What an extraordinary story.
As you reach the end of Outlaw Planet by M. R. Carey, one of the finest contemporary voices working in science fiction and fantasy, you will be consumed by the idea that here is one of the very best and most human stories you have ever read.
Set in the multiverse worlds that Carey brilliantly established and brought to vivaciously violent and diverse life in his two Pandeminion books, Infinity Gate and Echo of Worlds, Outlaw Planet is a standalone tale that punches so far above its already impressive storytelling weight that you will gasp in admiration at the way it tells its sobering but ultimately hopeful story and wonder at the intelligence and imagination behind it.
This is no ordinary science fiction novel.
It comes complete with world-building on an amazing scale, the true extent of which is revealed in a narrative told in the present and in flashbacks to a group of soldiers who stumble upon it during the last major engagement of an interdimensional war, a central character known as Dog-Bitch Bess who may be consumed by vengeance and grieving loss but who is one of the most intensely real protagonists you will ever have the pleasure to spend time with, and a breathtakingly rich heart and soul that is rich in thought, deed and intensely alive feeling.
It takes the endless potential of the multiverse, a place of billions of worlds, all of them fantastically diverse riffs on planet Earth, which is itself a cradle of life in all its bewildering astonishing variety, and takes it to places to awe-inspiring and heartfelt that you will wonder how just one man came up with it all.
Around this time, too, jockeying for power between the so-called Parity in the north and the south’s Echelon was getting worse, not better. There were some that wanted it to come to a boiling, and others that wanted peace at any price. But despite what any of them said or did to make trouble or avoid it, trouble seemed to be coming on at its own even pace.
But then M. R. Carey is not just any author.
The person responsible for reinventing the zombie apocalypse and giving it so much humanity that you rightly wonder if the scourge of the undead is what people needed to become really and truly alive and for the thrillingly imaginative The Rampart Trilogy which dares to imagine a future where daring unorthodox tactics aren’t just brave, they are everything, Carey is an author who has proven again and again that they can go epically big and wide without losing the heart of the matter in the process.
Proof of his storytelling gift is Outlaw Planet which tells the outlandishly large tale of a woman pejoratively known as Dog-Bitch Bess, a woman who starts out life as a member of the semi-upper crust in what’s known as the States’ Union for becoming a schoolteacher on its Wild West-like frontier and finally an outlaw or hero depending on your perspective.
She is an impressively well-wrought figure no matter how you view her, someone who has to grow a callous over her heart after true love enlarges in a way only it can do, who gives up so much and yet retains an intrinsically bold and strong sense of self that guides her through death, destruction, war and liberating planet-wide revolution.
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
You cannot look away whenever Bess is on the page.
She is the exemplar of what happens when terrible things are wrought against one person, someone who, as fate would have it, ends up in possession of a powerful gun called Wakeful Slim, a piece of AI-driven out of place and time in one sense but perfectly where et needs to be in another who ends up saving a life, bringing about a truly unique friendship and ultimately saving the world.
Her story is one of how searing loss can corrode the soul and send it hurtling on a path it never expected to travel but how all of that death and violence, much of it well and truly justified, though not all because Bess, Carey bless her, is not a faultless figure, can also be the clarion song of freedom and hope too.
Outlaw Planet is ultimately Bess’s story, powerfully and wonderfully told, but it is also a recounting of an entire planet on the final frontline of a terrible and often soulless war which seems lost to everything good and thoughtful until people from across millennia, united in the most marvellously imaginative of ways, decided to do something about it.
This was make or break, the moment when the plan would either play out or fall in pieces. But since there was nothing Bess could do right then to help or hinder it, she put her head down and ran on.
Quite what that is, and why it is needed, forms the hugely epic heart of Outlaw Planet.
What is staggeringly impressive is how even in going to some expansively rich places, worthy of a blockbuster which is effectively what this novel is in written form, Carey retain a tight and affecting focus on the deep and moving humanity at the heart of the tale.
Styled as a Western of sorts, and when you find out why you will gasp again at how clever the thinking behind Outlaw Planet is, the novel could easily have been all dazzling action and astonishing set-piece with just enough characterisation and heart and soul to give it a beating sense of narrative self.
But Carey is not an author to simply be all action and no heart, and so, while Outlaw Planet does have many moments of action so big and huge you will marvel they could it in just one book, it is also allowed to be an intimate character portrait of an exceptional woman and wider than that, of a society staggering under the weight of a burden unlike any other in the multiverse.
There is so much to discover in Outlaw Planet, so much to think about and to feel and to wonder and marvel at that this reviewer almost envies those who will read it for the first time, but know this, even when you have reached the end, you will likely want to dive right in again and experience all over again one of the most exceptional protagonists you will ever meet in a story like no other that knows the world can be big and dangerous and full of diversity on an epic scale but which knows that real life is lived in the small moments and that they can be the most powerful moments of all.