyms, smell the blood of vicious battle.
The style of the book, combined with the technology, gave me a Vandermeer New Weirdesque feel to God’s War, with the proviso that this is science fiction, even if Rhys is called a magician and just how things like his talent and those of the shapeshifters are not really explained.
This book is not for the squeamish. Right in the first chapter, Nyx talks about a hysterectomy, and the book does not soften from there. The protagonist gets tortured. People die. Fights and conflicts are messy, inconclusive, and exceedingly violent. Its all very vividly described but fortunately not to the level of “torture porn”
Blood, Bugs and Brutal Women. It says it all.
I, for one, am looking forward to the next Nyx novel, and what else Hurley is capable of beyond her vision of life on Umayama.
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