ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books – release date 8 February 2022 in UK and 22 March 2022 in Australia.
How can you possibly resist a book which winningly pitches itself as the story of a lesbian gunslinger who fights spies in space?
Reader, you cannot, and honestly, why would you even try, as Ciel Pierlot offers up in the full-speed ahead, quip-heavy delights of Bluebird, the type of gung-ho queer space opera that will engage your soul, entertain your mind and get your heart racing as the protagonist, Rig, dashes her spirited, impulsive way across a galaxy that sits heavy under the weight of human occupation.
The sheer genius of Bluebird is that it manages to be both a thrillingly charming race for justice, truth and long-denied human and alien connection across the vast reaches of space, ripe with sparkling good humour and richly-realised characterisation and a startlingly insightful treatise on the evils of imperial rule, displacement of indigenous populations and extremist zealotry that takes no prisoners with its messaging while somehow remaining nuanced and thoughtful.
Bluebird has the lot, also bringing to the very small spaceship kitchen table, some evocatively immersive worldbuilding that makes you feel as if you could literally walk onto any of the planets on which the action is set and have gloriously good adventures, and experience a deeply poignant sense of humanity as various people, not least the torn protagonist, do their best to make whole what has been broken.
“The Nightbirds, the group she [Rig] and Mohsin work for, mostly work in people-moving. getting refugees fleeing the ongoing war to safe planets. Helping former indentureds – like herself – smuggle themselves away from faction homeworlds and agriworlds. Hiding people from the law for as long as need be. When they’re not sabotaging every piece of faction tech they can get their hands on, stealing faction intel, breaking up faction bases. Just generally doing everything they can to slow the all-consuming three-way war that so often puts their people – the Kashrini people – in the line of fire.”
Rig is by far the standout character in a cast of arrestingly interesting people.
Brimming with vivacity and intense charm, Rig is a tortured soul who three years earlier fled life as a top scientist in the Pyrite faction, one of three human-led theocracies who have divided the galaxy up between them and who have been engaged in ceaseless war for ten-thousand years, all fighting for the good name of the god for whom they live and fight.
Done with the idea of extremism dressed up in pretty religious clothes, Rig has left her entire life behind, taking the schematics for a deadly weapon she has invented with her, one that has the capacity to kill trillions and the invention of which she lives in eternal regret for, ruing the day she ever thought her faction had her best interests at heart.
None of them do, of course, but try telling the many operatives and military people keeping each faction jockeying for position, all of whom it seems, as Bluebird gets briskly and memorably underway, are out to track Rig down, stopping at nothing to bring her to heel, including threatening the life of her sister Daara and imperilling her much-loved kickass librarian girlfriend June who has learnt more from books than simply how to construct really great sentences.
In short, Rig, a blue-skinned Kashrini who has suffered, along with her people, at the hands of colonising humanity, has problems aplenty and the gradual coming together of a host of people with fairly intense agendas, all out to get here in one way or another, means that the novel has a lot going on pretty much all the time to brilliantly good storytelling effect.
For all its endlessly good forward momentum, what Bluebird never once lacks is a raw sense of captivatingly moving, raw humanity.
Rig is constantly battling her considerable inner demons, the kind that could sink a lesser soul but then the owner and pilot of Bluebird the spaceship, has, as the novel blurb promises, much panache and pizzazz (literally as it turns out; finding out what this is exact is fun and sobering in equal measure); she’s had to fight hard to build a life for herself far from factional influence (or not so far since they seem to keep catching up with her at regularly annoying and often bloody intervals).
For all of her gusty bravura and confident charm, Rig is all too aware that some poor, pride-filled but necessary for survival decisions from her past are posing a major danger to her present and future, as well as making life hell for people she loves dearly or comes to love dearly such as a mysterious bounty hunter named Ginka who comes to form the nucleus, along with a rebel leader who came to Rig’s rescue when she needed it the most, of the kind of found family everyone needs if they’re lucky enough to get it.
Pierlot has constructed the kind of protagonist in Rig that you will embrace and love from the get-go, because for all her raw confidence and way with a ready, bitingly funny retort, she is a broken person looking to build her life and that of galaxy back together again in a way that respects diversity, justice, free thinking and alien and human rights.
“Blood – she needs to stop the bleeding. That’s the first thing to do. Memories of first aid crash courses come to mind, and she recalls that has to put pressure on the wound. Wrap it tightly with whatever she has – but she doesn’t have bandages. They packed rations and such on the bike. Not a medkit.
Her hands run over the thin fabric of Ginka’s clothes – nothing long enough. Nothing that would work. She goes to her own shirt before realizing that it wouldn’t work either. Her breath hitches and her hands stop.”
A bracingly good swashbuckling space adventure that draws you in and along with a giddy sense of big things about to happen, Bluebird is a complete and utter joy, offering up the kind of heady storytelling that offers breathless escapism and thoughtful incisive reasoning all at once.
For all its action and sense of pell-mell momentum, the novel never once forsakes the humanity at its core, taking time to let us into the hearts and minds of its characters so that we understand how much is at stake and how much it all matters to everyone involved.
It’s fun, sure, in massively big and ceaselessly inviting ways, and you will happy jump where Rig jumps and run where she runs, without giving it second thought, but you will also stop to ponder more than once, at the capacity of people to enact great, enduring evil but also at the endless hope-filled capacity of the human, and alien spirit, to fight for truth, love and all the good things we should always exhibit and live for, no matter what, and who, is arrayed against us.
As debut novels go, Bluebird is up there with the very best, reading like the work of someone who’s been at the storytelling biz for a good long while, a vivaciously entertaining story of one woman’s quest to save her life, to keep her found-family safe and to maybe remake the galaxy into a kinder, better and more diverse place (one refugee, challenged regime and saved Kashrini artifact at a time), one where humanity trumps hatred and brutality ever single damn time.