Banner of Souls

[sawyl]

Another week passes and another Liz Williams novel, this time the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke shortlisted Banner of Souls.

The story is set on distant future versions of Mars and Earth where men have been all but wiped out, humans have evolved to the point where they're grown like peas in a pod, the Earth has been comprehensively flooded so that only a few islands remain, and most technology makes use of spirits and ghosts. It's against this backdrop that the main characters, a girl called Lunae who can manipulate time, her guardian Dreams-of-War and her nursemaid, are forced to defend themselves against the attacks of disembodied aliens called the Kami and a human assassin from the planet Nightshade.

Banner of Souls is an interesting novel with a deeply cool, elegantly ambiguous backdrop. There are hints and suggestions that the Martian history, the one that says that all life in the solar system came from Mars and that men were an Earth-bound mutation, is false but these are never entirely resolved. The concept of haunt-tech is also seriously neat: a field of science where a seance just as legitimate a form of investigation as a particle physics or nuclear magnetic resonance, a sort of cranky spiritualist's dream come true.

The idea of an almost all female world is also fun, although it took me a while to break out of my gendered ways of thinking: on a few occasions I had to remind myself that all the characters were women, especially given Dreams-of-War's macho preoccupations such as hunting, killing, kicking ass, protecting her personal space, stuff like that. I think my only gripe with the novel is the trouble I had buying into some of the characters: I never really got a feel for Lunae or her nursemaid, and I also struggled with the motivations of Yskaterina. Maybe that's intentional given their alien natures, or maybe it's just me and my male chauvinism, but that's they way I felt. Whatever the reasons, it doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the story and doesn't mean that it wasn't worth reading, even if I do suspect that, deep down, I preferred The Poison Master.