Redsight by Meredith Mooring
This is an absolutely amazing book, and I’m very grateful to Solaris Books for gifting me an advanced copy to read.
Korinna is an adept of Vermicula, the Red Goddess, and a practitioner of the blood magic that comes with that position. Considered the least capable of her cohort, she finds herself thrown into a worlds-spanning conflict involving the pirate queen Aster Haran and the Galactic Imperium. But things are not what they seem, and soon Korinna finds herself falling in love with the wrong person, and agreeing to help them to revive a dead goddess.
This is one seriously insane book, but in the best possible way. It’s easy to draw comparisons with Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy (religious orders gone awry, rebellious priestesses, crazy magical effects, and so on), but it’s so much more.
The main point-of-view character, Korinna, starts off a bit broken, convinced that she’s worthless and won’t amount to anything. But as the story unfolds, and she starts to come into her power, she also grows as a character. She’s still flawed, and still makes mistakes, but by the end of the book she’s almost the antithesis of who she is at the start.
The other two main characters, Aster and Sahar, also go through their own, similar development, though their share of page time combined is slightly less than Korinna’s. Even so, the author does a superb job of showing us who these characters are and getting us to empathise with their respective positions. There’s also quite a bit of queer representation in this one, and it does get a little spicy at times, but it’s not just there for the sake of it – it helps develop the characters and give reason to their later actions and motivations. And it is very well written indeed.
One thing that really stands out for me about this book is the setting, and especially the magic it uses. There are three religious orders, and each has its own unique form of matter/energy manipulation, all made possible through the use of a nebulous force referred to as tactus. The Red Witches manipulate space-time, allowing for the movement of massive spaceships across vast distances; the White Witches control light, and perceive the truth of the universe around them; and the Black Witches manipulate matter and gravity, up to and including the consumption of entire stars to fuel their power. There are no explanations or justifications for how these powers work, they just do, and that for me works so well it’s ridiculous.
This is most definitely not the sort of sci-fi/space opera most readers will be used to. It pushes the boundaries of space fantasy to their limits, and subverts so many well-worn tropes that in some places my mind was very literally blown by what I was reading. If this is what Meredith Mooring is capable of with her debut novel then I’m most definitely interested in seeing where she takes us next.
If the idea of a weird, fantastical sci-fi with queer witches and galaxy spanning action appeals to you, give this one a read when it comes out in February ’24.
