Review: A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe, by Nadia Afifi

Description

Hardcover with sprayed edges. In the sequel to A Rebel’s History of Mars, Azad and his fellow time-traveling historians must contend with the consequences of the dark secrets they’ve exposed…

After exposing the dark origins of his world on the distant planet of Nabatea, Azad is a fugitive, hunted across the galaxy by the fearsome Vitruvian Authorities. But to lead a passive society into revolution, Azad and his crew must enlist the unlikely help of a space pirate with an agenda all her own. Their adventures once again draw them into the past, into the early days of settlement on Nabatea, where a death continues to haunt the fledgling community and a mother must contend with her son’s monstrous vision for their new home.

My Review

Thanks to Anne of Random Things Tours for organising the tour and to the team at Flame Tree for my copy of this book. You always send me the prettiest books.

I started reading this on the 8th July and only got a couple of chapters in before life got in the way. I may have mentioned I’ve been evicted so I’m preparing to move. I have found another house and I’m just waiting on the gas safety certificate before I sign the tenancy agreement. It’s been a stressful few months, but the end is in sight! I’ve been packing, but I got to a point yesterday when I couldn’t do any more because I’d run out of packing tape so I couldn’t pack up my bedroom books, and my sister needs to clear the rest of her stuff so I can get into the front bedroom and pack my clothes. As such, after making a vegetarian cottage pie, I settled in for the afternoon to read most of this book. It’s Sunday 12th July, and I am ahead of schedule! Also, I didn’t make enough mash so I had savoury mince, veg and new potatoes for tea. The new potatoes and the courgettes in my savoury mince/cottage pie mix came from my garden.

Anyway, back to the book. Got to write this quickly because I’m getting death glares from Phoenix; she wants a fuss.

The team that brought the true history of Nabatea’s founding has returned from Mars to Nabatea system and are facing the consequences of telling the truth. Hiding out in an enclave of Vitruvians and orthodox, far from the planet they all once called home, they continue their search for a way to bring down the Juulian authorities on Nabatea. The reader follows Azad as he gets mixed up with a pirate, escapes raids, hides out on the moon, starts a revolution, and then heads out alone to follow Saadia, the mother of Nabatea.

At the same time, we read about the events Azad is following using Barry the time travel machine through the eyes of Saadia. Initially proud and supportive of her son, Barrett Juul, and willing the new civilization to succeed, she slowly realises that she’s raised a monster. She’s struggling with her own trauma and obsessions, ignoring the terrible system Juul and his Vitruvian circle are putting in place.

The two stories meet when Azad follows Saadia’s last journey, to the edge of the universe, where he finds a civilization beyond his understanding.

It took me a while to get into the novel because I read A Rebel’s History of Mars a year ago. Once I’d got myself located, I felt able to really dive in today. Azad’s personal journey, from orthodox Nabatean to revolutionary is played out across both books, but in this one we find him growing more into himself, especially as he develops a relationship with his pirate. He becomes determined to find the true history and share it with everyone, all the while struggling to accept that his sister is an adult who can look after herself.

Saadia goes on a parallel journey of personal growth and understanding. Like Azad, she attempts a revolution, but fails, leaving Nabatea worse for it. Azad returns to discover a successful social change, an attempt at building the new world the original settlers from Mars sought originally.

The background of the story is one of Earth being exploited and Barrett Juul becoming rich off the labour of others as he tries to remake Earth societies. His compromises to corporations and dissolutions of existing communities for idealised structures makes things worse, so that by the time Azad is on Mars (book 1) Earth has become unliveable. There’s also more details about how Barrett Juul became who he was, from Saadia’s background as a child refugee escaping a war-torn Lebanon to live in Denmark, her years as an activist, her marriage to Barratt violent father, and her career fighting for change while making compromises. She finally sees in her compromises the lessons she unconsciously taught Barrett about ethics and essentially using people as a means to an end.

Something that struck me, and which I shared on Instagram, is the prescient descriptions of the terrible events that cause Saadia to become a refugee – the war in Lebanon, organised and paid for by Western powers to control oil, gas and water. Way back when, my dad knew a man who fought in the first Gulf War. He told dad we’d have let Saddam Hussain do what he liked to Kuwait if they’d been growing potatoes, but they have oil, so the western world went to war. It the same now. We won’t interfere in the genocide in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria because they have oil and water, and having a ‘friendly’ western state controlling those areas means the U.S. and Europe has control of those resources.

It’s fucking obvious and has been for decades. All these coups and wars, from 1918 onwards have been about controlling the oil reserves of western Asia by imperial and formerly imperial powers. Iran was a lovely place right up until the 1950s when the US and UK got snitty about democracy and installed the Shah. Afghanistan was doing okay until the US decided to fund religious fundamentalists to fight the Russians during the Cold War. Many of the newly free African states were doing well, until their former masters decided to interfere because ‘communism scary’ and loading them down with debt kept the countries under control. Can’t steal people’s resources if their too busy begging for food.

It’s quite sickening that we can fuck up a entire regions of the world and then bitch when people seek refuge with us.

Nadia Afifi is a bit more subtle than I am, she uses storytelling, with the dual timeline and histories of individual characters, to illustrate the same point. As I said on Instagram, sometimes people need stories to understand events in the real world. Afifi does a brilliant job of holding up a mirror to our current reality. The increasingly authoritarian ruler and his circle of fanatics taking control, while making speeches about freedom and equality, is particularly well placed.

Highly recommended. Read Mars first, though, or you’ll get properly lost.

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Author Bio

Nadia Afifi is a science fiction author, whose works include The Sentient and their sequels, A Rebel’s History of Mars and numerous short stories. Analog Magazine describes her as “a brand-new voice in our field, and one you should become familiar with.” She calls Denver, Colorado home