TBR Pile Review: Frontier, by Grace Curtis

Blurb

Saints and preachers, librarians and horse thieves, lawmakers and lawbreakers, and a crash-surviving spaceborn vagrant searching for her lover on a scarred Earth.

Earth, the distant future: climate change has reduced our verdant home into a hard-scrabble wasteland. Saints and sinners, lawmakers and sheriffs, travellers and gunslingers and horse thieves abound. People are as diverse and divided as they’ve ever been – except in their shared suspicions when a stranger comes to town.

One night a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet’s first visitor in three hundred years. She’s armed, she’s scared… and she’s looking for someone.

Love, loss, and gun slinging in this dazzling debut novel by Grace Curtis. For fans of Sam J. Miller, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Becky Chambers, Frontier is a heartfelt queer romance in a high noon standoff with our planet’s uncertain future, full of thrills, a love story, and laser guns.

Spoiler below.

My Review

I picked up a signed copy of this book from Waterstones yesterday. The end papers are soooo pretty!

This novel is a Sapphic sci fi western. Think about it, it’ll make sense. We start in 2800s, most of humanity has left the dying Earth behind, except a few who refused to leave. In the centuries since leaving the planet, humans have spread across to galaxy, building an empire. On Earth, people live in a waste land, worship the parched Earth and curse the ‘sinners’ who left. A pace craft falls into a desert, seen at first only by a couple of scavengers, and the Deputy Sheriff.

The Stranger emerges and makes her way across the wasteland, meeting friends and enemies alike on her way to a city that is the centre of abundance, compared to everywhere else. It’s a downed star ship, one of the last to leave. She’s searching for a way to contact the ship her life raft fell from, to find out if the crew, and her lover, are still alive. What she eventually finds surprises even her.

This novel has the structure of one of those Clint Eastwood westerns from back in the day, a stranger walks into town, has adventures and rides of into the sunset with the girl. Except without the rape and racism. There are repeated encounters with various characters; I especially liked the librarian who helps fight the Deputy Sheriff a few times, and Nana and Ken, who live in a self-sustaining colony among the high-rises of an ‘abandoned’ city in the mountains. Along the way we learn that the Preachers are mostly scammers, fandom is still alive and well in the 29th century, that there’s a colony of musicians living in the bowels of the ship that became a city, and that insulin is transported by drug-tortoise.

There’s an atmosphere of quiet menace and Curtis builds the world vividly. The interspersing of background information in the form of newspaper articles and comments on academic papers, as well as a chapter near the end that takes us back to the start of Kai and Noelle’s story, makes all the strange events make sense. The use of pseudonyms for Kai throughout the first 2/3rds of the book builds the atmosphere and tension, which is released when she is shot and assumed dead.

People who gave up before they got to this point missed the point of the book! Making Kai an anonymous traveller rather than skipping in as a space farer giving out their name and story, might be confusing, but it builds tension as the reader is left asking if the Stranger, the Courier, the Vagrant, Darling, etc. are all the same person, who they’re looking for and what they are doing on Earth anyway, if they’re among the humans whose ancestors abandoned Earth three hundred years before. The tension ramps up to her shooting, and then steadily rebuilds again after she leaves the sanctuary of Nana’s flat to return to the city, name and mission acknowledged. In returning to the City, we learn that others have their own secrets, that the Sheriff chasing Kai isn’t just any sheriff nor is he a bumbling fool taking orders from higher up. Although there are one or two of those in the book.

The background information sprinkled throughout the novel provide insight into the world, and Kai’s background as a soldier in the imperial army, a war hero who has sworn off killing, and the complex politics of the Centralian Empire, which appears to engage in the usual sort of imperialism – invent a crisis, escalate, invade, steal resources, subjugate population, encourage children to become soldiers, send them out to do it all over again.

There are a couple of interesting and important themes in this novel. Firstly, the climate crisis, looking towards the responses we can choose if we don’t act. We can stay and ‘drink dirt’, or try to survive in small enclaves of privilege where there are resources, or we can find a way to leave on mass, populate the galaxy. We don’t have the technology to leave but we do have the ability to mitigate the crisis even if current political will is against it. The self-sustaining garden city Kai finds herself in when Nana and Ken rescue her is an example of the small scale community projects that can help to mitigate by making local food networks stronger, recycling and reusing available materials, building community for resilience. We already know how to do this, we just need to do it.

The second theme is the dichotomy of good and evil that plays out. To those who stayed on Earth, those who left and the humans who live on other planets are sinners and all evil, whether they knew it or not, because they ran away from their ‘God’. Those who stayed are automatically good, because they are taking the punishment humanity deserves for ruining the planet. Except of course all the bandits, the corrupt Deputy Sheriff Seawall and his officers who are robbing people blind and killing without consequence. There’s a strongly stratified society, controlled access to resources and a plot to make things worse.

The people of the Centralian Empire consider their imperialism to be good, because it’s extending human space and resources, although the people on planets invaded for their resources, those at the bottom of another strongly stratified society, and anyone, like Noelle and her Humanitarian Society, who questions the way things are done, aren’t too happy with the arrangement. The Earth and the people there are lost causes to the Empire, not worth bothering with.

It’s never that simple though. None of the characters or societies, even Kai who killed dozens in a renowned invasion, or Noelle, naïve, sensitive, likely to get lost in a project, desperate for justice and to improve society, are solely good or evil; they all just chose different ways to survive, but the ideologies the different groups believe in cast anyone who doesn’t agree with them as evil. Fundamentalism of any type is dangerous and being able to see others’ perspectives and empathise can help us reject the polarisation that increasingly divides society.

I enjoyed this book, I read it in one day, and found the structure reminiscent of a book I read in 2020, Red Noise, which is also a sci fi western, but set on a mining colony, also with an unnamed main character. The writing is witty, and some of the references made me giggle. Look I liked the librarian, okay, she’s funny! Highly recommended for worldbuilding, tension and characters. I am looking forward to more books set in this world, even if we see no more from Kai and Noelle.