Liz Bourke Reviews The Knife and the Serpent by Tim Pratt

The Knife and the Serpent, Tim Pratt (Angry Robot 978-1915202802, $18.99, 400pp, tp) June 2024.

Between Tim Pratt novels, I always forget just how unabashedly pulp he is as a writer. I say pulp as a compliment, not a criticism. Pratt has a gift for embracing the ridiculous and turning it into entertainment: playing the emotional field with seriousness while rolling around in weird and wacky SFFnal propositions. In The Knife and the Serpent, he dives into many-worlds theory and multiple parallel universes again, albeit in completely different fashion to his The Doors of Sleep.

In Berkeley, California, Glenn is a postgraduate student of the history of science. He’s in a relationship, one that’s got very committed very rapidly, with Vivy, another postgraduate student. In part because of the particular (kinky) dynamics of their relationship, Glenn’s been willing to accept a few unexplained mysteries about her… right up until he finds himself accidentally dragged several alternate universes sideways and into the middle of a firefight aboard a spaceship that Vivy’s winning.

Tamsin is an ambitious and high-flying young graduate. She returns to the home of her youth when her secretive grandmother, her only surviving relative, is murdered in a home invasion. There, she encounters her grandmother’s murderers: a terrifying pair of mercenary-assassins from another level of the multiverse. It turns out that Tamsin is the last surviving member of an oligarchic family from a neighbouring technologically advanced reality, and her grandmother’s murderers want revenge on the other oligarchs that exiled them from their home reality. This is shocking news to Tamsin, made even more startling by the fact that her high school boyfriend is also an incomer from the same reality, a loyal retainer of Tamsin’s dead family. But Tamsin is rapidly able to adapt: She’s the heir to vast wealth – and terrible weapons – that can be unlocked only by a member of her bloodline. Revenge on the exterminators of her family – and ascending to rulership in their place – sounds to her like appropriate scope for her talents. Would the dramatic mercenary-assassins, perhaps, accept employment for the prospect of a share in the family wealth?

Glenn has made the awkward discovery that Vivy is a secret agent for a multiverse-spanning organisation – the Interventionists – dedicated to trying to protect the inhabitants of the multiverse (or Nigh-Space, as it is called by those who traverse it) from conquest by aggressively expansionist totalitarians. Vivy had – so says her friend, the part-time spaceship and full-time AI (and master of snark) The Wreck of the Edmund Pevensie, Eddie for short – planned to tell Glenn as soon as she’d cleared it with her bosses, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s been lying to him throughout their relationship. And it’s a relationship that relies even more than most on mutual trust. (This is a place, I think, where Pratt’s choice to place Glenn and Vivy in a kinky relationship emphases both their mutual trust, and the depth of the breach of that trust caused by the lying. It pays off, in addition to affording moments of humour.) It also doesn’t change the fact that their relationship only started because Vivy was investigating him for background on one of his ex-girlfriends, another Nigh-Space incomer to Earth.

You might guess that Tamsin is that ex. You’d be right. You might also guess that when Vivy and Eddie (who’s visiting Earth in an android body for some mandatory downtime, an uninvited houseguest in Vivy and Glenn’s apartment) are tapped to look into Tamsin’s sudden, mysterious disappearance, Glenn insists on going with them.

What should have been a straightforward check-in finds Vivy, Eddie, and Glenn joining forces with Tamsin and her murderous crew to defeat an alliance between Tamsin’s homeworld’s oligarchs and one of the fascist empires that the Interventionists combat – before Tamsin turns on Vivy and Glenn, as they’d get in the way of her plans to take over Earth, too, with a little bit of strategically applied mass-murder. Now it’s a race against time.

The Knife and the Serpent is told in the first-person viewpoint, alternating between Glenn and Tamsin. Tamsin seems like a relatively ordinary protagonist at first, but as matters progress it becomes clear that she has classic narcissistic and anti-social tendencies. A willingness to commit cold-blooded mass murder for her goals is perhaps the most obvious sign. (Though readers have frequently been known to forgive protagonists their war crimes.) Her voice is nonetheless compelling: You’re rooting for her, right up to the point where she tips over from “understandable, who hasn’t wanted to do a spot of murder in emotionally fraught circumstances” to “would-be conqueror who sees even the people closest to her as tools.” Tamsin starts the novel feeling in control of her life and circumstances, and sees the opportunity to achieve more power and control. Meanwhile Glenn’s voice starts out a little hapless, a little out of his depth, but it transpires that he has deep reserves of adaptability, competence, and kindness, which stand him in good stead as he gets propelled out of his ordinary life and into a weirder, wilder multiverse, and which contrasts noticeably with Tamsin and her reactions.

Glenn’s kindness and his willingness to give up control doesn’t mean he lacks boundaries, though. Set alongside the pulp adventure of multiverse-hopping secret agents and distant wars suddenly turning up next door, his negotiation of what the secrets mean for his relationship with Vivy, and what boundaries he needs to have as they work out what Vivy’s revelation of her real job and background means for that relationship going forward, forms the emotional core of this novel. Alongside a heap of pulpish good fun: swarms of intelligent murderous autonomous robots, bio-engineered mermaid people, sunken vaults, battles in space and across different realities.

There are two sides in The Knife and the Serpent, really. There’s Vivy’s Interventionists, who want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to live boring lives of peace and prosperity, free to find meaning (or its absence) in whatever fashion they choose. And then there are the space fascists and Tamsin, whose only problem with space fascism is that she’s not in charge: The stomping boot of authoritarianism, graciously allowing its supporters to live comfortable lives and mercilessly purging its opponents. (Pratt’s entertaining pulp adventures do often have a pretty sharp political point.)

I’m not sure anyone is writing novels quite like Tim Pratt. There’s a positively retro sense of glee (and a willingness to throw in the kitchen sink, too) in The Knife and the Serpent, at playing with the multiverse to yank unsuspecting Earth-normal humans into the wilder, wider cosmos. It’s really quite delightful, though I think I might have preferred a little less of Tamsin’s point of view. Murderous oligarchy is less delightful, after all.

This review and more like it in the June 2024 issue of Locus.

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