Friendly ghosts and buried Gods in this month’s science fiction: Radiant Star by Ann
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie (Orbit £22, 368pp)
Leckie is a unique voice in contemporary sci-fi. Her great interest, extraordinarily, is etiquette, as interstellar civilisations with multiple faiths, shapes, genders and pronouns negotiate the tricky matter of how to treat each other.
Does that sound dry? It’s anything but. Leckie is like a wry angel guiding us lesser beings through a complex maze; in this case events affecting Ooioiaans, a people beset with interfaith issues and about to be taken over by the fair but ruthless Imperial Radch.
Sainthood, onions, inheritances, unlikely friendships and beastly high-handed behaviour: they all come together to make for an utterly compelling and terribly moving story, told with calm precision and jewel-like clarity.
Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler (Riverrun £16.99, 288pp)
It’s hard to do justice to this beautiful and intimate novel about love, friendship, death and ghosts.
The setting is New York in the early 1980s. Aids is scything through the gay community and death is almost becoming commonplace – but not for Renata, never for Renata, because she sees ghosts.
There’s nothing gothic or sixth sense about this: they’re in her apartment, at clubs, on the street and some of them are her friends.
How she deals with the upset is explored with realism and delicacy, while a brutal Ghostbusters-plot strand is brilliantly integrated into the authentic grit and hustle of New York then. A stunning debut.
Heaven’s Graveyard by Grace Curtis (Hodderscape £22, 368pp)
Buried secrets, buried gods, buried truths . . . Heaven’s graveyard is an emotional, slow-burn, questy adventure of love, loss and, finally, acceptance.
Coda (Cod for short) Canalluny is an archaeologist, working as an archivist for the civic museum.
Her vocation, however, is to prove the existence of an ancient myth and the existence of her hero, the rebellious Aleya Ana-Unai.
Complicating matters are university politics, the threat of war, Cod’s neurodivergence and Sparrow, her wilful, spoiled and super-rich ex-girlfriend.
A telegram from her old mentor kickstarts the plot, as a new potential dig leads to a murder, a race for relics, untold divine power and a time of reckoning for Cod.