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baihe_mediaI got this Taiwanese baihe space fantasy because I was already ordering a load of books from Taiwan anyway and thought I might as well take full advantage of having to pay the shipping fee. According to the cover copy and author's foreword, this is the first in a planned series of novels set in the same universe, and possibly involving the same characters.
In the Starsriver (月祈, pinyin: yue qi. The literal title translation is 'moon prayer'; In the Starsriver is the English title chosen by the author) is fundamentally a space fantasy f/f YA novel. The plotline is almost painfully simple: it's the story of space princess Cynthia, her space knight Leona, her space arranged marriage fiancée Flora (also a space princess, but the butch kind), and their joint coming-of-age. And there's not really a whole lot more to it than that.
The base world-building is perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel, being almost a throwback to classic 'gender utopia' SFF (though I'm not sure how conscious of a throwback it is). The novel is set in the far future, where aliens have overrun Earth by means of releasing a plague that causes terrible mutations and eventual death in the vast majority of men and some women (the novel doesn't really engage with transness as such). The surviving humans (essentially all female) have migrated either to the moon or to a man-made satellite named Apollo. The moon, now terraformed to resemble mini-Earth, has been renamed Artemis, and is basically a lush agricultural and horticultural paradise. The more austere Apollo does not have these riches, and relies on Artemis for food and similar supplies. In return, Apollo provides Artemis with military defensive capabilities, and soldiers on Apollo launch regular attacks on Earth in a bid to retake it bit by bit from the aliens. So basically what you have is Artemis, the femme planet, and Apollo, the butch planet. Each planet is ruled by a (seemingly) absolute monarch, and the two royal families intermarry regularly. There's an interesting detail that is mentioned later in the book, which is how procreation happens. If a married couple wishes to have a child, one of them undergoes a vaguely-described treatment which results in them being able to produce gametes with the Y chromosome (the details of this are also described very vaguely). However, this doesn't come into play at all in the novel, despite it being nominally focused on a dynastic marriage.
The novel begins with Cynthia, Crown Princess of Artemis, ten years old, who is trying to get to grips both with mastering her inherited magical Mary Sue power (basically, the power of conferring blessings that have very real and tangible effects, e.g. if she gives your armour a blessing of indestructibility, it really will become indestructible, as we see later in the novel, and if that isn't a Mary Sue power I don't know what is) and the fact that she has to marry Flora, Crown Princess of Apollo, when she comes of age. This is later complicated by the fact that she meets and gradually falls in love with Leona, a knight in service to the throne of Apollo. For the best half of the novel, Cynthia kind of drifts along on a fairly undirected voyage of self-discovery, where she doesn't do very much. The denouement of the novel is actually triggered by an ill-advised decision by Flora, which is then resolved through a combination of Cynthia's Mary Sue magic and Leona's martial prowess.
None of the main characters was particularly compelling. Cynthia is a pretty standard well-meaning, somewhat passive princess, and Leona is the bog-standard perfect gentle knight (though it's revealed at the end that she's engaged in a massive shirking of responsibility that IMO she did not get nearly enough flack for). Flora was perhaps the most interesting of the main trio, being a combination of aggressive cockiness and deep insecurities (for reasons we only find out towards the end of the novel), but the novel doesn't give her a whole lot of interiority. There are some interesting secondary characters Cynthia comes across, including a mysterious foundling she adopts as her maid, and the royal soothsayer whose quarters (which she appears to share with a very smug assassin) are basically a series of multi-dimensional portals, but they don't really play much of a role in the novel, though may reappear in later books in the planned series. The world as depicted in the book, other than the gender plague/utopia backstory, is actually very thin. In particular, the actual ruling queens of Artemis and Apollo barely appear, and I found it pretty outrageous that Cynthia's mother didn't even seem to put up any objections to Flora rushing her visibly unhappy daughter into a very hasty wedding ceremony (as a direct result of Flora's aforementioned ill-advised decision). There's also no attempt to interrogate the received wisdom that the aliens are purely evil and mean humanity nothing but harm, at least in this novel, though Cynthia does at one point raise the question in a way that suggests a possibility of a subversion in later books. I would be vaguely interested in being told what happens in later books, but not enough to actually track them down and read them.
I read the print edition of the novel from Must Muster Publisher, a Taiwanese outfit that seems to specialise in lesbian literature.
In the Starsriver (月祈, pinyin: yue qi. The literal title translation is 'moon prayer'; In the Starsriver is the English title chosen by the author) is fundamentally a space fantasy f/f YA novel. The plotline is almost painfully simple: it's the story of space princess Cynthia, her space knight Leona, her space arranged marriage fiancée Flora (also a space princess, but the butch kind), and their joint coming-of-age. And there's not really a whole lot more to it than that.
The base world-building is perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel, being almost a throwback to classic 'gender utopia' SFF (though I'm not sure how conscious of a throwback it is). The novel is set in the far future, where aliens have overrun Earth by means of releasing a plague that causes terrible mutations and eventual death in the vast majority of men and some women (the novel doesn't really engage with transness as such). The surviving humans (essentially all female) have migrated either to the moon or to a man-made satellite named Apollo. The moon, now terraformed to resemble mini-Earth, has been renamed Artemis, and is basically a lush agricultural and horticultural paradise. The more austere Apollo does not have these riches, and relies on Artemis for food and similar supplies. In return, Apollo provides Artemis with military defensive capabilities, and soldiers on Apollo launch regular attacks on Earth in a bid to retake it bit by bit from the aliens. So basically what you have is Artemis, the femme planet, and Apollo, the butch planet. Each planet is ruled by a (seemingly) absolute monarch, and the two royal families intermarry regularly. There's an interesting detail that is mentioned later in the book, which is how procreation happens. If a married couple wishes to have a child, one of them undergoes a vaguely-described treatment which results in them being able to produce gametes with the Y chromosome (the details of this are also described very vaguely). However, this doesn't come into play at all in the novel, despite it being nominally focused on a dynastic marriage.
The novel begins with Cynthia, Crown Princess of Artemis, ten years old, who is trying to get to grips both with mastering her inherited magical Mary Sue power (basically, the power of conferring blessings that have very real and tangible effects, e.g. if she gives your armour a blessing of indestructibility, it really will become indestructible, as we see later in the novel, and if that isn't a Mary Sue power I don't know what is) and the fact that she has to marry Flora, Crown Princess of Apollo, when she comes of age. This is later complicated by the fact that she meets and gradually falls in love with Leona, a knight in service to the throne of Apollo. For the best half of the novel, Cynthia kind of drifts along on a fairly undirected voyage of self-discovery, where she doesn't do very much. The denouement of the novel is actually triggered by an ill-advised decision by Flora, which is then resolved through a combination of Cynthia's Mary Sue magic and Leona's martial prowess.
None of the main characters was particularly compelling. Cynthia is a pretty standard well-meaning, somewhat passive princess, and Leona is the bog-standard perfect gentle knight (though it's revealed at the end that she's engaged in a massive shirking of responsibility that IMO she did not get nearly enough flack for). Flora was perhaps the most interesting of the main trio, being a combination of aggressive cockiness and deep insecurities (for reasons we only find out towards the end of the novel), but the novel doesn't give her a whole lot of interiority. There are some interesting secondary characters Cynthia comes across, including a mysterious foundling she adopts as her maid, and the royal soothsayer whose quarters (which she appears to share with a very smug assassin) are basically a series of multi-dimensional portals, but they don't really play much of a role in the novel, though may reappear in later books in the planned series. The world as depicted in the book, other than the gender plague/utopia backstory, is actually very thin. In particular, the actual ruling queens of Artemis and Apollo barely appear, and I found it pretty outrageous that Cynthia's mother didn't even seem to put up any objections to Flora rushing her visibly unhappy daughter into a very hasty wedding ceremony (as a direct result of Flora's aforementioned ill-advised decision). There's also no attempt to interrogate the received wisdom that the aliens are purely evil and mean humanity nothing but harm, at least in this novel, though Cynthia does at one point raise the question in a way that suggests a possibility of a subversion in later books. I would be vaguely interested in being told what happens in later books, but not enough to actually track them down and read them.
I read the print edition of the novel from Must Muster Publisher, a Taiwanese outfit that seems to specialise in lesbian literature.
