RaveFiction Unbound... indispensable ... a plotty, twisty, satisfying read, with a sprawling, diverse cast of magicals and a churning narrative ecosystem of monster-faction intrigue to sustain the trilogy. For every action sequence, though, there’s a march, or discourse on monster allyship, or a lovingly detailed co-op retreat meeting. There’s even an action sequence at a co-op retreat meeting! It’s not merely a quirky setting, either: it’s Turnbull’s faith that the messy, clumsy, figuring-it-all-out of a movement has its own artistic dignity. If imagination is, as Le Guin says, what starts to extract us from oppressive political structures, then every step of that extraction deserves its treatment ... Rather than train his imagination on the one cinematic moment that changes everything, Turnbull invests in the uneasy stretch of moments when a movement can go either way. That zone of ambiguity, rich with possibility and tragedy, where no one is offered the confidence of preordained victory or the absolution of certain failure, places extraordinary demands on the novel’s characters. And the novel shines in these moments.
Cadwell Turnbull
PositiveFiction UnboundTurnbull’s light touch here is effective: the connection he draws between historical Caribbean slavery and alien occupation is firm and unsparing, but unsentimental. The fevered heroics of alien invasion stories and human resistance can be thrilling; sometimes, though, they read like a sleeper waking from a nightmare and re-litigating the dream, convincing themselves it (colonization, enslavement) wouldn’t happen to them, not that way. Turnbull is more interested in probing the complexities of resistance, what it means to answer violence with violence and what these cycles signify to occupiers and rebels alike ... Turnbull’s honesty here is important: the world we’d like to see, that we think is so obviously a better one, is hard to get to, because it leaves out the need for reckoning, symmetry, satisfaction that drives our sense of justice.
