Edge of the Known World by Sheri T. Joseph: Review by Alexandra Pierce
Edge of the Known World, Sheri T. Joseph (SparkPress 978-1-68463-262-6, $18.99, 328pp, pb) September 2024. Cover by Kathleen Lynch.
In her debut novel, Sheri T. Joseph mixes frustratingly messy politics with painfully messy personal affairs to create a riveting novel of the not-far-enough-away future. It’s a future of familiar challenges – displaced people, xenophobia, technologies that threaten individual privacy. Joseph uses three key characters, and their love triangle, to examine the politics – and uses the politics to highlight personal conflicts.
Edge of the Known World opens a couple of decades after a war has devastated the globe. There are, naturally, ongoing political repercussions of this war; some familiar nations still exist, but much more significant are new political blocs: the Federation Regime (somewhere in Central Asia), Allied Nations (including the USA), and Protectorates (none of which are clearly mapped against existing polities). Mass, and occasionally forced, migrations have displaced and disenfranchised enormous groups of people. As well, radiation and disease – some the result of bioweapons – accompanied the war. The Federation used gene therapy to mitigate the radiation effects; it didn’t work, but those who received it have been left with a genetic marker. People in the Allied Nations refer to people with the marker as ‘‘refusés’’ – because the Alliance refuses them entry, thanks to a fear of bioweapons – when they’re being polite, and by nastier names otherwise. Alliance fear is, indeed, so great that they have developed portable gene-scanners that can detect the marker from a simple cheek swab. The Alliance is where most of the story’s action happens.
Joseph has said that the concept for the book began with learning that in the 1940s, Adolf Hitler wanted to develop a blood test to identify Jewish children whose appearance allowed them to hide in the ‘‘Aryan’’ population. It wasn’t possible, but come to the 21st century, with increasing use of genetic testing both for disease markers and for ancestry research purposes, and it seems less far-fetched. Add in the trend towards fear of refugees and migrants more generally, as well as questions over surveillance and privacy – this novel is responding to pressing current political issues and following them to one possible (and horrifying) outcome.
Three key characters drive the story. Alexandra Taschen is the youngest person to have received a PhD, in economics, from the TaskForce Institute. Eric Burton has been a Security Operations Director, leading a CyberIntel team; his foster brother Strav Beki is a skilled linguist and diplomat, and proud of being a descendent of Genghis Khan. Taschen, it turns out, is actually from the Federation – she was smuggled into the US as an infant, and has never been revealed; Eric has recently been court-martialed for breaking a fellow operative’s jaw; and Strav is dealing with PTSD from a bungled hostage negotiation. These are the corners of the love triangle that forms the emotional nucleus of the story. Each character is dealing with emotions – falling in love, struggling with fear, being outraged by betrayal – while also dealing with their jobs and wider politics, in particular an attempt to get some semblance of recognition and power for at least one group of displaced people.
The personal and the political are woven together throughout the story, with personal attitudes impacting on global politics and vice versa. Told in the third person, the reader has insight into how all three lead characters make decisions and react to situations, as well as their pain and occasional triumph. Following the three characters gives the story greater depth than following only one would have. Their motivations and experiences are very different from one another, allowing Joseph to explore this future much more thoroughly through their varied interactions and responses. Given their different expertise – economics, cyber security, diplomacy – and different jobs, Alex, Eric, and Strav move differently through the various challenges, highlighting the maneuvering and tensions of back-room political deals, as well as reacting differently to the plight of the powerless. Overall the balance between the intensely personal and the world-changing politics feels about right, too.
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Alexandra Pierce is the editor and publisher of the nonfiction Speculative Insight: A Journal of Space, Magic, and Footnotes. She is an Australian and a feminist, and was a host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Galactic Suburbia. Alex has edited two award-winning non-fiction anthologies, Letters to Tiptree and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler.
This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.
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