After thoroughly enjoying Redemption in Indigo, I picked up Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds with high hopes. Unfortunately, my hopes were not met.
The Sadiri are a proud, reserved race — positively Vulcan. Their home planet is destroyed suddenly and thoroughly. The survivors reach out to the indigenous humanoids of Cygnus Beta, many of whom have Sadiri ancestry and therefore would make suitable mates. Our heroine, biotechnician Grace Delarua, is assigned to work with Dllenahkh, a Sadiri councilor, on a mission to find appropriate (that is, Sadiri-descended) mates with whom the remaining Sadiri men can fall in love, have some Sadiri babies, and re-establish their awesome lineage. This is kind of a travelogue of an epic road trip during which they learn all about Cygnus Beta and (SPOILER but not really because, come on, it’s inevitable) fall in love. Most of it is narrated by Grace, with the occasional third person narration that gives and overview/update of the general situation. The story reminded me of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Butler’s Xenogenesis triology, both of which dealt with similar topics in alien-but-kinda-Earth settings.
The chapters that were 3rd person narrated were great. But Grace’s first person narration was frankly, and I’m sorry to say, annoying. Her tone is frequently cheesy, sarcastic, rom-com-y, which is fine once in a while–but it gets old. It grated especially given that the story deals with weighty topics like cultural integration and social engineering. There’s of course plenty of room for romance and humor in serious situations, but something about the telling just fell flat for me. Grace’s here-and-now storytelling seemed to limit the narration on the whole, partly because this book wants to be bigger than first-person, and partly because–in my opinion–Lord is just better at writing the omniscient narrator. (For instance, there were several characters I just couldn’t keep straight, not because they hadn’t been introduced, but because Grace-as-narrator didn’t establish who they were and why we care about them. Lord-as-narrator is much better at that.)
This leads to my other, bigger problem: lots of promise, disappointing follow-through. There are all kinds of great ideas here, big ideas: Domestic abuse via telepathy! Characters that choose their own gender! A race of Future Humanoids that have evolved differently on different planets! I mean, the story starts with planet-level genocide, for Pete’s sake. But within a chapter, we’ve all but abandoned the world building and entered Grace’s point of view and none of these big ideas seem to go anywhere–there’s no real exploration of what it means for a character to be genderless, or how one would verify or prosecute telepathic abuse. The problem is that it feels like this book wants to discuss those things and sometimes even thinks it is discussing those things. But it’s not; it’s mostly just talking about Uhura and Spock.
This book also felt hastily edited. For instance, Grace spends two days visiting her family. Literally one page into the description of the weekend, she says, “Then one afternoon, after a large Sunday lunch…” You don’t have to say “one afternoon” when there are only two possible afternoons! I couldn’t tell if things like this were on purpose, intentionally confusing the reader to show Grace’s confusion and/or point of view, or if it was just poor editing. Since I couldn’t tell, I’m going with the latter. And on that note, I was never sure if this was set in a parallel universe, or far in the future, or what. There are lots of casual references to pop culture and other things that are Obvious Present Day Earth Things: Indiana Jones and Dick Van Dyke (!), elephants, mangoes. Are we on Earth, but it has a different name? If not, wouldn’t space mangoes, well, not be called mangoes? And why does Indiana Jones, of all things, have pop culture staying power in future space world? Some of this was fun (haha, space elephants!), but most of it just felt sketched in. Things like this really took me out of the story.
Rating: 2/5. I liked the premise of this book, the ideas were great, and there were sections I enjoyed. Like I said, Lord’s 3rd person narration is top notch: vivid imagery, lovely descriptions. I love her characters’ diversity, her big ideas, and her imagination. But this felt like a letdown, especially compared to Redemption in Indigo.