James Nicoll Reviews

Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s 2024 This World Is Not Yours is an upcoming science fiction horror novel.

Amara’s powerful family resolved to sabotage Amara’s romance with the socially unsuitable Vinh. Amara and Vinh did what any pair of forbidden lovers might do in their place. They fled to join the New Belaforme colony on a planet a hundred light-years distant. Einstein will protect their relationship from Amara’s interfering relatives.

What will protect the pair from more local challenges is less clear.

One concern involves a curious local feature known as the Gray. The Gray is a pervasive phenomenon, not alive, but in many ways acting as though it were alive. The Gray seems to be an environmental guardian, detecting and eliminating disruptive elements from the planet. All humans need do, however, is avoid any activity that would convince the Gray that humans are environmentally disruptive.

A more immediate concern involves Jacksonhaven, the other colony on the planet. Everyone knows that in the end, only one colony can dominate the planet. Therefore, relations between New Belaforme and Jacksonhaven are less than cordial. At this stage of settlement, conflict should be limited to low-grade mutual harassment, which is why it comes as a complete surprise when Jacksonhaven raids New Belaforme, carrying off as many of New Belaforme’s gestation chambers as they can, and destroying the rest, along with New Belaforme’s fabricators.

In the short run, this is inconvenient. In the long run, it is catastrophic. Colonies that cannot demonstrate a certain level of growth do not receive external assistance. Instead, they are left to languish and dwindle.

Without gestation chambers, women and men will be forced to produce babies the old-fashioned way. To that end, the colony pairs potentially fertile couples. Vinh’s designated male partner is a man named Henry.

This development highlights the crucial flaw in Amara and Vinh’s grand scheme to find true love, which is that their relationship has always been somewhat fragile. Indeed, they broke up and reunited before they fled to New Belaforme. There is no guarantee that they will not break up again, only that if they do, it will be in a community too small for them to avoid each other.

Jacksonhaven comes to the rescue. Never as cautious as New Belaforme where the Gray is concerned, Jacksonhaven does something that convinces the Gray that humans are a dangerous invasive species. Unless humans can change the Gray’s mind in this matter, Amara and Vinh will be united forever… in death.

I too am astounded that Jacksonhaven somehow did something sufficiently disruptive to annoy the Gray, by which I mean I am mostly surprised that that didn’t happen as soon as the first landing craft touched down. A species that aggressively spreads from solar system to solar system seems destined to vex a mechanism whose purpose appears to be carefully curate continental ecologies.

This being a very short work, we don’t learn much about Judgement, the organization that appears to administer interstellar colonies. It is possible to deduce a few things about Judgement. The most important is that Judgement takes a long-term, big-picture approach. It does not care about individual happiness, or even the fate of individual communities. All that matters is the net growth of the human species. Colonies are free to settle where they want to but only the ones that thrive get helping hands.

Why colonies see each other as obligate rivals is less clear. There can only be one is fine for movies about immortal Egyptians inexplicably played by Scottish actors, but in real life, cooperation and trade is not only possible, but a common phenomenon. That said, depiction is not advocacy. Nothing in the novel suggests a Hobbesian war of all upon all is the optimum strategy. One could even argue that the plot is an exploration of certain obvious failure modes.

Readers may think that emigrating to a planet with a mysterious phenomenon like the Gray, one that is prone to painfully disassembling lifeforms designated surplus to needs, sounds like a bad idea. It is a bad idea. So is running away to a small community with a One True Love who might not be the One after all. This is a horror story and horror stories often feature terrible decisions. This work in particular appears to be about the logical consequences of poorly thought-out plans by deeply flawed people who deserve what’s coming.

While Judgement clearly doesn’t give a toss about individuals, the reader has to, or they won’t finish even a short work about them. I can’t say I especially liked either Amara or Vinh but I was curious to see where their decisions took them. You may be as well.

This World Is Not Yours is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).