Review: Jubilee by Stephen K. Sanford
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for review consideration.
Jubilee is Stanford’s first book and it is a very solid debut. Mild spoilers follow.
The world of Jubilee is a sin city in space, a station built on the other side of a wormhole into a pocket universe in which there is no galactic civilization and it’s hinted the laws of physics may be slightly different.
It’s run by a Scottish AI (or rather an AI who affects a Scottish accent) named Douglas. Our protagonist, Col, travels there with a coworker, Danae, to retrieve the body of a VIP who apparently died during a bender.
But nothing is as it seems. Human space is caught in a culture war in which the Movement, led by the mysterious Gidram, is trying to bring back certain old things. Like caring what gender somebody is born as. Old things like that.
Stanford postulates a high tech world, with nanites, DNA alteration on the fly (allowing for appearance changes and for gender confirmation that is easy, total and reversible), FTL, and a history of colonialism as bad as anything on Earth.
An interesting choice is to create a world that is queernorm light…nobody cares if you’re gay or bisexual and people transition just to see if it’s right for them…and then view it through the eyes of a…
