Review: Map's Edge

Map's Edge by David Hair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Adventurous, exciting, suspenseful, and full of tension. The copy editing (even in the pre-release version I read from Netgalley) is cleaner than average. The characters are appealing and varied, and their various alliances, hostilities, and other interactions drive the plot in interesting ways.

I debated, though, about whether or not to put it on my Best of the Year shelf or not, largely because of the ending, but also a bit because of the worldbuilding. In the end, it squeaked through, but it will be at or near the tail end of the list.

Without giving spoilers, at the end the author feels the need to pull out three fortunate coincidences (including a Convenient Eavesdrop), spaced very closely together, to get the protagonists out of the corner he's backed them into. This isn't typical of the rest of the book at all; they succeed against the odds not by good luck, but by courage, intelligence, good planning, and the judicious application of their skills, which is how protagonists should succeed.

The ending is also a cliffhanger. I'm not as averse to those as some people are, but I don't love them either. Combined with the coincidences, it felt like the author rushed and forced the ending and finished the book too early.

Throughout, I was never sure whether this was planetary fantasy (along the lines of Sherri Tepper's True Game or Ann McCaffrey's Pern, where settlers on a planet gain unusual powers and forget their interstellar origins), or whether it was simply a secondary-world flintlock fantasy where several of the cultures were copied wholesale from Earth. The evil imperialists are Russianesque; one magical language is Latin, and the culture and language of the fallen empire from hundreds of years before appear Japanese. There's a tribe at the end who are essentially Maori (and ride on birds that are like more colourful moas), but they speak an odd blend of almost-Maori and kind-of-Japanese. If these are settler cultures on another planet, that's inadequately explored and not clearly justified; if it's just lazy worldbuilding by way of cultural photocopying, I have a problem with that approach.

So: most of the book is very sound and enjoyable, but it's let down by a couple of aspects, and so only barely makes my recommended list for 2021.

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