HADRON AGE SF (71)
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October 12, 2023
One in a series of posts about the 75 best sf adventures published during the genre’s Hadron Age era (from 2004–2023, according to HILOBROW’s periodization schema). For Josh Glenn’s Hadron Age Sci-Fi 75 list (a work in progress), click here.
Charlie Jane Anders’s Victories Greater Than Death (2021).
Although she lives a normal life on Earth (with a mom who, contrary to YA tropes, is a smart, cool, activist, and very supportive), bored seventeen-year-old Tina Mains knows she’s really a clone of one Captain Thaoh Argentian, a legendary (and purple) galactic hero — whose memories, knowledge, and skills are urgently needed by the Royal Fleet in their war against The Compassion, a genocidal alien military wreaking havoc off-world. If Tina suffers from imposter syndrome, then, it’s understandable; in fact, when she and her eccentric, home-schooled friend Rachael are taken aboard the HMSS Indomitable to join the anti-Compassion effort, she soon discovers that her transformation (back) into Argentian is incomplete. (She can access her former self’s information, but not his emotions.) This doesn’t prevent alien assassins from pursuing her! It’s a fun YA space opera in the Star Trek/Heinlein juvenile as opposed to the Star Wars tradition, but one in which the Royal Fleet’s diverse ensemble of alien species introduce themselves with their preferred gender pronouns and neopronouns, and they don’t see any value in breaking down new recruits in order to build them up again; in fact, individuality is highly prized and celebrated. When Rachael decides she doesn’t want to go back home, despite her inability to become the hero everyone thought they needed, she is permitted to recruit more diverse, gender-fluid teenage supernerds from Earth — a gamer from Mumbai, a 15-year-old PhD in physics, a Chinese roboticist, a Brazilian hacker — and head out on a mission to retrieve a powerful artifact much desired by the Compassion. Not your typical dark, dystopian YA sf fare, then…. “In the last five years, I feel like I’m seeing more than dystopias,” Anders has said. “There are fun, colorful worlds where teenagers say, I’m going to explore, I’m going to figure this out, I have goals I’m going to accomplish. I think it’s better for teens to read about characters who act rather than react.”
Fun facts: Anders’ first work of YA fiction won the 2022 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. It has since been followed by Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak (2022) and Promises Stronger Than Darkness (2023). In 2021, it was announced that Amazon Studios was developing a TV series adaptation.
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST HADRON AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES.