This article was amended on 16 August 2020. Despite some scientific implausibilities, the novel moves at a cracking pace and, with neat plot twists and cliffhangers, is page-turning fun.Įric Brown’s latest novel is The Martian Menace (Titan). With its well drawn cast of LGBTQ characters, Seven Devils is a curious mixture of the old-fashioned – novels of rebellion against an evil empire are ten-a-penny – and the up-to-the-minute: think Star Wars recast for the modern age. Heroine Eris was once heir to the throne, but turned against the brutal regime and now, with a team of four other women, works to bring the empire, led by her villainous brother Prince Damocles, to its knees. Thec crushes dissent, is perennially at war, and forever expanding. It’s the far future, and an evil empire has the galaxy in its grip. Johnson excels at contrasting lives of privilege and poverty, and at drip-feeding information that gradually reveals Cara’s complex character.īilled as a feminist space opera, Seven Devils (Gollancz, £18.99) is the first collaboration between Elizabeth May and Laura Lam. Having lived a hand-to-mouth existence fighting poverty and abuse, Cara relishes the freedom of interworld travel, but what she discovers on Earth 175 threatens to uncover not only her own terrible secret but that of the enigmatic Institute. Enter strong-willed but vulnerable Cara, a young black woman plucked from the hostile wastelands to work for the Institute: her doppelgangers are dead on all but eight parallel Earths, allowing her almost unlimited movement.
Only “traversers”, individuals whose doppelgangers are dead on another Earth, can make a crossing to collect scientific data for the benefit of the Institute. In Micaiah Johnson’s entertaining first novel, The Space Between Worlds (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), the Eldridge Institute has not only discovered the multiverse, with 380-plus planet Earths alongside Earth Zero, but the means to travel between worlds.
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