James Nicoll Reviews

The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson is a stand-alone, far-future science fiction novel.

Freida would like nothing more than to join the ranks of the librarians once she is an adult. Unfortunately for Freida, what she wants is unlikely to be what she gets. Her disappointment may be short; she isn’t likely to live long.

The infant Freida was found in a Library tunnel by Nadi, who later adopted her. Freida is of divine origin, spun out of genetic info by the eighth god, Iemaja. But Nadi chooses to raise the girl as she would have any other infant.

Nadi’s rival Quinn regards Freida in an entirely different light. Freida was made, therefore she is a thing, to be tolerated only if she is useful to the Library. Quinn is sure that she won’t be useful, therefore should be contained or killed. That this would hurt Nadi, her rival, is entirely coincidental.

Both Nadi and Quinn are senior functionaries in the Library, Nadi being ever so slightly more senior and powerful than Quinn. The Library exists to maintain peace; few want to return to the bad old days of mass warfare. And yet … the struggle between Nadi and Quinn’s factions could affect all of the settled worlds. Freida has become a playing piece in the struggle.

As Freida and her friends discover, what constitutes peace depends on your perspective. The great powers no longer war on each other; targeting religious and ethnic minorities for genocide seems an obvious peace violation. However, the powerful are adept at gaming the system, at getting legal results that they find convenient. Bad news for the dissident Miuri, whom the far more powerful Mahām would prefer dead. Legal challenges on behalf of Miuri face courts that are inclined to accept contrived arguments favouring the powerful. Things look dire … were it not for the fact that the god Iemaja had built Freida as a weapon, a weapon against Mahām’s god Nameren. She has unexpected powers, but she is also a mortal woman. Her survival, let alone success, seems unlikely.

~oOo~

This book features gods but it also features interstellar travel. Most persuasively, the spine of the book says ​“science fiction,” therefore it is SF¹.

A complaint about something outside the author’s control. Scholastic for some reason used a small font, double-spaced. The text in the hardcover was therefore hard to read. People with vision problems may want to seek out the ebook version and not the hardcover.

A second complaint about something else outside the author’s control: the Kirkus review. I mean, I gather from the Kirkus reviews I’ve read they generally don’t like anything but this particular review read as if it had been hastily written; it is a half-assed effort whose final line reads like (IMHO) a vaguely hostile afterthought.

The novel concerns itself with two levels of conflict. Firstly, there is the philosophical and legal world, in which ideals like peace, justice, and history are tolerated by the great and powerful provided they get to define them and provided they are not themselves inconvenienced or prevented from doing anything they might care to do. The powerful would argue the world progresses towards peace and justice, because they are the ones who get to determine what words mean, and which events will be remembered or discarded as surplus to needs.

Secondly, there is the personal level, Freida’s relationship with her mother and her various lovers. In this setting, in this time, the personal is inextricably entangled with the political. If Freida is to survive, she and her friends must fight the courts with philosophical and legal arguments. Buffy’s Scooby Gang × Harvard Law School. With relationship drama.

Like the late John M. Ford, author Johnson isn’t interested in offering much helpful inclueing. This makes sense in that some of the plot involves working out exactly what the history of the world actually was (whatever the authorities have said about it). Readers should expect to have to do some of the heavy lifting themselves. They will find the effort required worthwhile.

The Library of Broken Worlds is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

1: Although the library from which I borrowed this book classified it as ​“teen fic,” like Freida herself, a book can belong to more than one category. This is why the United States can be both a republic and a nation whose inhabitants eat waffles.