The Galaxy Game
Karen Lord
Del Rey, 2015
The bonds that tie us closer than blood have been the subject of many a fictional enterprise, likely ever since skittering drawings in red chalk began appearing on cave walls. What Karen Lord brings to the questions of intimacy and entanglement, in her upcoming third novel, The Galaxy Game (Del Rey, 2015) are the workings of a mysterious, ruthless universe–and the compulsions, human and alien, that shape it.
Fourteen-year-old Rafi Delarua, estranged from his mother and sister, makes for one of the Lyceum's most reluctant, and most gifted, pupils. Charged with the task of training and monitoring charges blessed (or burdensomely saddled) with telepathic ability, the Lyceum cannot contain Rafi's curiosity for the worlds beyond. Nor is the Lyceum a match for his psionically talented friends, Serendipity and Ntenman, both of them hungry for more from life, and from the reservoirs of their own untapped potential–but for wildly distinct reasons. Leaving the psychic academy opens the triad up to a literal galaxy's worth of adversities. Separately, and occasionally hand-in-hand, they head for distant stars, on an infinitely chartable series of planes where the threat of warfare is barely masked beneath the greater game of political manipulation.
In The Best of All Possible Worlds, the society-establishing expeditions of Cygnian Grace Delarua (Rafi's aunt) and her Sadiri teammate Dllenahkh opened the diasporically-centred, rich outpost world of Cygnus Beta to the reader. As a sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds, The Galaxy Game holds each of the principal civilizations–Sadira, Ntshune, Zhinu, Terra–in the palm of its worldbuilding hand, and expands the borders of each.
Lord extends the territories and empires she founded in Grace and Dllenahkh's story, showing us more of the complex machinery that runs her novels' mainframes. We travel, with Rafi, Serendipity, Ntenman (and a whole host of others, including fondly familiar figures from The Best of All Possible Worlds), and the worlds within The Galaxy Game reveal themselves, in the heights and chasms of their petty, powerful superstructures, their economies of dominance and coercion, their stratagems during armistice, political drought, and the probability of peaceful rule.
Unsurprisingly, then, the novel hinges and expends much of its dramatic and psychological action in matters of game theory. Wallrunning, a sport of blood, brotherhood and betting, is at once the most important game being played across the societal span of the humanoid register, and the least innocent of sports imaginable. The game is an extended, exquisitely articulated extended metaphor for both thwarting and enabling diplomacies–as are most games, as anyone who's given more than a cursory examination to cricket as a post-colonial instrument will wager.
Nor do the games played in and across the worlds of Cygnus Beta, Punartam and Ntshune focus merely on the sweaty, plasma-patinated forms of figures grappling, contorting and twisting their bodies on an antigravity field. Rafi seeks to become one sort of Wallrunner, and becomes instead another, one whose responsibilities reflect and reveal more of his fraught nature–and how much he must quell his rage and indecision, for clarity, for the sake of his own team.
Rafi as a vehicular-propelling narrator is often indistinct, separated from the truth about himself in ways that render him in fragmentation. He becomes better perceived through the eyes of others, and the core inhabitants of the novel each tell Rafi's story (sometimes, directly to him) as they untangle the interweaving skeins of their own. Ntenman's buoyant first-person narration does this with greatest efficacy, painting its speaker as a younger, slightly more callow Han Solo type, one whose keenness to further the cause of his own initiatives is often underpinned, convincingly, by the smudged slate of his anxieties.
The Galaxy Game doesn't do trope-insistent speculative fiction readers any favours. It confounds easiness, and ease, in favour of systemic precision that speaks to multiple intelligences, with a communal intensity of purpose. Lord's new novel issues kindly, stern edicts, not from on high, but from the cluttered aisles of the galactic marketplace in which we all war, love, barter and steal from each other, in and out of good, sometimes ungovernable faith.
The Galaxy Game will be published by Del Rey (Random House) on January 6.