A review I wrote of David Bowles's science fiction novel The Blue-Spangled Blue is currently up at Strange Horizons. This book was originally published a little over ten years ago, but was recently rereleased by Castle Bridge Media in preparation for the publication of the final book in the novel's series (The Swirling Black, which is set to be released next year).
The story of The Blue-Spangled Blue takes the form of a far-future space opera in which humanity has recently invented a faster-than-light drive system that allows previously isolated human colonies to begin reconnecting with one another. Much of the plot of the book focuses on the experiences of a linguist from Earth named Brando D'Angelo, who travels to an unknown world called Jitsu after his family disowns him. In the process, Brando quickly becomes entangled in a political and religious struggle taking place between two factions within Jitsu's society. Below is an excerpt from my review:
Arriving on the distant planet of Jitsu, Brando immediately falls in love with Tenshi Koroma, a famous architect on this world who has similarly been cast out of her own politically elite family, due to her decision to join a supposedly heretical religion. While Jitsu’s state religion follows the Dominatudan Path, teaching that its followers must pursue a transcendent state of existence called Quantum Enlightenment by living lives utterly consumed in meditation and inward self-reflection (ignoring broader social responsibilities in the process), Tenshi’s alternate religion teaches that Quantum Enlightenment must be achieved through selfless acts meant to improve the lives of others. Together, Tenshi and Brando bond over their mutual distrust of Jitsu’s prevailing theocratic institutions, with Brando soon coming to be looped into a complicated political struggle against Tenshi’s uncle, an ultranationalist politician named Santo Koroma who seeks to preserve his culture by keeping Jitsu isolated from the rest of the universe.
In all, while I appreciated the attention to detail in Bowles's world-building, and the enormous care that he clearly devoted toward working out the social and historical dimensions of the religious conflict animating his novel's plot, my overall impression of this story was mixed. I felt that many of the early chapters struggled with pacing, and that a lot of scenes came across as stilted for how they very overtly sought to dramatize the ideological conflicts playing out between the characters in a way that felt too obvious. Things got worse for me when the novel entered its final act, and most of the story's more interesting plot threads and themes were dropped entirely in favor of a very stereotypical revenge narrative that didn't really seem related to the book's original subjects.
That said, like I wrote at the end of the review, this is a novel that was originally written more than ten years ago, and it might be interesting to compare this story with the many works that Bowles has created since.
The complete review of The Blue-Spangled Blue that I wrote for Strange Horizons can be found here.