I got to a point over the summer when I had complete thriller fatigue. Heavily pregnant, unable to move and beset by life’s realities (Ohgodogodohgod how was I going to cope with TWO CHILDREN?) The last thing I wanted was a dark twisted domestic drama. I wanted total escapism. And that’s how I ended up reading Diabolic in the delivery suite.
It’s set in space, a fantastical future in which the stars have been colonised using great leaps forward in technology – but the ruling class has since turned away from innovation towards religion, locking themselves away from danger in ancient, luxurious space stations.
Nemesis is a diabolic, a sub human, genetically engineered and bonded to a little rich girl named Sidonia, designed to defend her with as much savagery as necessary.
Good sci-fi should be entertaining escapism but still say something about the world we live in
And she is pretty savage – one minor character gets dispatched without so much as a shrug. She is strong, sharp and completely unapologetic – killing is in her nature. As diabolics have been banned by the Emperor who rules over their part of space, she shouldn’t even be alive at all but she finds herself at the heart of imperial politics, a world even more casually vicious than she is.
As the blunt instrument that is Nemesis learns to fit into a far more subtle world, the character’s growth is convincing and enjoyable, and the author has great world-building skills – a must for any sci-fi writer. The book also benefits from being a standalone rather than the first of a trilogy – the plotting is tight, the action beautifully timed and there’s no padding – although it would have been nice to have more detail about the world outside the imperial upper-class bubble.
Good sci-fi should be entertaining escapism but still say something about the world we live in now, and the message here is a warning about equality, fundamentalism and not burying our heads in the sand and avoiding reality (which, ahem, was exactly what I was trying to do.) So while I was looking for a complete break from reality I actually ended up with food for thought, which is just as it should be.
And the baby? Just under 8lb of non-diabolical cuteness. A whole new plot to be written.
The Diabolic by SJ Kincaid is out now
