Fiction Reviews
A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe
(2026) Nadia Afifi, Flame Tree Press, £20 / Can$34.95 / US$26.95,
hrdbk, 281pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58948-3
This novel is the sequel to A Rebel’s History of Mars, received here at SF²C Towers with reasonably good reviews by Steven and Mark. It takes broadly the same approach as its predecessor, having two timelines running in alternating chapters throughout the book. One is future past and the other future present, with characters in the latter having a quantum machine allowing them to remotely view the former, in an attempt to discover what truly happened all those years ago.
Warning: spoilers for A Rebel’s History are unavoidable in this review.
In Timeline One, rebel Martians have escaped a corporate dystopia (see Book One) and have flown a starship through a wormhole to a new system. Here, they settle Nabatea, a habitable but not hospitable planet which they begin to terraform, while building a new society under the leadership of the charismatic but unscrupulous Barrett Juul (a real Frank Herbert of a name if ever I heard one).
Dr Saadia Hamza, not only the scientific genius behind their interstellar flight but also Juul’s mother, is increasingly concerned about her son’s authoritarian tendencies. On the journey to Nabatea, Juul had committed the new colony’s original sin by murdering Kezza Sayer, a young woman and joint protagonist of the first book, who was infected with a benign alien virus boosting her physical abilities.
Sayer’s virus serves as the starting point for deliberate infection and the creation of a new caste of enhanced post-humans named Vitruvians (after Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous eight-limbed sketch). As their numbers increase, they begin to dominate Nabatean life under Juul’s direction, much to Saadia’s dismay. She consoles herself with science, researching a mysterious spherical object which orbited the new planet, only to crash into its moon following human interference.
Meanwhile, in Timeline Two, over 1,200 years after the founding of the colony, we follow Azad – doctor, newly inspired revolutionary and the other lead character from A Rebel’s History. With his rag-tag team of rebel historians, scientists and renegade Vitruvians, he has already used the time-viewing machine (incongruously called Barry) in Book One to expose Barrett’s feet of clay and murderous perfidy.
The chance rescue of a Virtruvian space pirate allows Azad and his allies to turn their attention to Dr Hamza, still venerated as the wise scientist who guided them to this brave new world. The pirates’ discovery of an artefact connected to her in a remote part of the Nabatean solar system gives them the opportunity to rediscover her story, even as we follow her directly in the chapters for the other timeline.
Needless to say, the system isn’t going down without a fight and Azad and co. are chased throughout most of the book by the Vitruvian space fleet – there is no shortage of physical peril in A Fugitive’s History.
And there is a lot going on in this relatively slim book overall: the two timelines; the building of the Nabatean colony; the uprising that follows a millennium later; the mysterious alien artefact; the question of whether Saadia is saint, sinner or something of both; and the novel’s aspirations to intelligent space opera. It’s as if the author was trying to do something in the vein of Ken MacLeod, Arthur C. Clarke and Kameron Hurley all at the same time.
Brevity is usually a virtue – at least for this reviewer – but on this occasion it means that none of these themes really gets the attention and airtime they deserves, to say nothing of the relative thinness of the supporting cast.
For example, I would have loved to have more on the development of Nabatean society as well on as the revolt in Timeline Two. And writing a good Big Dumb Object plot needs more slow revelation and sense of wonder than the whistle-stop tour around a Space MacGuffin which this book gives us. More soft SF and more hard SF for my dollarbuck please!
Put simply, A Fugitive’s History Of The Known Universe is one of those rare novels that could have stood to be at least half again as long.
On the other hand, the novel is without doubt enjoyable and well-written. It’s nice to see a science-fiction novel draw on Middle Eastern cultures without falling victim to cliché, negative stereotypes or straight-up appropriation. Protagonists Saadia and Azad both hold the reader’s attention throughout and their adventures unfold at a fair pace without confusing the double narrative.
Indeed, if you view the revolutionary setting and gestures towards serious science as more set dressing than content, A Fugitive’s History then stands revealed as a fast, effective and reasonably original piece of space opera. Much of this reviewer’s grumbling could then fall away.
But still I remain unable to quite let go of the book that could have been.
Tim Atkinson
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