AS a writer, RSA Garcia is fond of portents. The very first chapter of her upcoming book, The Nightward, is littered with them. Clearly bad things are going to happen as that first chapter proceeds, and apparently quite soon.
The final chapter toys with the reader, offering some particularly surprising twists and turns, before ending with a whopper of a foreshadowing.
I’d encountered Garcia’s writing rather late, with the publication of her novella Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 in Unknown Magazine (https://cstu.io/757828), an endearing work of hard science fiction written almost entirely in local creole.
That story recently won the author a Nebula Award, one of the premium indicators of arrival in the universe of speculative fiction.
But it was with growing apprehension that I began to read the first few chapters of The Nightward.
A confession here: I am not a fan of the various fantasy branches of speculative fiction. My preference drifts to hard science fiction, but meanders outward from there into various realms populated by concepts and notions that are anchored, no matter how tenuously, by some tether of logic, science or supportable narrative logic.
So alternative histories? Great. Anything involving magic and actions that are inexplicable in-world? My attention begins to drift.
So here’s what I can tell you about The Nightward. There is a lot of magic. There are also magical creatures and what summary shorthand would describe as possessed zombies.
Guiding my mind back to the matters at hand is Garcia’s solid sense of world-building, though the book really should offer a map to orient things, at least geographically.
She is clever enough to bring her presentation of Gailand to life with measured, but descriptive bricklaying, slowly building awareness of the world that her characters inhabit. There is an above-average number of people of colour in this world, as well as several people who are notable for their pale aspect. I had a sense of braided, kinky locks in majestic designs in the courts and streets of her imagined world.
But the author rarely spells anything out explicitly, choosing instead to drop a fractional description here and a quiet reference there.
[caption id="attachment_1098803" align="alignnone" width="680"] The cover of RSA Garcia’s upcoming book. -[/caption]
She’s also not afraid to kill her characters after investing thousands of words in their creation and establishing emotional attachments that reach beyond plot-driven narrative connections to touch the reader.
And yes, that even includes the reader who affects indifference as the story seems to canter along what appear to be the predictable narrative ley lines of fantasy fiction.
The author is also quite keen to inject into the book a sense of her own Caribbean experiences. There are smells of curry, potato pies and stewed chicken in the air and fashionable saris and shalwar kameez among the well-to-do and people of station. To the reader unfamiliar with this Caribbean garnishing, it is a thing of litt
