Book Review: Once and Future
Once and Future is my favorite book I’ve read in 2019. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing in one day and really wish the sequel was already out.
Concerning the plot and concept, it reminded me of two of my favorite no longer running TV shows: BBC’s Merlin and Firefly. The world had a bit of a dystopian flare, reminiscent of Hunger Games and Feed.
There were spaceships, unchecked capitalism, sketch government cover ups, and hereos resisting cooperate villains.
Once and Future had just the right balance of goofy, darkness, action, and romance.
And all the characters were queer. One POV character was pan. Another was gay. There was a gender fluid side character with they/them pronouns. Another side character was ace. This book had all the LGBTQIA rep.
The crew was full of personality!
I have zero complaints about the characters, plot, or ending. Even though this was a retelling, I was never quite sure what was going to happen next!
The only flaw I noticed was one I didn’t think of until a few days after I finished reading . The world building, on the science fiction side, lacked detail and explanation. So if you are someone who wants to know how the space travel and the terraforming and whatnot works, then you might have a problem with this aspect of it.
I had no problem ignoring those holes and just taking everything at face value. This was more science fantasy than science fiction anyway. After all, there was magic.
And really, I was in it for the characters and the adventure, not the technical side of the world building, so I’m still giving it five stars.