An Unbreakable World by Ren HutchingsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I dropped this author's first book, Under Fortunate Stars , two whole tiers in my annual recommendation list because of its truly massive overuse of fortunate coincidence to drive the entire plot. But everything else about it was decent to excellent, and (unlike one of the characters in this book) I believe in second chances, so I picked this one up when I saw it on Netgalley.
I'm mostly glad I did.
True, the main characters still don't have a whole lot of agency; events act on them more than vice versa, and their decisions often don't end up mattering, or are "decisions" to go along with the situation because there doesn't seem to be much other option. But I did come to care about their wellbeing, and almost everything else - the copy editing, the characterization, the plot, the twists - is at a high standard.
The worldbuilding, though, is mostly off-the-shelf space opera, including a threat from implacable alien Others who can't be communicated with and are almost impossible to fight (and yet haven't destroyed humanity, and clearly are possible to fight or the alien ship hulls that form an important plot point wouldn't be available). I don't have much time for this trope, not only because it's a piece of xenophobia originating in the Cold War, but because I've read Murray Leinster's story "The Aliens" from 1959 - more than 65 years ago - which points out how much more likely it is that advanced civilizations would want to trade with us rather than make war. (You can read it on Project Gutenberg, if you're curious.) But anyway, here the trope is, mostly providing a background existential threat to provoke reflection, but also a couple of important plot points.
The most original part in the worldbuilding is that there's an isolationist planet that claims, and teaches its people to believe, that it was the original home of humankind, despite the presence of clear marks of "seedships" having colonized it ("they're natural formations," according to the propagandists). One of the several narrative threads follows the niece of the leader of this planet, a cynical politician with a direct approach to silencing dissent and a lot of hypocrisy to hide. We follow the niece as she grows up, interleaved with the story of the tribulations of a young woman with no memory of who she is, thanks to having been cryo-revived, who is caught up in a proposed heist. That story is told both from her perspective and the perspective of another participant in the heist who semi-befriends her. There's also a fourth viewpoint, that of an anonymous (until the end) "storyteller" participating in what turns out to be an oral history project, who fills in bits of backstory that are important to the main plot and that the other viewpoint characters don't have access to.
Like the author's previous book, it's well enough written and has enough depth that it would normally get to the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. However, also like that book, I'm going to demote it, though not by as much. As well as the implacable-aliens trope, which I personally think needs more thought put into it, and the shortage of protagonism among the main characters, there are also spoilerific reasons: (view spoiler)
The quality of the writing is far above average, but the author makes some decisions that turn this into a book that doesn't map well onto my personal preferences, so it only gets to Silver tier on my annual recommendation list. Other people, I'm sure, will like it more than I did, and even I liked it OK.
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