A joyous, enthusiastic time-travelling galactic-sized saga that is just not very good
Have you ever been to a 6-year-old’s dance recital? A 10-year-old’s orchestra concert? A 16-year-old’s theater show? Young artists in the making tend to lack skills but not enthusiasm, and they throw themselves into their performances with a wholehearted earnestness that can be incredibly endearing. But for all that, they are not (yet) good dancers, violinists, or actors, and it shows.
This book is that. The author describes in her author’s notes how she started writing it as a 16-year-old, and that alone explains so, so much about this book. It explains the sprawling, ambitious plot, in which tropes are evoked with such an ardent embrace that they almost feel fresh and new. A Chosen One? Yes, please—in fact, how about three Chosen Ones? No—wait—make it nine! And reincarnation! And cyclical prophecies, and the fate of the galaxy and an evil empire and time travel and found family and teleportation and secret libraries and queer love and coming of age and fighting back against oppression and and and and and and...! I don’t want to say that only a teenager could be responsible for such a bursting profusion of familiar tropes played so fervently straight, but the fact that a teenager was originally responsible for this bursting profusion explains a lot.
It explains the odd technical details, like robots which apparently have retinas, because they need to get past retinal scans. It explains the writing style, in which a teenage Chosen One who has only ever known a life of oppression laments never having an opportunity to feel ‘normal’—as if she can know any meaning of normality that is different from her entire life hitherto. It explains why characters from 1812 talk about being each other’s ‘boyfriends’—a word whose usage to mean ‘male lover’ was not attested until 1906. (A more accurate term would have been sweeting, or paramour, or lovemate, or honeybird, or sprunny. Yes, you read that right, sprunny.) It explains the extremely odd understanding of history, in which an ailing King George III laments the loss of the American colonies as evidence of the decline of the British Empire, when in 1812 it was only just getting started. Although perhaps we’re in an alternative timeline, since there’s another George—George V??—floating around the joint, son of the regent George IV; and this George, as far as I can tell, never existed. And speaking of monarchy, it explains an odd conversation, in which a king, hearing of unrest among his people, muses that perhaps this is simply the moment when the people rise up and decide to govern themselves, and is that really so bad a thing? This king would not be so blithe, I imagine, if he had heard of what typically happens to monarchs when the people decide they’re ready to rise up and govern themselves. But because he’s a Good Guy he must necessarily despise all things monarchical and be willing to see it go away, because Monarchy Is Bad and 16-year-olds struggle with complexity.
Here’s the plot. In the future, the year 6066, a teenage girl, Asha, has lived her whole life on a planet that is crushed under the rule of an evil galactic emperor. Through cleverness and persistence she works out a plan to steal a spaceship and escape the planet. This plan is put into action when a mysterious visitor arrives, tells her that she is a Chosen One, and that she must find her sister, who was also kind of a Chosen One, but maybe not. It’s all very cryptic for reasons that are never explained except that you can’t explain everything on page 25.
Narratively meanwhile, in 1812 London, Obi is a time traveller who has fallen in love with Prince George. We know that they are in love with each other because they have a very long, tedious conversation about that fact, which serves no purpose beyond establishing their fraught relationship. Oh, and also that George doesn’t like being a prince, because Monarchy is Bad and George is a Good Guy and therefore cannot possibly think otherwise. Then Obi, who has difficulties controlling his time travel, accidentally time travels to the future, landing in the midst of Asha’s escape attempt, where he helps her avoid capture, and they fly away together.
(Oh, and speaking of the spaceships! If the galactic empire is so huge that your spaceships need to be hyperspace-capable to get anywhere, then I have difficulty imagining someone ‘gently steering’ the ship in normal space. Steering around what? A stray hydrogen atom? And why does the hyperspace-capable spaceship need wings?)
An incredible amount of not-terribly-functional plot occurs afterwards. Daring, cinematic escapes, betrayals, chases, rescues. We eventually learn the whole story of the various Chosen Ones—including a kind of cool moment when one previous Chosen One decides he’s not okay with having a role forced upon him, and decides to make trouble. This could be an outstanding opportunity to engage with the Chosen One trope and explore the effect of cosmic determinism on the psychology of the pawns of fate, but remember that 16-year-olds don’t do well with complexity, so instead we get a pretty dull antagonist. We learn through document fragments that the whole story of various Chosen Ones is bound up in a kind of reincarnation thing, so that legends of the previous instantiations of the Chosen Ones portray versions of the same adventures that Obi and Asha experience in the pages of the book. This is rather neat, until eventually it gets repetitive and tedious, and finally culminates in a huge revelation scene, in which Asha discovers how it all works and marvels at something that we, the reader, have known for a few hundred pages already.
Now, to be fair, there were some excellent touches in this book, hints of the kind of writer that Jikiemi-Pearson might become. The resentful Chosen One and the reincarnation of story events I’ve mentioned, but there was also a lovely moment between Obi and Asha, in which they have been rescued from some Bad Guys and have a quiet moment together. Obi braids Asha’s hair for her, in a way that she can’t quite manage herself, and explains that this hairstyle is not meant to be done by oneself. The expectation is that you have someone to help you. I was very touched by this scene—a reaction immediately undone by Obi going off to the bathroom to give himself a face mask, leaving me wondering at what point he managed to find himself travel-sized spa kits in the midst of escaping from prison ships.
There’s a truism floating around SFF writer circles that you have to be a bad writer before you can become a good one. Brandon Sanderson describes on his Writing Excuses podcast that he had to write 7 or 11 or some very large number of novels before he managed to sell his first published one, Elantris. You have to write a million bad words before the good ones start flowing, he says.
I can see the good words getting ready to flow in Jikiemi-Pearson’s writing. But I think there’s still a few hundred thousand bad ones that have to be flushed out first. And fortunately, given her eager, sincere, wildly ambitious approach, she’s well on her way there. But this book is not there yet.
Nerd Coefficient: 5/10, problematic, but has redeeming qualities.
Highlights:
- Tropes played earnestly straight
- Black teenagers saving the world
- Many, many Chosen Ones
Reference: Jikiemi-Pearson, Esmie. The Principle of Moments [Gollancz, 2024].
