Maurice Broaddus

the alternate history here looks great in the glimpses we get - a maybe contemporary america in a different timeline altogether where Jamaica is a power, the founding fathers are often mentioned (right up to Clinton) but it looks like the British Empire is still in place, though ununited states still fight for dominence at their borders, and the vast american west is powerful indian country. but this trip of a man and a child across some of the roughest country in search of a new home, pursued by stories, old westerns, Pilkertons, and steammen, doesn't seem like it cracks even the surface it skates over - it's the vivid and intriguing altHistory background i want to see more of, not the principals here, and the little teases of what the setup might offer that sprinkle the novella (in itself a stock journey, followed by a confrontation of steampunk vs solarpunk in the trenches) is not really equipped to get me there, which renders the novella in itself a kind of flat surface that's obscuring the real strengths of this world. so call me when the novel's done.… (mere)

Going into this novel I really had no expectations, though that might be a commentary on how wary I am of late when it comes to stories that you can describe as being space opera. Be that as it may, I have a number of issues. The big one is that the dialogue seems so stilted to me for much of the book, as every conversation turns into a lecture on ideology. I was well aware that this was an exercise in Afro-Futurism, and I was cool with that, but people just don't talk that way on a regular basis.

Two, so much of what is happening in the novel seems divorced from internal context. Events just happen willy-nilly and they don't seem to matter all that much. This is particularly the case when the antagonists of the community Broaddus has sketched make their play, and they feel really cardboard.

So, if I had stuck to the "50-page" rule I probably would have set this book aside, but I did skim through to a point where things started to improve, particularly when one is following the soldier Fela Buhari; but that's about 100 pages in when I started to sense some narrative coherence begin to emerge. I finished the book liking what I was reading just enough that I'm willing to give the follow-on works a try. Though if this work doesn't turn out to be a trilogy that will be problematic; I can't see only two books (totaling about 700 pages) being sufficient to develop all the concepts that Broaddus is throwing at the reader.… (mere)