This is the follow up to Binti, a book which told the tale of a young girl travelling across the galaxy to study, and getting involved in an interplanetary war.
Apparently. I haven't actually read it.
I've read all of the Hugo and Nebula novellas as standalones, and thus far that's been reasonable. It was potentially a bit of a risk with Down Among the Sticks and Bones, but it worked. Unfortunately, this final novella of the two sets of awards is a sequel that is fairly dependent on having read previous parts of the series. This did mean that I spent about the first quarter of the book being rather confused, and a bit overwhelmed by the number of invented terms which came thick and fast.
This novella tells the story of Binti's return to her family, which is rather fraught, due to both her previous sudden disappearance and the changes she has gone through in her battles across the galaxy. Her emotional torment is only compounded by discoveries about her family history and her place in both her own world and the wider universe.
Because of the difficult start, I had to put this down and come back to it, and it took a bit of effort to get far enough into it that I could enjoy the book. It's got some interesting ideas, with the impact of alien life on the world, ancient alien artifacts and human-alien hybrids, but these are all done in a rather brief fashion, and appear to mainly be in place to allow Binti to do increasingly cool things. I'm also not sure what the meditation of mathematics is actually meant to do.
Binti and Okwu (her alien companion) should be dealing with the struggles of bringing an alien aggressor to a now peaceful planet, but their dialogue through half of the book mostly consists of "'Sup?" "Nowt." It felt so under-developed, possibly because the novella had to rush to the final reveal, which may or may not have a significant impact on the future plot. It doesn't get the chance to have an impact on this book's plot, because the story comes to a screeching halt as things get going.
Though I got more into the story after about the first third, I didn't get into it enough to go back and read the first one, or look out for the next.
Tagged: Book Science fiction Alien villains Novella Print