QSFer Ellen L. Saunders has a new queer space opera out (gay, gender fluid, lesbian, non-binary, multi-gendered): A Dubious Hope.
Opal and Danielle: unlikely would-be friends separated by suspicion, then a mutually incompatible sense of duty, and finally by abduction.
Spacers: a tight-knit generation-ship community that has survived much only to find their destination planet fried by a pulsar. They’re rescued by mysterious aliens, the Semqu, and given the unsought-for opportunity for planetary life 300 years early. Some worship their alien benefactors. Some secretly worry they were diverted to be food or worse.
Opal, chosen as translator for the Semqu to her people, trusts their new benefactors. Earthborn Danielle, woken from long hibernation to help with the shift to planetary life, is deeply wary of creatures she cannot see and a most that she can. Their neighbors include egotistical, predatory dinosaurs and robotic Modeel with crackling auras. All seem to lack any real history, yet have faster-than-light travel. The Semqu cannot be seen yet appear to hear much. Secrets here run deep and are confusing. Breaking rules can be fatal.
Opal tries to befriend Danielle, but the army-trained Earthborn distrusts her. Danielle develops networks to gather and spread information about the secretive Semqu, then loses control over the narrative. The death of a young woman on an alien ship combusts fear into rage, and a few Spacers attack, rupturing the long peace in Se System. Their acts are deemed unforgiveable, and only warnings from Opal and Danielle prevent the exile of every Spacer back onto a trajectory with a dead planet.
In the uneasy years that follow, it’s clear that someone is still sowing discord system-wide. Who? Why? And how long can the peace hold?
Found family, cooperative communal culture, multi-lingual population, dysfunctional family, sister issues, small-town culture, tardigrades, sentient fungi, sentient dinosaurs, cuttlefish in space: for fans of Arkady Martine, Becky Chambers, C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher, and Martha Wells.
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Excerpt
Chapter 1: Bilquis Reborn
EARTH YEAR 3410 CE
NEW HOPIAN YEAR 712
HEAVENLY GANGES aka THE MILKY WAY
A star whirls in sapphic dance with another in the vastness of the Milky Way. She is massive compared to the star that still warms Earth, perhaps twenty times larger. Give her a number or call her Bilquis—she is indifferent to labels. Like all stars, she and her companion have been slowly consuming themselves. She creates helium in raging storms of quantum explosions, fusion on a colossal scale that releases enough energy to easily outmatch the crushing gravity of her substantial girth.
But lately her infernos have been dimming. Too little hydrogen remains. Outward pressure from her billowing plasma weakens.
Gravity is implacable, unforgiving.
When the tipping point is reached, she falls into herself. The collapse takes mere seconds. Her once vast gaseous edges slam solid, tense. Chain reactions transform helium. She is weighed down with heavier elements, each giving her less and less in return—carbon, oxygen, silicon—until finally, she creates the one that takes but does not give: iron.
Iron suffocates her shrinking core in the blink of an eye.
Bilquis inhales herself. Crashes inward like lava forced into lead-filled lungs, like an asteroid belt sucked to a planet’s core. She implodes with unspeakable force and speed. Atoms compress to the screaming point. Gravity forces electrons to violate their boundaries, squeezes them into protons; boson or fermion, their charges gone. Bits shear off. Nothing about this process is voluntary.
It is too much. Everything too near, too hot, too—
Bilquis explodes.
She has spent an eternity fusing her core. In microseconds, she flings much of it away, expanding as rapidly as she had collapsed. Shockwaves reverberate at pressures and speeds reminiscent of her own birth. She creates again, briefly: nickel, silver, tin and every element in between. Her possessive gravity clutches, seizes, clings; succeeds in holding her together.
When the maelstrom subsides, she spins faster, burns hotter. Her magnetic fields have increased by orders of magnitude. Her traumatic near-death has pulled her companion star within reach. Bilquis reels in outer layers of its plasma onto her own unsettled, roiling surface until again, it is too much.
Jets erupt from opposite sides of Bilquis’ superheated form. The brief flare is a brilliant light show as gorgeous as it is vicious.
Stars are seldom immortal. Lucky Bilquis has become a phoenix. Reborn a pulsar, she is a rare jewel in the night sky.
Whipped by an unstable magnetic field, the superheated plasma she ejected into space rockets through the cold vastness that is mostly but not entirely empty. One of those beautiful, deadly particle streams strikes a planet humans dubbed New Terra a mere 900 years earlier. The earth-like sphere’s magnetic field is no match for the blast, which doesn’t even slow as it strips away New Terra’s atmosphere and incinerates everything it touches on the planet’s surface.
New Terra may phoenix someday as well, but it will take eons, even with terraforming. Its ability to support mammalian life is gone.
***
Even light has its limits, such as speed. It takes time for the brilliance from the rebirth of Bilquis to travel to areas that are populated with minds. When it finally arrives, it is, like all information, interpreted differently depending on the motivations of the viewer.
One powerful being, fascinated by what they learn looking through others’ eyes, lacks the ability to sense starlight. So Bilquis’s flare does not stir their insatiable curiosity, though its consequences will reverberate through their orbit for millennia.
Also unaware is a brooding female beneath the surface of planet Vasom. She only has eyes for her unusual lover. He watches with satisfaction as she takes a sip of the green beverage he has offered her. That swallow will have as many ramifications for the solar system’s residents as does Bilquis’ rebirth.
Elsewhere on Vasom, a couple celebrating in a dark bay delight in Bilquis’ short-lived brightness in their sky. They twine teal tentacles tight as they float in the cold water, sharing joy and raw mollusks under the stars. Perhaps their children will investigate. They’ve just convinced their spaceships to begin wider exploration, beyond the known planets.
Far away on planet Taequa, a servant hurrying over the cobblestones through the blessedly cool pre-dawn air glances up, sees the flare among the stars, and sinks her talons into her fur. Is this yet another ill omen for her people?
***
Much later, an insomniac astrophysicist on the generation spaceship New Hope gazed in wonder at the brilliant light, thinking about the studies he can do with the captured data. It took him an hour to think to check the pulsar’s path. When he did, he fell to his knees, swearing. Vomited bile. Checked his math and the many instruments trained on the fried planet. Finally, he woke the head of planetary research and the ship’s captain.
Seven hundred and thirteen years after its launch from Earth, the New Hope hurtled onward toward New Terra.
Author Bio
Ellen Saunders lives in the Pacific Northwest and primarily writes speculative fiction, space opera, and fantasy. Her home is stuffed with the typical ADHD piles of hobbies past and present. She and her partner Mark are mutually startled by having survived together for more than twenty years.
Ellen’s short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and ROAR. This is her first published novel, although there are two completed books in this universe and more coming. (Life lesson: Perfection is the enemy of done).
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