The Galaxy Game

The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord is a fascinating book about culture, politics, fear and a game that illustrates the intersection of all of these things. This is a well-defined and complicated galaxy. The interactions between the various worlds and the cultures that sprang from them are not easy to digest and the story requires a close rather than a casual reading.

The story centers primarily around Rafi, a psionically gifted student whose abilities are viewed variously as something to be exploited or something to be feared, both by others and by himself. Rafi and his friends, Ntenman and Serendipity are all anxious to leave the Lyceum, the school attempting both to help Rafi understand and control his gift and to assess the danger he show more poses. Rafi and Ntenman sneak off planet to the world of Punartam, where Rafi must learn a whole new way of social interaction as well as develop his skills in the game of Wallrunning.

Karen Lord is obviously an extremely talented writer and The Galaxy Game is full of intriguing ideas and well-thought out political interactions with realistic consequences and developments. Wallrunning is a complex game requiring both skill and strategy. It serves as a foil for the political games going on within this universe. I wish the game itself had been better described and illustrated. As it is, the skills necessary for the game are fairly well-covered, but how the game is played as well as its objectives remain murky. Perhaps that is what was intended, but it felt lacking.

The societies in The Galaxy Game are uniformly fascinating and the constant maneuvering for position both for the present and the future make for a great read. When sudden and violent upheaval occurs, the pieces that have been maneuvered into place throughout the story suddenly come to life and take the story in new and interesting directions.

This is an entertaining story filled with well-executed and complicated ideas. There is a lot to explore in this world and it invites a close reading and rereading. The Galaxy Game is thoughtful science fiction and well worth the read. Highly recommended.

I was fortunate to receive an advance copy of this book. show less

I was really excited to get a review copy of "The Galaxy Game" by Karen Lord; I absolutely loved both of Lord’s prior novels – "The Best of All Possible Worlds" is one of my favourite books of the last few years (and shares a world and some characters with "The Galaxy Game"). Unfortunately, I ended up being pretty disappointed with the book.

The main protagonist is Rafi, the nephew of "The Best of All Possible Worlds", Grace Delarua, who has been forced to attend an oppressive school for the psionically gifted. He escapes with the help of one of his friends, and is thrown unprepared into a galaxy that is undergoing considerable turmoil. We also follow his two friends, Ntenman and Serendipity as they find their own way.

So, there were show more a bunch of problems with this book:

RAFI: Rafi should have been interesting – he’s scared of his psionic abilities because of the way his father abused his own, and he has a difficult relationship with his mother who’s scared of being manipulated by him. He’s doing exciting things – he’s exploring a new planet, and training for a galaxy-famous sport. Unfortunately, he just comes off as a child who’s mostly passive but occasionally reactionary (he even admits as much in the book) – the only thing he does actively is run away from his school. In the end, when he finds a place in society, it seems to be mainly because everyone else told him what to do.

THE OTHER VIEWPOINT CHARACTERS: I’m not really sure why Ntenman and Serendipity were protagonists – sure, we did watch them “grow up” a bit too, but their arcs were as dissatisfying as Rafi’s. This book was only 320 pages, and it didn’t have enough room for us to get to know these characters and invest in them. Ntenman’s voice was pretty charming, and I at least looked forward to his dry humour, but Serendipity seemed completely flat. Also, we get viewpoints from Delarua, Dllenahkh and the headmaster of the Lyceum (there might be more that I’m forgetting), and there’s even a framing story that takes place fifteen or so years later. This makes the book seem pretty fragmented, especially given…

THE PLOT OR LACK THEREOF: Okay, there is nominally a plot – the protagonists come of age in a time of great galactic turmoil, which they are marginally involved in. Emphasis on the “marginally”. As I said earlier, a lot of the stuff that happens is just Rafi reacting to what other people tell him to do, and most of the time, he just does it. So yes, a lot of stuff happens, but we’re just left with burning curiosity about what’s actually going on. For example, a planet gets attacked by a rival faction, but we have very little context for it, so it’s not very impactful, except for a generic “war is bad” way. And there are many factions, each with their own agenda, but we know very little. But the plot isn’t even about the galactic conflict, per se, but about developing a new transportation technique… that somehow involves a sport that Rafi is uniquely qualified to play, but it’s actually about Rafi and his friends growing up, but there’s also the plot of the framing story…

CHARACTERS FROM THE PREVIOUS BOOKS: Okay, I loved Delarua and Dllenahkh and the assorted supporting characters in The Best of All Possible Worlds, but they should not have been in this book this much unless it was at least twice the size. Pretty much everyone shows up, and we learn all about their problems, and how they’re resolved (Freyda and Lanuri’s marriage, Lian’s worry over the missing Queturah), and they add to the mess of plots already in the book.

If I were to describe the flaws of "The Galaxy Game" in one word, it would be “unfocused”. Both of Lord’s previous books were pretty intimate – they were mostly focused on one or two people and the consequences to their own life, and she’s very good at that type of narrative. She seems to be trying to do that in this book, focusing somewhat on Rafi and his friends’ coming of age, but it doesn’t really work that well because there’s so much going on in the grander scale. There was a lot going on in the grander scale in "The Best of All Possible Worlds" too, with the destruction of Sadira, but that was much more personal because of Dllenahkh.

I know that it seems like I hated this book, but I didn’t; I just had really high expectations from Lord’s previous work. The Galaxy Game has beautiful prose and fascinating ideas. It would have been great as either a 600 page book or a novella with a lot of the subplots cut out. I’m still anticipating Lord’s next book eagerly, though – I hope it is a return to her previous form. show less

Rafi is fourteen years old, on the verge of legal adulthood as a Homesteader on Cygnus B, and a student at the Lyceum, a school for the psionically gifted. Unfortunately, on Cygnus, psionic powers are mostly feared, and the Lyceum is as much about keeping the students from becoming dangerous as it is about teaching them to use their powers well. Rafi, with powers that will enable him to help people or to control them, is not being helped by the school's treatment of him; instead, he's having nightmares and feeling less and less secure.

Fellow students Ntenman and Serendipity are communities that do support psi powers, and are a little more protected, but have their own reasons for wanting to leave.

So Rafi does, using his powers to help show more him slip out, and heads first to his mother's home, and then to his aunt's. Serendipity and Ntenman soon follow. It's not long before all three are off Cygnus, on another world, faced with new challenges and about to experience violent political change.

Lord has built an interesting galaxy. There aren't any nonhuman intelligences mentioned, but humans have dispersed and diverged a bit--one of those divergences being the differences in how common psionic abilities are in different populations. It's also a galaxy that, in the not too distant past, experienced a galactic war that wiped out life on one planet, forcing the survivors of one of the most psi-capable populations to resettle elsewhere--with strong tensions between those intent on rebuilding what they once had, and those intent on building new lives in the worlds they live on now.

We see Rafi, Ntenman, and Serendipity faced with real challenges to how they view the world. Rafi has to learn to embrace powers he's feared, initially in the context of "just a game," the popular wallrunning game that involves vertical surfaces and widely different gravitational levels on different parts of the wall. Serendipity is challenged in her ideas of community, and Ntenman finds his skills and opportunities leading him in exactly the direction he didn't want to go: helping to advance his father's business. Lord does a great job of showing us all of these characters growing, changing, and struggling with what their world is doing around them. The political situation is also developed with subtlety and nuance, and grounded in the plausibly real motivations of the different individuals and groups involved.

The narrator, Robin Miles, also does a great job with the different voices.

It's a wonderful book, and highly recommended.

I received a free copy of the audiobook from Audible in exchange for an honest review. show less

This is a fascinating book; any plot summary is going to make it sound much more mundane than it is.

Teenage Rafi is a psion in a society that strongly distrusts psionic powers. His abilities have caused even his own mom to pull away from him, and he's been sent to a special school for some questionable 'treatment.' In many ways Rafi's a typical kid. He likes hanging out with his friends and enjoying his favorite sport, Wallrunning. But he's got serious issues to deal with, and not all of them will be solved by his becoming a legal adult on his next birthday. It's not totally surprising when events conspire to push Rafi to run away to a planet where psy skills are much more valued and accepted.

However, on the planet of Punartam, it's not show more like everything is suddenly going to be easy. Rafi will have to learn a whole new way of living and negotiating society, and he'll come to realize that the issues that he thought were his own personal drama are inextricably tied in with a web of politics that stretches right up to the Galactic level.

As I said, that summary makes the book sound a bit like a YA adventure. It's not. It's a mature, challenging novel that touches on and explores quite a few social themes, on multiple levels.

Most notably, Lord creates a truly new-feeling, original society (actually, multiple societies) here, ones that really don't run quite like ours. The book keeps striking down the reader's assumptions, continuously presenting one thing after another that's just really strange and interesting.

It's not a perfect book. It had a bit of a slow and bewildering start; I felt like many elements could've been introduced more smoothly. The narrative switches POV frequently, and there's often an unnecessary effort required to figure out who's speaking. I don't think that the tense changes fully worked either.

However - extra star for really being unlike anything I've read recently. I'd definitely read more from this author.

Many thanks to NetGalley and DelRey for the opportunity to be introduced to Karen Lord's writing. As always, my opinions are my own. show less

I loved this book. It was very much a continuation of The Best of All Possible Worlds but in a way I totally did not expect. I'm hoping this is not the end this series. I liked this every bit as much as TBOAPW if not more. Rafi and his friends were fun to follow along. The politics felt organic and real.

"The Galaxy Game" is probably three books squished into one and, as a result, it is not as good as it might be. Karen Lord can certainly write, but she needs to slow down. Her erratic jumps between topics and points of view and locations are confusing and disconcerting. The text in the review copy is not marked to indicate any of these changes and we switch scenes and narrators from one paragraph to the next. I am a careful reader and yet I still had trouble deciding which planet I was on at any given moment. Ms Lord is known for her magical realism but this feels more like jump cuts in action films than glorious anarchy.

Ms Lord takes all kinds of shortcuts with physics, technology, society and politics and the whole is not internally show more consistent. I am certain that it is consistent in her mind, but not on the page. Some of the inconsistencies are quite damaging.

This is a shame because "The Galaxy Game" is good even as it stands. It might have been truly great (and I say this as a serious and long-time SF reader) with a bit more editorial attention and a slower push to market.

I received an advance review copy of "The Galaxy Game" by Karen Lord (Del Ray Spectra) through NetGalley.com. show less

I'm going to be honest from the very beginning: writing a plot summary for this book is really challenging. The reason is that any sort of synopsis I can come up with doesn't do justice to the unique and dynamic story that is contained within these pages. Karen Lord has a masterful way of world building and character development that a reviewer like me just cannot capture in a few short paragraphs. I'll use the book's blurb instead, because even though I feel like there's more to this story than is reflected there, at least it's the publisher's approved copy and not my mangled attempt to summarize this for you:

For years, Rafi Delarua saw his family suffer under his father's unethical use of psionic power. Now the government has Rafi show more under close watch, but, hating their crude attempts to analyse his brain, he escapes to the planet Punartam, where his abilities are the norm, not the exception. Punartam is also the centre for his favourite sport, wallrunning - and thanks to his best friend, he has found a way to train with the elite. But Rafi soon realises he's playing quite a different game, for the galaxy is changing; unrest is spreading and the Zhinuvian cartels are plotting, making the stars a far more dangerous place to aim. There may yet be one solution - involving interstellar travel, galactic power and the love of a beautiful game.

The story does take a bit to get going--there's some lead-up and background that doesn't seem entirely necessary in the early stages but comes back around to be very important to understanding the world in which these characters live. The personalities, cultural dynamics, and themes of family, success, integrity, and survival are well-represented and very natural to the flow of the story.

This was the first book I've read by Karen Lord, but I definitely see myself seeking out more. show less