mere three decades from the present, the affairs of mankind are instantly recognizable. Geopolitically, the divisions and tensions between Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern cultures continue unabated. Technologically, no dramatic revolutions have intervened to rescue mankind from the perpetual problems of poverty and sickness. In the land of India, the focal country of our tale, AIDS has been cured, but a new disease, Selenge, is rampaging through the land. India's social problems have been compounded by the reinstatement of a harsh caste system, a legal and cultural prejudice against the untouchables which impacts many lives, not the least of which is that of our heroine, Jaya Devi.
At age 28, Jaya has had a full career. Raised as the assistant to her poverty-stricken, itinerant magician father, Jaya matured to become a charismatic rebel for the cause of her people. Troubled by strange mental voices since childhood, Jaya now finds herself on the point of death, her body mysteriously aged and decrepit well beyond her actual years. It is at this juncture that her strange, unguessed legacy manifests itself.
Jaya learns that she is the Receiver, the genetic fulfillment of a long-ago plan initiated by aliens of the planet Rasasatra, whose multiform inhabitants resemble the various Hindu deities. Her physiological symptoms are a glitch in the biological program running in her that will initiate communications with the Rasasatran ship that has been monitoring Earth for literally millions of years. But once the aliens awake to the coming of age of their Receiver, events move into high gear. Representatives of the Rasasatrans named Sirru and Ir Yth arrive to take charge. They heal Jaya and enlist her in making their plans known to the world at large. Earth is and always has been a colony of Rasasatra, and the new overlords are here to "harvest" our world. They intend to impose some drastic modifications on the way humanity functions, granting boons but also taking payment.
Jaya is now at the center of a typhoon of forces: Her own government has sent killers after her; Sirru and Ir Yth are feuding; a pretender to her role is issuing orders in Jaya's name; an unscrupulous Japanese industrialist is angling for personal profit; and Jaya's own body is betraying her with alien functions. Only Jaya's own resources and initiative stand between mankind and extinction.
A new voice for the 21st century
It's always a pleasure to see a bright new talent explode onto the SF scene. Only the recurrent advent of fresh voices out of the gloaming can insure the continued health of the field. Liz Williams, who debuted just last year with The Ghost Sister, now proves with her second book that she possesses enough talent and ambition to leap to the forefront of the next generation of SF writers.
This novel, cast in very capable prose, takes several underutilized threads from past milestones of SF and weaves them into a tapestry bearing Williams' distinctive touch. The vast subcontinent of India has always been neglected in Western SF. Aside from Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss, Ian McDonald and Jan Lars Jensen, few writers have dared to tackle this fertile culture and its myths. But Williams brings firsthand experience of India to the page, and the result is a fresh, believable and exotic setting and characters, thickly described and full of import.
The biological sciences always come in second to the harder disciplines as well, but Williams' striking speculations on the life sciences of the Rasasatrans, whose spaceships and homes are alive and whose culture depends on pheromonal transmissions, lend a wealth of outré emotional resonance to the book. In this sense, Williams follows the pioneering work of Linda Nagata and Vernor Vinge in the same sense-of-wonder vein.
Finally, it's refreshing to see new talents riffing on classic Larry Niven tropes. Just as humanity proved a lost offshoot of the Protector race in Niven's Known Universe, so do Jaya and our species represent the long-range evolutionary machinations of the Rasasatrans. And Williams really follows the logic of her setup to the concluding massive paradigm shift. She does not simply leave mankind one rung higher on the technological scale, but reworks our entire destiny, as well as that of the aliens.
The parallel plots on both worlds dovetail very nicely, and suspense is maintained by constant intercutting. Both alien and human characters are distinctively hewn, and the interaction between Jaya and Sirru elicits real emotion.
In the end, Jaya and Sirru aim for nothing less than a revolution "against that vast and ancient empire of bones and genes and blood and flesh." Such ambition matches Williams' own fervor.
