Review: Outlaw Planet

Outlaw Planet by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is set in the author's Pandominion universe. It is not the third book in the series, and is pretty much a self-contained stand-alone. I own the two Pandominion books but have not yet read them. However, I enjoyed this so much those books have been bumped up my TBR pile, and I daresay I will go hunting down the author's other books as well.

This is the story of multiversal travel to the titular "outlaw planet," where time works very differently--i.e., much faster--than the rest of the Pandominion. We have a weird Western, genetic engineering, an eternal war that is fought over and over again, artificial intelligence, mind control, and at the heart a thousand-year-old war crime that is slowly unraveled with fair clues and deft pacing, leading to a climax where the protagonists struggle and sacrifice to do what is right and save the planet's indigenous population.

Our protagonist is Dog-Bitch Bess, a genetically engineered, uplifted Labrador, made sentient and bipedal like all the planet's other inhabitants. She is introduced via a five-page prologue that is like a Western tall tale, and it's only when you get to the end of the book that you can reread it with fresh eyes. The entire first few chapters of the book are like that, laying out the worldbuilding and the background of Bess's life in a deliberate, old-fashioned manner. The fact that we are told right away that our main characters are not human beings is a clever way of drawing the reader in, and the rest of the worldbuilding is revealed in the same steady peeling of layers. Bess, or Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, leaves home and takes a job teaching in a small town of Ottomankie, in the southern district called the Echelon. She spends nine years there, falling in love with her fellow teacher Martha Good, while in the background the rumblings of civil war between the Echelon and the northern Parity territory are slowly brought to the forefront. When the civil war breaks out, Martha is killed, and Elizabeth in her grief turns outlaw and vows revenge, becoming the notorious irregular Dog-Bitch Bess.

There are many more layers than this to the story, of course, and each one is fascinating. There is so-called "Precursor" tech, from a high-technology past scattered across the continent, in the form of incredibly tall white dream-towers that do....what? We find out, and the answer is chilling. There are sentient drones and high-powered weapons, the latter of which provides our second protagonist, the gun Wakeful Slim that becomes Bess's companion and friend. There are the Pugfaces, wandering tribes that are just a little bit different than the rest of the uplifted animals, and when their origins are revealed they tie back in with that same thousand-year-old mystery. There is Bess's obsession with revenge for the loss of her lover, a revenge that is slowly turned as she understands just what has been done to her and the rest of the people on her world. Instead of looking inward to her personal hatred, she begins to look outward, and vows to bring the dream-towers down. And this is the story of how Bess, Wakeful Slim, and the Pugface engineer Dima Saraband do just that.

This is not a fast-paced narrative, and given the depths of the worldbuilding and mystery, it shouldn't be. Don't get impatient as you read it. As the clues are laid and the secrets are revealed, the story becomes incredibly satisfying. It all comes to a head in a poignant two-page epilogue which might bring a tear to your eye (it did mine). Those emotions are fully earned. I didn't expect to get this kind of story, but damn if it wasn't one of the best books I've read so far this year.



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