If space opera science fiction is to your taste and interest, I had an advance reader copy for Sarah Hoyt’s latest. It is a truth universally acknowledged that just about every writer has a juvenile book hidden away someplace. A tale scribbled in their youth for fun, or because a story, a situation or a character obsessed them. Often it’s a kind of fan-fiction, or as I think of it – a training wheels book. Sometimes the basic concept and perhaps some elements are worth taking out and making something substantial and adult out of them, which is what Sarah Hoyt did with the epic space opera-fantasy No Man’s Land. The genesis of the basic story came about when she was a teenager, read Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness and had serious doubts about how a totally hermaphrodite world would work. The teenage version of this may be the epic story that she spun to amuse and enthrall her fellow high students back in the day. The world of the planet Elly is a complicated one, not least because of being peopled – personed – settled – whatever, by a race of genetically engineered hermaphrodites, who can impregnant and be pregnant. Which does make for exceedingly bizarre familial relationships, as we binary humans understand them. The Ellyians can also teleport, among other interesting and seemingly magical talents. As one can imagine, this leads to a very curious society, complicated by the fact that the spaceship which brought them to the planet also went back in time thousands of years in relation to the civilization which sent them, and others out to the stars. A lot of this is not infodumped upon the reader in one fell swoop, but rather noted in passing, and left to the reader to put together.

There are two complicated and entwined stories in No Man’s Land – and two main characters carrying the narrative, along with scores of minor but essential characters. The first we meet is Skip, Viscount Webson (whose formal name and title is about half a paragraph long in itself) the very young but official envoy from a galactic empire with very strict rules about its’ various operatives interacting with those societies deemed not quite ready for relations (of any kind, official or un-) with the star-spanning empire. Skip has problems and past trauma of his own. The second main character is Erlen Troz, who also has had sufficient past and present horrific trauma, being on the run from unnamed assassins. Erlen was not just a high official of what passes for a central government on a neo-barbaric world, but also the romantic partner of the late ruler, and quasi-parent of the heir apparent … and what with one thing and another, there is treachery afoot in both their worlds. So, who sent the assassins to kill the former king, murdered an investigator from Skip’s government, is still hunting Erlen, and the new king, and is it the same party as those still trying to kill or disgrace Skip? Who can they trust, and where can they turn for help? It’s a long and episodic adventure, through a very alien but well-fleshed out world. This is a narrative of characters and a society, not so much a close examination of the technologies involved in a futuristic tale. By the end of it, a lot of elements were tied together, things which had developed gradually all through the narrative; not all, of course – life isn’t that tidy. It is a long, long book – the pre-release version which I read came in three parts – but it did engage and held my interest all the way through.