Countess by Suzan Palumbo: Review by Liz Bourke

Countess, Suzan Palumbo (ECW Press 978-1770417571, $16.95, 168pp, tp) September 2024

Trinidadian-Canadian author Suzan Palumbo draws on Caribbean history, culture, and experi­ence in her space opera novella Countess. Pa­lumbo has been previously best known for short fiction: Her collection Skin Thief was published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2023.

As a novella, Countess is a mixed bag. Its first half is genuinely compelling, while its second feelts to me like an excellent synopsis for a much longer novel: There is a distinct shift in style, focus, and register, from the character-focused space opera of the beginning to something more like a folktale’s collection of didactic snapshots, and the shift didn’t work for me.

Virika Sameroo is a model immigrant. She and her parents left the poor and exploited Exterran Antilles for life in the Æcerbot Empire, where she has assimilated into this racist and rigid society, absorbed its standards, and succeeded in becom­ing an officer in the merchant marine by dint of being three times as effective as anyone else. Her Æcerbot lover, Alba, is an upwardly mobile administrator at the Ministry of Trade, and her life seems to be on course for success when her captain’s illness means she finally has a chance to take command. Unfortunately, a mere encounter with the Antillean privateers that raid Æcerbot trade is enough to create suspicion, while her captain’s death from his illness proves damning for her. Arrested on charges of treason and mur­der, Virika never has a chance for exoneration: Tried and condemned, she’s sentenced to life imprisonment in the solitude of Æcerbot’s deepest oubliette-style prison – which does, at least, have the salutary effect of pulling off her blinders when it comes to the empire’s injustice and exploitation.

This section of the novella, and Virika’s ensuing years in imprisonment, is compelling. Character-focused, moving forward with the inevitability of tragedy, it strips Virika of most of her illusions and leaves her with nothing. The prison scenes are atmospheric, harrowing in their isolation: This nadir the pivot point in Virika’s character journey. It takes a sympathetic prison guard – a part-Antillean who has lost everything, who sees in Virika someone who reminds her of a late, great Antillean revolutionary who almost managed to take on the Æcerbot hegemony – to draw Virika away from wanting to die and into preparing for an escape, and that escape is only possible through the guard’s sacrifice.

The latter part of the novella sees Virika join a privateer crew, forge a new relationship with a woman connected to the last Antillean uprising, find and retrieve buried treasure, set herself up under the name of the Countess of Sando, orga­nise an Antillean blockade against the Æcerbot Empire, and bring Antillean leadership together to negotiate a more equitable state of affairs vis-a-vis the Æcerbots, discovering along the way that her downfall was on account of a jealous co-worker who framed her for murder and that her ex-lover, now a big cheese in the Ministry of Trade, was a witness against her. It would recol­lect Dumas’ revenge classic The Count of Monte Cristo, save that this all takes place in the last four chapters of this ten-chapter novella, and feels much more a sketch of an outline than a fully developed narrative. Palumbo has a point or three to make. (Those points appear to be: solidarity among the oppressed is important; and also it doesn’t matter if you remember hav­ing great sex with them – trusting ambitious members of the imperial bureaucracy will get you killed, nine times out ten.) The latter half of the novella condenses years of growth and change into a series of snapshots that have very definite messages, and it just didn’t land for me, especially when compared to Countess’s first half.

I really wanted to like Countess: It’s queer, it’s angry, it’s got great space opera adventure bones, it draws deeply on the Caribbean and transports it to a science fictional future. As it is, I loved half of it. Perhaps if the second half had been five times as long, giving room for it to be as fleshed-out as the first half, I would have loved all of it. Still, there’s no question that on a sentence level Palumbo is an accomplished writer. I look forward to seeing her grow into the confidence to take up space in long-form narrative.

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

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