Microreview [Book]: Five Unicorn Flush by T.J. Berry

An entertaining sequel, though its characters are more compelling than its plot stakes

Last year's Space Unicorn Blues was a fascinating concept, the magical fantasy-space opera mashup that took its narrative to surprisingly dark places, with galaxy-wide exploitation and one of the most hard-headed and stupid human societies I've seen represented in fiction for a while. That book told an entertaining story with an ending that left the main strands of plot satisfied while setting up plenty of material for a potential sequel - a continuation which is now a glorious reality.

Five Unicorn Flush picks up close to where Space Unicorn Blues left off, six weeks after all of the Bala - the group of magical aliens who all look like creatures from western European folklore - are transported by a powerful third race from the human -controlled space where they had been exploited and used for parts and onto a secret far-off planet where they can start again. As this transportation also includes all Bala artefacts in human space, and these include all of humanity's known FTL fuels (of which the most reliable is unicorn horn) this has a pretty major effect on humanity's empire - called "The Reason" while also making it nearly impossible for the Bala to be pursued. Unfortunately, there are a couple of very persistent individuals left on the human side, one of whom is Jenny Peralta, disabled Maori space captain whose testimony ensured that humans and the Bala would be separated, despite losing her dryad wife in the equation. Meanwhile, on their new (very pink) home, the Bala, under the unicorn leadership of Gary Cobalt and his father Findae, are trying to make the best of what turns out to be a difficult planet to make their home on. Throw in some continuing meddling from the Pymmie, the all-powerful third species who called this time-out in the first place, and the continuing interference of Cowboy Jim, the useful but awful white man from the first book who is now masquerading as a Reason officer, and you've got all the ingredients for a seriously packed sequel that lives up to the weirdness of its premise.

Five Unicorn Flush shines brightest in its characters. Jenny is a great protagonist, a deeply flawed mess of a woman whose past - especially with Gary - contains inexcusable crimes intertwined with moments of selfless brilliance. What's perhaps unusual about Jenny is her level of self awareness and how she processes her guilt, which separates her out from the mountains of thoughtless bringers of carnage or tortured yet righteous anti-heroes who somehow always find justification for continuing to do the things that caused their guilt. Jenny fought against the Bala, and exploited Gary, and now her regret means that she acts in different (though not any less reckless) ways towards other people and in pursuit of her goals. In the first book, Jenny's largely sympathetic portrayal grated on me, but I think the greater distance from the Bala and increased remorse in her point of view mitigates that - it also helps that the details of her history with Gary aren't spelled out in nearly as much detail this time around. The other thing that makes Jenny stand out is that she's disabled - left without the use of her legs after a wartime event - and now in chronic pain following a partial attempt by Gary to heal her. The narrative strikes a great balance between showcasing Jenny's talents and giving her a ton of ingenious action sequences while never letting us forget that, when the gravity is on, Jenny is a wheelchair user, with all the accessibility challenges that brings in the thoughtlessly designed environments of Reason ships.

Compared to Jenny, Gary is a blander protagonist, though not to the point where his chapters are less enjoyable. The strength of his arc here lies in his understated but important interactions with his father, Findae, who has just returned to the Reason after a hundred year nap. Findae's expectations on how the Bala should live, up to and including the assumption that unicorns should remain benevolent but absolute rulers without consulting the opinions of the other groups they rule over, clash significantly with his son's experiences and attitudes towards leadership - and, of course, as Gary is only half-unicorn, he has a significantly harder time throwing that assumption of divine right around in the first place. Like in Space Unicorn Blues, Gary spends quite a lot of time getting told off, beaten up, and even dissolved by acid, and while he comes out of these experiences physically unharmed (thanks to some immortal unicorn healing powers) the way he internalises and deals with being a punching bag makes his development here interesting to follow.

Unfortunately, Five Unicorn Flush's plotting doesn't quite live up to the promise of its main characters. Nearly half of the book is spent switching between Gary's relatively passive attempts to placate the rest of the Bala and encourage them to make a go of their new home rather than disappearing back into the stars, while Jenny engages in a technically plot-relevant but very sidequesty-feeling heist on a generation ship full of cannibals, which involves her getting frozen to near-death and shot out into space without a suit all in the space of a few short hours. While it's a fun sequence, especially with the interactions between Jenny, her ship's AI, and the AI of the ship they have entered - it does slow the book down at the point where the plot could really do with some extra introductions to keep everything ticking. Once the heist is done - complete with introduction of an elf ghost who turns out to play quite an interesting role in the overall plot - and things heat up on the Bala's planet, Five Unicorn Flush does kick into gear, but it then has to contend with some rather left-field character reintroductions (yes, it's great to see Ricky from the first book again, but... she's been where this whole time? Did I forget something that would have made this make sense?) and yet more pointless-feeling sidequests before its eventual, slightly rushed climax. As a second book, much of Five Unicorn Flush's climax relies on developing emotional beats from its predecessor - and I can't imagine the heart of this book would work if you haven't been on the previous journey with Gary, Jenny and all - while also setting up some interesting plot hooks for further instalments. That's all well and good, but it's a shame that it comes at the expense of this volume standing up well alone.

Despite this, Five Unicorn Flush is great entertainment, set in an imaginative universe that leans in to the absurdity of its premise while using it to interrogate high stakes scenarios with moral weight behind them. Like Tim Pratt's Axiom series (also published by Angry Robot, who clearly know what they're doing when it comes to this particular strand of science fiction), and Alex White's Salvagers, this is highly entertaining space opera with a nice mix of standard and novel plot elements that I'm still invested in for at least the next volume.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Fun but weighty worldbuilding

Penalties: -1 A slow-to-start plot that doesn't stand up well alone

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10



POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Berry, T.J.. Five Unicorn Flush [Angry Robot, 2019].

Microreview [Book]: Space Unicorn Blues by T.J. Berry

An enjoyable and surprisingly emotional debut.

Gary is in trouble. He’s just got out of prison, only to discover his spaceship, the Jaggery, is under the control of a mildly sadistic hustler who wants him to complete three death defying trials to get it back. The first two turn out not to be a problem, but the third is proving trickier: sure, removing one’s hat in public wouldn’t be an issue for most people, but Gary is a half-unicorn, half-human in a world where the fae are actually peaceful aliens called Bala who have found themselves warred upon, enslaved and persecuted since humans developed FTL and discovered their homeworlds. Naturally Gary’s horn happens to be made out of one of the most reliable spaceship fuels in the galaxy, so showing it in a bar full of shady types makes it significantly trickier for him to get out unscathed. In fact Gary’s only hope of escaping without being re-enslaved and forced to endlessly grow rocket fuel out of his head is through cooperating with Jenny Perata, a human war hero who happens to have tortured Gary on his own ship ten years ago, before getting him thrown into prison in the first place.

That’s quite the opener for a space opera, and it only gets more intense as Jenny, Gary and the rest of their crew find themselves racing across the galaxy to deliver a mysterious package to a centennial conference where a third, more powerful alien race is going to judge humans and Bala on how well they’ve been able to cooperate over the past century. Unfortunately, humanity has developed a selective racial memory about this, and is convinced it is going to be judged on its “progress”, a metric which is apparently not incompatible with the exploitation of six planets full of sentient beings. Outside the main narrative, there are glimpses of a society almost like the Hunger Games’ Capital, where the use of Bala bodies and abilities as consumer products is entirely normalised and fashionable. This gives the story an even more desperate edge, as Gary’s options for safety get narrower and narrower in a corner of space that humans have made completely untenable for his people.

It also means this largely action-based narrative carries a lot of emotional baggage, both in terms of the cultural treatment of the Bala (which effectively amounts to ethnic cleansing, and involves atrocities even worse than Gary's potential enslavement), and in terms of the history between Gary and Jenny. Because, yes, the former abuser becomes a sympathetic point of view character, and is portrayed in a way that makes it hard to reconcile her perspectives and actions with the things we know she’s done to Gary, and other Bala, in the past. For much of the book, the characters are so focused on survival that it seems like the narrative might just run out of space to address Jenny's past, which includes locking Gary up, mining his skull for horn-fuel, and getting their ship stranded so that the only option for survival requires the death of another crew member (unicorns regrow their horns by eating special bugs or, in a pinch, animal bones). In the end, though, Jenny doesn’t get an easy “out”, with her choice to own up to her past and what it means for the behaviour of humanity contributing to a very sub-optimal ending for her character (though one that’s wide open for a sequel). I suspect the way that Space Unicorn Blues handles characters with histories of abuse will frustrate many readers, but its not entirely swept under the carpet.

Space Unicorn Blues has diverse representation on the human side: Jenny is Māori, lesbian and uses a wheelchair; Ricky the hustler is trans and from a Chinese family, and Gary’s human mother is Indian. There is a white man on the crew, Jim, who is effectively a bundle of tropes associated with gross white male privilege, but is kept around because he’s useful for getting the ship through checkpoints without scrutiny. (This might be a bit on the nose for some readers, but I honestly can’t fault it...) Unfortunately, the fantasy elements don’t embody the same diversity as the humans: it’s very much a “European with a couple of brief nods to other cultural traditions” mythology which, coupled with the non-European cast and the background which assumes all humans identify the Bala as belonging to “their” legends, puts elements like unicorns and dwarves into an unrealistic position of cultural universality. It’s less glaring than, say, the Europe-with-a-dash-of-Asian mythological colonisation of North America in the October Daye series, but still disappointing in a book which does so well on other metrics. The problem is compounded by the fact that the sense of Bala culture is the weakest aspect of the worldbuilding – all we really get is that these were largely peaceful, disparate groups of people who fell to human aggression despite being significantly more technologically advanced at the time of First Contact, because humans are The Worst. It feels obnoxious to complain that Berry hasn’t done enough to justify the inclusion of unicorns in a book which is literally predicated on being a mash-up of science fiction and unicorns, but it's still an aspect I hope we see expanded on in future instalments of the series.

All in all, I liked Space Unicorn Blues a lot. The story is compelling beyond the initially gimmicky premise, and Berry has done a great job of creating a spacefaring human diaspora that feels real and diverse, as well as integrating heavy subject matter in a way which is reasonably sensitive without overstraining the fast-paced narrative. I’d love to see stronger depth and diversity of worldbuilding in the inevitable sequels, but as a debut novel Space Unicorn Blues remains an impressive and highly enjoyable read.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 fairies in space! +1 some surprisingly satisfying character arcs

Penalties: -1 You want me to sympathise with her?

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 "A mostly enjoyable experience". See more about our scoring system here.

***

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke.

Reference: Berry, T.J. Space Unicorn Blues [Angry Robot, 2018].