![]() She heads to LA, not for ambition, but to stay with a kind boy she met at a queer youth conference the year before. Young trans woman Katrina Nguyen escapes her abusive family with little more than her treasured violin, a few dollars, and a lifetime of trauma. Mixing first contact, intergalactic war, and an unlikely chosen one (with a bunch of other tropes, including demon deals, cursed objects, and stargates, for color and flavor), Aoki actually feeds us a story about what it means to be a woman, in the here and now. Much of the action takes place inside a donut shop. Ryka Aoki’s second novel, Light from Uncommon Stars, has tucked a lot of hard points inside the creamy filling of a custard donut. ![]() By tucking social commentary beneath allegory and analogy, good speculative fiction lays bare hard points about this here, this now. ![]() Until, of course, we realize, it’s all a gorgeous deceit: we’ve swallowed a heap of nutritious vegetables believing it to be dessert. We think we’re escaping into a cool story about first contact, intergalactic wars, reluctant fulfillers of life-or-death prophesy… you know, stuff not about here. Good speculative fiction has long been a shell game. ![]()
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May 2023
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