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A review by sadie_slater
Weird Space: The Baba Yaga by Una McCormack, Eric Brown
5.0
The Baba Yaga is described as being the third book in the Weird Space series, which was created by Eric Brown and then passed over to Una McCormack, who wrote this book and the soon-to-be-released sequel. I haven't read the two books Brown wrote, but I didn't really feel that it mattered, as the opening chapters gave enough background that I didn't feel I was missing anything.
The novel is set sometime in the distant future, when humanity has recently made a fragile peace with the alien Vetch, largely in response to a new threat from the Weird, strange alien beings from another dimension whose encounters with humans and the Vetch to date have been catastrophic. This isn't a utopian Star Trek future; old enmities and suspicions are hard to put aside in the face of new threats, and humanity is split on whether to try to destroy the Weird before it destroys them or to find some way of negotiating a peace. The central character, intelligence analyst Delia Walker, is on the side of negotiations, and has heard rumours of a distant planet where humans and Weird live in harmony. Forced out by the hawkish ascendency in the Intelligence Bureau, she sets off in search of this world, which may well just be a myth.
Part space-opera quest, part Spooks-style thriller, the real delight of this book is in the characters, who are complex and three-dimensional and sympathetic while not always being likeable. Also, almost all of them are women, and reading an SF novel full of well-drawn, non-token female characters was an utter and unexpected joy. And that was before I got to the part where McCormack creates a society which is basically a 1970s feminist utopia brought into a 2010s novel.
Although you don't have to have read the previous novels set in the same universe to understand this one, the ending is very obviously setting up the sequel and although some of the sub-threads are tied off the wider plot is very far from being resolved. Apart from that, the only slight quibble I have with it is that the Kindle edition could have benefitted from more thorough copy-editing, as there were a lot of small errors, particularly missing words or moments where part of a sentence had obviously been rewritten but some of the grammar of the surrounding text needed to be updated to match. But overall, I loved this book, and am really looking forward to the sequel.
(Disclaimer: Una McCormack is an online friend, and I might well not have bought the book in the first place if not for wanting to support her. I'm really glad I did, though, and I'll be buying the next one because I want to read it.)
The novel is set sometime in the distant future, when humanity has recently made a fragile peace with the alien Vetch, largely in response to a new threat from the Weird, strange alien beings from another dimension whose encounters with humans and the Vetch to date have been catastrophic. This isn't a utopian Star Trek future; old enmities and suspicions are hard to put aside in the face of new threats, and humanity is split on whether to try to destroy the Weird before it destroys them or to find some way of negotiating a peace. The central character, intelligence analyst Delia Walker, is on the side of negotiations, and has heard rumours of a distant planet where humans and Weird live in harmony. Forced out by the hawkish ascendency in the Intelligence Bureau, she sets off in search of this world, which may well just be a myth.
Part space-opera quest, part Spooks-style thriller, the real delight of this book is in the characters, who are complex and three-dimensional and sympathetic while not always being likeable. Also, almost all of them are women, and reading an SF novel full of well-drawn, non-token female characters was an utter and unexpected joy. And that was before I got to the part where McCormack creates a society which is basically a 1970s feminist utopia brought into a 2010s novel.
Although you don't have to have read the previous novels set in the same universe to understand this one, the ending is very obviously setting up the sequel and although some of the sub-threads are tied off the wider plot is very far from being resolved. Apart from that, the only slight quibble I have with it is that the Kindle edition could have benefitted from more thorough copy-editing, as there were a lot of small errors, particularly missing words or moments where part of a sentence had obviously been rewritten but some of the grammar of the surrounding text needed to be updated to match. But overall, I loved this book, and am really looking forward to the sequel.
(Disclaimer: Una McCormack is an online friend, and I might well not have bought the book in the first place if not for wanting to support her. I'm really glad I did, though, and I'll be buying the next one because I want to read it.)