The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord is the sequel to the Barbadian writer’s 2013 science fiction novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds. This is Lord’s third novel overall, in what has been, thus far, a relatively short career, yet one that has already seen much praise directed towards the writer, including a Crawford Award and a Mythopoeic Award for her first novel, Redemption in Indigo. The Galaxy Game, presents a slight hiccup in her trajectory, as it expands the focus of its predecessor, but fails to retain the intimacy and emotional resonance that made that novel such a success.
The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game are set in a universe in which various incarnations of humanity have been seeded on four different worlds, possibly by mysterious omniscient beings known as the Caretakers. Humanity has migrated beyond these first four “crafted worlds”, to colonise other neighbouring planets. On the crafted world of Sadira, humanity evolved to become masters of telepathy, but also the keepers of law and order across the galaxy. This novel follows directly on from The Best of All Possible Worlds. At the beginning that novel readers learn from the outset that the planet of Sadira has been made inhabitable for centuries following an attack and attempted genocide by the colony world called Ain.
Be warned, anybody interested in reading this new novel is advised to read its predecessor first and spoilers for The Best of All Possible Worlds follow in this paragraph. In that earlier book, the surviving Sadiri quickly re-establish their seat of government on a colony planet renamed New Sadira. However, the gross majority of surviving Sadiri are male, so the New Sadira government establish a cultural consulate on the colony world of Cygnus Beta, in order to encourage the formation of families with females of Sadiri heritage, known as taSadiri, in the hopes of preserving Sadiri culture. In The Best of All Possible Worlds, the Sadiri consul, a man named Dllenahkh, successfully established contact with a number of taSadiri colonies on Cygnus Beta, with the assistance of a team from the planet’s Science Council, including a woman named Grace Delarua. At the end of the first book Dllenahkh and Delarua have also discovered their mutual love and respect for each other, resulting in their decision to marry.
The Galaxy Game follows three young characters. The first, a boy encountered in the earlier novel, is Delarua’s psionically gifted nephew, Rafi Abowen Delarua. Rafi has been sent, against his will, to an academy named Lyceum, to learn to control his powerful telepathy. The second is Ntenman, the son of a wealthy trader on Cygnus Beta, who is the unpopular Rafi’s only friend at Lyceum. Both Rafi and Ntenman share an interest in a sport known as Wallrunning, which is played by teams on a vertical wall with various ledges and manipulated gravity fields. Ntenman, the older of the two, was once a Wallrunner of some talent, whereas as Rafi is an aspiring player, but with no natural physical aptitude. The third major character is named Serendipity, a member of one of the lost taSadiri colonies discovered by the Sadiri Consul and Cygnus Science Council in the first book. Serendipity, who has come to Lyceum as a guest, has a strong fascination with Rafi, whereas Ntenman displays an unrequited affection towards her.
In the foreground, the book is a coming of age tale in many ways, following these three characters as they begin to make their way in the galaxy. Juxtaposed against this coming of age story, there is a background story of galactic conflict. The New Sadiri continue to try to secure the continuation of their culture by insisting that female Sadiri on Cygnus Beta come to New Sadira, forcing them to leave whatever families they have formed on the colony world. Likewise, a struggle for dominance over the modes of interplanetary travel is brewing between the Sadiri and cartels on another planet called Zhinu. Both Dllenahkh and Delarua return as secondary characters as players in these larger scale events.
The Galaxy Game retains many of the strengths that made The Best of All Possible Worlds an excellent novel. Lord writes social science fiction reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin and SF writers of that tradition. Her plots are refreshingly free from conflicts that rely on violence for resolution. Her interest lies in how people from different cultural perspectives interact and relate to each other, and she is able to deftly evoke a number of textured and layered societies in her books. In this respect The Galaxy Game is more ambitious in scope than The Best of All Possible Worlds, which was somewhat narrowly focused on events and peoples on Cygnus Beta, whereas here Lord’s lens expands to describe societies and politics on multiple planets, without any loss detail or thoughtfulness. It is apt that the role that Rafi fills on his Wallrunning team is that of a “nexus”, a player that coordinates and inspires other players. Apt because the game of Wallrunning itself serves as a kind of nexus of influence within the societies portrayed in The Galaxy Game. Lord skilfully portrays the important way that shared activities or interests between diverse societies, in this case a mutual interest in a particular sport, can be used to create or manipulate centres political power.
Unfortunately, with this novel’s wider focus the book also loses something that made The Best of All Possible Worlds a standout novel. That earlier book was an intimate and personal story told almost entirely from the first person point of view of Delarua (with occasional interludes from Dllenahkh’s perspective). The Galaxy Game alternates pretty evenly between Ntenman’s narration told in the first person, and Rafi’s third person point of view. Readers also occasionally dip into a third person point of view following Serendipity, though this becomes increasingly infrequent as the story unfolds. Told from these multiple perspectives with a much more sweeping and expansive story of political change happening in the background, this book loses the intimacy and emotional resonance that characterised the first book. Furthermore, some of the political manoeuvrings and the interaction between the various factions becomes quite convoluted and muddled in the middle part of the book set on the colony world of Punartam. While Lord is to be commended for trying combine a coming of age story in the foreground with a backstory of galactic strife, the balance does not always seem right, and events happening to Rafi and his friends are drowned out by the noise of what’s happening around them, resulting in a fairly uneven plot.
Nevertheless, Lord remains an exciting and ambitious writer. With the success she has had in her career to date, I can forgive her the slight missteps she makes in this latest book and I will be waiting eagerly to see what she produces next. I hope she continues writing science fiction that juxtaposes the intimate with the grand, with personal stories about human relationships that don’t centre on violence or combat. I would recommend both The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game to anybody who craves mature social science fiction, which takes some traditional flavours and spices them up with tasty lashings of Barbados rum.
The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord
Published by Del Rey, January 2015 (US); Jo Fletcher Books, January 2015 (UK)
336 pages
ISBN: 9780345534071
Reviewed by Luke Brown, April 2015
