(courtesy Goodreads)
In a field as venerable and well-established as science fiction, with tropes plenty and cliches to burn, it can be challenging, though clearly not impossible as an impressive number of recent new books in the genre attest, to come up with something truly, mesmerisingly new.
And even if you do manage to tick that cleverly inventive box, balancing some gee-whiz epic storyline with some truly affecting insights on what it means to be human (or an alien with fully-realised thoughts and emotions because there are a lot of them too, and not just at Area 51) is not always easy to pull off, meaning you can be left with spectacle but no heart and that only gets you, and by extension, the reader, so far.
Frontier by Grace Curtis is one of those sci-fi novels that manages to not only flip the tables on what a novel of the genre should be and should accomplish but to do it in such a way that while we are transported far away from the cares of our everyday (but well and truly into those of someone else who has their hands well and truly full), but to do it with characters that absolutely reach into your heart, slam it home in your soul and make you feel far more than you thought you might in the midst of some superbly escapist storytelling.
Reluctantly, she resumed her climb, trying to fix her focus upwards, back to the goal that had been, for so long, the source of single-minded pursuit. She was almost close enough to permit wild fantasies – like what the message would say, if she was able to send one out: I’m here. I’m okay. Where are you? Are you okay?
Also, if she had the space: I love you.
Also: I miss you.
Also: The last time we said goodbye, I wish I’d held on just a little tighter. I wish I’d stayed there just another second. I wish I’d buried my face in your neck and told you how much I love you. I wish I wish I wish.
It’s chief claim to fame, and the one who carries Frontier effortlessly along with a mix of military skill, quick-thinking and vibrantly, at times funny, personality, is the protagonist known by a variety of names throughout the book, depending on who she is interacting with, and throughout her cross-apocalyptic Earth journeying, she meets a considerable number of people, some outright bad, some good and some fallible to their core and simply wanting to survive.
Thus she is the Stranger to an incestuously tight-knit town where power is in the hands of someone ill-equipped as a human being to execute it well and to the people of a bar at the gods-forsaken base of a towering city called New Destiny where the poor cling to the bottom and the rich saunter through the upper floors, the Homeless Woman on account of the fact that, this far in her arduous trek, she is looking a good deal worse for wear.
She is in many ways everything to everyone, but for all her chutzpah qualities, she’s also scared, a woman way out of her depth of a planet she has little-to-no knowledge of, save for some tutoring on its strange, hard-scrabble sensibilities who simply wants to find the woman she loves, who may or may not be alive and who is the world she never thought she’d have and which she is desperate to regain.
Frontier is a queer romance above all else, but it is also a thrilling told adventure tale of one person lost, and then found, in startlingly unfamiliar terrain, someone who crashes to Earth from the stars where, hundreds of years earlier, the vast bulk of humanity fled for safety in what has become known to those who chose to stay behind on a near-ruined planet as the Great Departure.
(courtesy Rebellion Publishing)
To say too much more is to reveal the exquisitely enthralling and beautifully imaginative and thoughtful world-building that fills Frontier to the highly readable brim.
In a relatively short novel that is full of clever ideas and moving insights, Curtis takes us deep into the heart of the contrary strangeness of the human condition where a Gaia (Earth Mother)-based religion has inspired enough people with its tales of tech-savvy humans who left as sinners and those who stayed behind as the blessed worthy of their god’s embrace (though clearly not her bounty with most people struggling to survive as fulsomely as those in space seem to do) to keep some sort of frontier-like society just ticking over.
All the Western tropes are here from the crooked law enforcer to the wayward, if well-meaning priest and the know-it-all pillar of society who knows better than others (and who can sew well too) and Curtis uses them an inventiveness that reveals many of them to be simply normal people wanting to survive whose twisted beliefs have left them stranded on a world that now seems inimical to their survival.
But a funny thing happens to our adventuring searcher for love on her multifaceted, character-rich journey a cross a broken world that may yet be able to be redeemed, and not by a religion that has some strange takeaways from the lessons of climate change and almost-terminal environmental degradation.
There was nothing more to say. They shook hands – he had a grip like a pair of boulders – and she climbed onto the bike. The engine came instantly to life, trembling with an energy that rattled her teeth.
She took off with only a nudge of the pedal, up the ramp and out into the bluish dawn sprinkled with soft, tentative rain. She turned cautiously eastwards, moving through the debris, blinking away the rainwater that wept down her eyes. Buildings peeled away to either side, and the broken white lines slipped faster and faster beneath the front tyre, summoning the rising mountains and the glare of the unshrouded sun.
She begins to realise, in-between learning to ride a horse and a motorcycle, thankfully at different times, that maybe the people of Earth aren’t as bad as she thought and that maybe the planet may have some fetching features, after all.
Indeed, for all the people who give her hell, and who covet her tech, despite their beliefs preaching that this is a wanton sin, there are a good many more who help her, many in their own idiosyncratically self-interested way, and who prove that maybe this jaunt to Earth to render aid and sustenance may not be so fruitless and may even lead to some wonderfully good lasting change.
When the back cover blurb of Frontier promises you “Love. Loss. Laser guns.”, that’s precisely what it gives you, and in ways both dramatically energising and vivaciously comedic, but it also gives you so much more, primarily a moving rumination on what home is, what it can be and the lengths we will go to get back, especially when it’s centred, as all the good ones are, on someone worth loving enough to make you journey across a landscape full of “saints and sinners, lawmakers and sheriffs, gunslingers and horse thieves”.
Frontier is a beguilingly smart and funny, affecting and endlessly adventuresome, queerly romantic, superbly well-written gem that has stunningly expansive world-building, an envelope-pushing, cleverly imaginative premise on which it delivers with fecund storytelling nous, emotion so moving it will never leave you, and characters who make the pages, and your heart come alive, chief among them our laser gun-toting protagonist who might be in over her head in some respects but who knows who she loves and what she’s willing to do to remake her home and heart, and maybe, just maybe, an entire planet into the bargain.