queer SFF – Xiran Jay Zhao

The Bone Shard Daughter Review + Cosplay

the bone shard daughter cosplay — *Cosplay of Lin Sukai, the emperor’s daughter*

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

An Asian-inspired epic fantasy set in an empire of drifting islands, out now from Orbit, available anywhere books are sold

Personal Rating: I’d give my bone shard to Lin to command as she wishes, except she wouldn’t take it because she’s too good for that 🥺

Reasons to Read: Asian-inspired queer-normalizing world, clever magic system that works like coding, sci-fi post-humanism tropes told in a fantasy way, determined protagonists, adorable animal companion

So, I never liked the strict division of sci-fi versus fantasy in publishing. My favorite works tend to be those that combine the tropes of both, especially sci-fi with grand, beautiful worldbuilding. This is the first epic fantasy I’ve read that borrows brilliantly from sci-fi tropes, though. Its magic system made me go WHOAAA OMG once I realized it worked like coding. Basically, the empire takes a bone shard from behind everyone’s ear when they’re 8, then if you carve the right commands on the shards in a special language, they can remotely drain the person’s lifeforce to power magical constructs made of animal parts. BUT, if the commands don’t work with each other, it can cause the whole construct to break down. (Where are the programmers out there…relatable content for you.)

Constructs weren’t people, even if a few bore human parts. The lives of the shards in their bodies powered them, and the commands written on them gave them purpose. But depending on how tightly those commands were written, well, they could be subverted. And despite the smooth work on this construct, it was a dockworker and would be lower-tier. Fewer commands, more loopholes.

The empire spans hundreds of drifting islands and was established by the Sukai family, who defeated the Alanga people that once ruled the islands with their supernatural powers. The Tithing Festival that gathers the bone shards necessary for magic is a painful and dangerous one, with one wrong move meaning the chisel could hit the brain and kill the kid, but the empire justifies it by constantly warning its citizens about how the Alanga might come back. Though by the start of the story, this fear of the Alanga isn’t strong enough to pacify people anymore, so revolutions are brewing in every corner of the empire. It doesn’t help that the emperor has holed up in his palace to focus on bone shard magic experiments instead of keeping the political system running.

But the constructs kept us all safe. They were as numerous as any army. My father always said the Alanga would one day come back, and when they did, they’d try to reclaim the Empire. All the Alanga had powers, but their rulers had more than most. When one island’s ruler fought with another, the clash of their magics had killed so many hapless bystanders. Enormous walls of water, windstorms that flattened cities. The greatest of them, Dione, could drown a city while saving all the flies, but most Alanga didn’t have that level of control.

The chief protagonist is the emperor’s daughter Lin, who was meant to be his heir but now faces intense competition from his adopted son Bayan because she lost all her memories 5 years ago. The emperor keeps most rooms in the palace locked and makes Lin and Bayan compete for the keys to unlock them and gain more knowledge. To prove herself worthy of the throne, Lin decides to pull off a string of heists to steal the emperor’s keys and secretly learn the bone shard magic he has kept from her. Determined, hard-working protagonists are my favorite, and she shines as exactly that from the very first chapter. As she claws for more power, she also grapples with the ethics of using this magic at the expense of other people’s lifeforces–is it justified if she’s trying to hold the empire together and save people from warfare everywhere? The direction her story takes is pretty surprising as she uncovers layer after layer of the mysteries behind what her father is really doing.

My father ruled his Empire by proxy, all his power and commands distributed to his four most complex constructs: Ilith, Construct of Spies; Uphilia, Construct of Trade; Mauga, Construct of Bureaucracy; and Tirang, Construct of War. It occurred to me that this must be why he guarded the secrets to his magic so zealously. If I were smart enough, if I were clever enough, if I were careful enough, I could rewrite the commands embedded into their shards. I could make them mine. Father didn’t think I was enough. My memory was lacking. But I knew who I was now. I was Lin. I was the Emperor’s daughter.
And I would show him that even broken daughters could wield power.

Another major protagonist is Jovis, a smuggler who has faced discrimination all his life because he is half Poyer, a minority people not native to the empire. He has spent the 7 years prior to the story searching for his abducted wife, even making deals with a notorious gang to get a boat to sail the islands. Early on, when an island he’s on sinks into the Endless Sea, he rescues the kitten / otter-like creature Mephi, who is utterly adorable and becomes his animal companion. To Jovis’ enormous surprise, Mephi turns out to be no ordinary animal. Not only does he slowly learn to talk, his presence starts giving Jovis superhuman powers to fight off the gang members chasing him across the islands to collect the debt he owes. Jovis finds himself rescuing a string of children from the Tithing Festivals, then as his notoriety grows, he gets roped into helping the underground resistance against the empire. He starts off very practical and cynical, only saving kids for money and not believing in the possibility of a revolution, but slowly comes into the responsibility of using his powers to help those who need it. He has a valid point in that most revolutionaries end up becoming tyrants themselves, though. I appreciated how the rebels in this book were not portrayed as selfless saviors, but possibly shady people who have their own agendas. It made the conflict less black and white and kept you guessing at how everything would resolve all the way until the end.

“I’m not a hero. I never set out to be a hero in the first place. Those children? Their parents paid me to rescue them.”
“The Empire was established to save those people from the Alanga. The Shardless Few is trying to save those people from the Empire. Who, after, will save the people from the Shardless?”

HOWEVER, the book does have one wide-eyed, idealistic revolutionary in the form of bookseller Ranami, who is in a relationship with the sword-bearing, armor-wearing Phalue, daughter of her island’s governor. Ranami and Phalue are an amazingly complex F/F couple who love each other very much, but struggle with sorting out their political differences. Ranami has tried many times to get Phalue to pay more attention to the issues on their island, but Phalue believes her father’s feudal system is a fair exchange and that those who starve just don’t work hard enough. Phalue thinks she’s qualified to make this judgment because she’s Not Like Other Aristocrats. She doesn’t care for luxuries, gives to the gutter orphans whenever she can, has a commoner mother, and interacts often with commoners.

“I know it bothers you,” Phalue continued, “but these things are this way for a reason. The farmers receive land from my father; they owe him their fealty. Yes, I think the way he spends the money is stupid, but it is still his right to send the caro nuts to the wealthier islands, where he can fetch the best price for them. He still pays the farmers their fair share. He keeps order and peace, and that deserves payment.”

I think we’ve all struggled with this type of “come on, it can’t be THAT bad!” people (or were one of them), so I found Phalue and Ranami’s plot thread to be the most compelling of the book. (It’s not just because they’re amazing F/F rep, I swear!!). It takes Phalue a realistically long time to truly understand what Ranami has been saying to her for years, though she still starts off as a decent and interesting person, so you don’t dislike her for what she initially believes. But the book’s point is that merely “being decent” is not acceptable when it comes to addressing oppression. If you have the power to change things for the better but you don’t choose to, you are still complacent in the exploitation of others.

“It’s hard to remake one’s view of the world, to admit to complacency. I thought remaking myself for you was hard enough, but doing that was something I wanted. I didn’t want to realize how much I’ve hurt the people around me, and that’s what confronting my beliefs meant. We all tell ourselves stories of who we are, and in my mind, I was always the hero. But I wasn’t. Not in all the ways I should have been.”

This timely theme of “you should do more” runs through the entire book. Ultimately, I find the Bone Shard Daughter to be a story about all the ways an authoritarian regime can go unchecked because of fear and acquiescence, and how those with the power to make even the slightest things better have the responsibility to do so. It actually reads like a cyberpunk tale, except it takes place on beautiful and fantastical islands instead of urban cities (though there IS constant rain too!). It’s definitely a very unique book, so I absolutely recommend checking it out.

Bonus Cosplay Shots:

Lin with her green-bound journal of memories

The First Sister Cosplay + Review

*Cosplay of the titular First Sister, nameless, voiceless*

The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis

A Red Rising meets The Handmaid’s Tale space opera, out now from Skybound

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Personal Rating: I’d betray any higher power to join Hemlock’s gang

Reasons to Read: Richly-realized worldbuilding, compelling characters, non-binary rep, multilayered tension, mindblowing plot twists

You know, despite literally being a sci-fi author, I’ve always had trouble connecting with space operas. I don’t know why. But I DEFINITELY didn’t have a problem with this book. The worldbuilding, character work, and unraveling plot threads were so perfectly balanced that I breezed through it without a single moment of boredom or confusion. Even though it was this far future space society with so much history, everything was presented in a very digestible way. The gist of the setup is that Earth and Mars originally fought a long war over resources, during which a bunch of scientists were like “aight, this is a lost cause” and flew out on a vessel called the Icarus to colonize Mercury. There, they found the fantastical substance hermium, which fulfilled all their nerdy scientist dreams and kicked their tech up to another level. By the time the war ended, with Earth and Mars’ combat AIs growing sentient and being like “aight, this is a lost cause” and peacing out to the outer planets, the Icarii were so much more technologically advanced and prosperous that they could afford to turn Venus into basically the Hollywood/Instagram planet, with a lavish entertainment industry. BUT they refused to share their resources, particularly hermium, so Earth and Mars joined forces as the Geans and entered a new war to scavenge tech from the Icarii. My favorite part of the worldbuilding was how a lot of it was conveyed via these excerpts from in-universe books or fliers or speeches, which gave it an extra sense of depth. I also found it interesting that the typical big sci-fi robot rebellion came BEFORE the start of the story, and it influenced the Gean society into becoming super religious and hung-up on being “natural,” as opposed to the Icarii, who readily embrace technology like neural implants and genetic engineering.

The Dead Century War was fought because Earth continued to demand resources from its child, Mars, while they were both suffering. Unable to help Earth any longer, Mars went to war. And afterward, when the war stopped because the Synthetics abandoned their makers on both sides, there was no choice but for the two planets to enter into a reluctant treaty and become the Geans. While the Dead Century War had raged, the Icarii built paradise and then refused to share it with the rest of the galaxy.

The story is told through 3 POVs on different sides of the conflict, 2 in real time and 1 through these cool voice message transcriptions, and they’re all easy to get invested in. The first, the First Sister, is literally nameless and voiceless, both having been taken from her when she was 12. She is a “priestess” of the Sisterhood, the chief religious organization of the Geans, but what her duties really entail is comforting soldiers on a starship by listening to their feelings, or “confessions,” and providing them with sexual relief (though no sexual assault happens in the book itself). This is clearly an allegory to how women are expected to listen to and comfort and serve everyone around them with a smile on her face, without troubling them with her own emotions in return. It’s like a male fantasy come true and codified into a system.

Somehow, at twelve years old, I had been forced to forget my name.
I was sent away then to my first assignment, a pleasure liner that brought soldiers home from deployment, with a dozen other Sisters who attended to passengers. And that was when I used all I had been taught, the taking of confession, the act of forgiveness, and, when I grew older, the comfort of the body. Yet I clung, ever so tightly, to the secret part of me. I wanted a home. I wanted a family. I wanted to be anything other than what I was.

On the surface, the First Sister acts like a loyal, demure servant of the system, but she secretly wants out badly. The only way she can avoid the advances of the entire starship of soldiers is if she has the captain’s exclusive favor, which she did before the start of the story. She thought she would soon be free from all this when that captain promises to take her off the ship with him as he retires, but she learns a painful lesson to never trust the promises a man makes in bed when he straight up leaves without her. Now, with a hardcore new captain Saito Ren on board, she has to fight for the white armband that marks the captain’s exclusive favor all over again. Except, this time, she receives a personal mission from the Mother, leader of her religion: spy on Captain Saito and report back any fishy details, despite their religious doctrine specifically forbidding this type of treacherous behaviour. She’s hesitant about this mission to begin with, and it only gets harder when she finds that Captain Saito wants to know more about her as a person instead of seeing her as an outlet for venting. They’re two lonely women who slowly get closer, but a sense of doom constantly presses down on their budding romance, and the biggest question of the book is how the hell they’re going to get out of this.

When I turned twelve years old, I woke to find my sheets covered in blood. I cried then, so sure was I that I had done something horrible. I did not fear for myself, never once considered that I was the source of the blood despite the pain in my stomach, but wondered who I had harmed or killed. Finally my dreams of violence had come to fruition, and I had become a monster.
My Auntie heard me crying and came to see what was the matter. She did not speak, but in the lines of her ecstatic face, I saw that she was pleased. She held me to her chest and hugged me, then slapped me across the face for making noise.

The second POV is Lito, a soldier on the other side of the war who worked his way up from the very bottom of Icarii society. He is a Duelist, a kind of elite Icarii soldier who fights in pairs with transforming hermium blades controlled by neural implants. He is a shining example of the Icarii equivalent of the “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” doctrine, so much that he even got his sister out and funded her pursuit of a career in art. However, a major failed battle prior to the start of the story made him fall from grace and caused the Icarii to separate him from his partner Hiro, who he is basically soulmates with. Lito and his sister still live in the top rung of society, but there’s a lot he’s unhappy about, and he has a tendency of repressing all those emotions with commands from his neural implant. His big dilemma comes when the army sends him on a mission to kill Hiro, who apparently went rogue while on a deep uncover mission in Gean space. His struggle deepens when he discovers that Hiro may have betrayed the Icarii for very good reasons (because, despite living so close to the sun, the Icarii are SHADY AS HELL). But if Lito doesn’t complete the mission, his sister is still back home, and he doesn’t know what could happen to her if he goes rogue.

From the moment I earned the Val Roux Scholarship to the Academy, climbing the levels of Cytherea for my family, I was nothing more than a soldier. I went for the same reasons anyone on the bottom level would—no more cramped two-bedroom apartment for four people, no more bland slop called dinner, no more poorly recycled air that left you slightly out of breath—but I became exactly what the military wanted me to be. Strong. Courageous. Loyal. I never asked questions, even when I should have.

The third POV is a batch of voice messages that Hiro secretly ships to Lito, and it definitely has the strongest voice of the POVs, providing iconic non-binary rep. Hiro is a character that EXUDES personality, mainly because they grew up in a such a repressive picture-perfect home that they decided that they could not deal with being anything other than unapologetically themself. There’s not a lot I can say about them without going into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave it at this: you will be delighted and mindblown by how the mystery behind their motivations resolves.

My mother’s name was Mariko. She couldn’t stand the idea of her or my father living a lie for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes I wonder if this is why I am who I am: unabashedly me. And sometimes I think of how this must remind my father of the woman who walked away from him, and wonder if that’s why he hates me so much. Not for who I am, but for who I remind him of. For Mariko.
Because I also can’t stand the idea of living a lie for the rest of my life.

In fact, the entire last 1/3 of the book is a sequence of twists that will boggle your mind. Everything set up throughout the rest of the book collides in such a way that will leave you going OHH MAN WHY DIDN’T I SEE THAT COMING. Each character has reasons to stay loyal to their societal system and reasons to defy it, and things don’t necessarily play out the way you’d expect them to.

Overall, The First Sister is a tense, thrilling, emotional read that’s easy to get sucked into, and worth a try even if you’re not typically into space operas. It’s out NOW, so go check it out!

Bonus cosplay shots: