Infidel by Kameron Hurley is the second book in her Bel Dame Apocrypha, following on from God’s War (see Rob Bedford’s review for SFFWorld here). This book was first published in the United States by Nightshade Books in 2011. However, the trilogy has taken some time to find its way to the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, with Del Rey UK publishing this book only last year (the whole trilogy is now available, with particularly awful cover art). With God’s War Kameron Hurley garnered attention as a bold new voice in science fiction and fantasy, and I was very pleased to find that Infidel is even better than its predecessor, harnessing the same raw and furious imaginative energy, and channeling it into something tighter and better crafted.
In God’s War Hurley introduced the planet of Umayma, a place that would not be on anybody’s top ten travel destinations. Under the scorching heat of dual suns, two powerful nations of Nasheen and Chenja fight a generations-long war. Organic technology is fueled by the variety of bugs and insects that infest the planet, and contagions and diseases ravage the blighted landscape. Mutant magicians have the ability to control insects through pheromone-based manipulations and shifters have the power to change their physical forms into dogs or birds or other things. Nyxnissa so Dasheem is once again the star of Infidel. Nyx is a former bel dame, an elite organization of female assassins, used by the government of Nasheen to enforce law and order within the country, while all men of fighting age are off at the front being used as cannon fodder. But, as readers witnessed in God’s War, Nyx was has been cast out of the bel dames for using prohibited methods to bring in her blood notes, and after a stint in prison, she has become a mercenary for hire.
Infidel picks up six years after the end of God’s War, and I imagine if anybody attempted to read this without reading the first book they would be at risk of head ‘splosion. As her reward for thwarting the plot of the alien gene-pirates and rogue bel dames at the end of God’s War, Nyx was promised by the Queen of Nasheen to be reinstated as a bel dame. In the opening pages of Infidel, it’s clear that this has not occurred, and Nyx is still working for hire as mercenary, doing security work and running bounty jobs. She has a new team, comprised of a young Ras Tiegan shifter boy named Eshe and a Chenjan ex-soldier named Suha. Her former magician Rhys, another major character in God’s War, has settled down in the wealthy neutral country of Tirhan, along with former team member Khos and his wife Inaya (brother of mercenary and comm’s specialist Taite who was killed in God’s War).
The book opens with Nyx and her new team acting as bodyguards for a Ras Tiegan diplomat’s daughter, named Mercia, in Nasheen’s capital city of Mushtallah. Nyx fights off a mysterious attack by a group of bel dames, beheading one before she collapses in an alley, stricken by some strange ailment. When she awakens, she is given a fit bill of health by her local magician – leaving the reason for her collapse in the alley unknown – and finds time in her busy schedule to deliver the head of the bel dame she decapitated to the organization’s headquarters, a fallen spaceship called Bloodmount, in the city. Here she learns that Fatima, the friendly neighborhood bel dame who hunted, captured, and tortured Nyx in the first book as risen to a position of power within the sorority. After this awkward reunion a large-scale terrorist event in Mushtallah leads to another meeting with Queen Zaynab and her magician Kasbah. It seems the Queen wants to hire Nyx to hunt down the remnants of the rogue bel dames that featured in God’s War, who might be responsible for the attack on Mushtallah.
One of the standout features of God’s War was the originality and detail of the world building, and Hurley capitalizes on that further in Infidel. The nations of Umayma have reference points in the Islamic world, but it’s as if these recognizable features have passed through one of the organic filters that feature in the novels, and have come out the other side burnt and twisted into something wholly original and fully formed. Infidel expands the setting of its predecessor outside of Nasheen and Chenja to include new countries such as the aforementioned Tirhan, and Hurley evokes multiple cultures and places in way that fully immerses the reader in her world. The beauty is she does this without sacrificing the pace of the plot or characterization. While even the secondary characters in Infidel read as fully formed individuals, Nyx once again stands out. She is a warrior woman presented without idealism or wish fulfillment. She’s big, unattractive, fond of sex with both women and men and aggressively pursues it, tough and resilient, good with a sword and explosives, terrible with a gun, alcoholic, and will sacrifice others for her own self-preservation. She’s really not a very nice person, but Hurley makes her completely compelling and believable, while at the same time critiquing the status quo in relation to female science fiction protagonists.
It is very satisfying to read Infidel and see Hurley’s marked improvement as a novelist. The plot of Infidel is better structured and tighter than its predecessor, which had a notoriously bumpy beginning. Having said this, there are points in Infidel where the plot can still seem somewhat convoluted. What’s more, after praising Hurley’s characterization more generally, I often found character motivations in the book to be obscure, which exacerbated my occasional confusion with the plot. I was also bothered by decisions Hurley makes in relation to certain plot points. Like the other books in the trilogy, Infidel is a relentlessly grim and brutal book, and other readers may find this somewhat oppressive reading. I commend Hurley for the responsible, yet unflinching, nature of the depiction of violence and war in this trilogy. Be warned, there are some truly confronting scenes in this book, but that didn’t bother me particularly. What did bother me, without wanting to give away major spoilers, was that I felt some of her plot choices undermined the consequences of violence presented as part of the story, with characters making recoveries with the aid of weird biotechnology, in a way that whiffed of deus ex machina to me. This jarred with the other irrevocable consequences of violence in the book and resulted in some of the tension and impact leaking out of the narrative.
Having also read the third book in the trilogy, Rapture, which was released this year in the UK and Commonwealth, I can say that Infidel is the high point of a very good trilogy from one of the bright new stars of the field. Hurley continues to write books that challenge expectations about genre boundaries, world building, and gender status quos, while delivering compelling characters, vivid settings, and compulsive plots. If you haven’t caught up on the trilogy yet, I highly recommend you do. If you don’t, you’re missing out on one of the most vital and interesting writers currently working in the field, and if there’s still some raw edges to the work, well, that’s part of the excitement.
Infidel by Kameron Hurley (Bel Dame Apocrypha #2)
Published by Del Rey UK, October 2014
388 Pages
ISBN: 0091952808
Review by Luke Brown, August 2015
