Seven Devils, Elizabeth May & Laura Lam

Having had a great run of sci-fi recently (thanks entirely to C's book-picking skills), a correction was inevitable. Seven Devils, an unusually two-handed affair, delivers this in spades. Its sole distinction is a primarily female cast in what's routinely a male-led genre, but everything else is wholly unoriginal, a poor copy of a copy of a copy. A poly-galactic evil empire, a despotic ruling family, the inevitable sequence of run-ins with scions of said family, lazy archetypal characters that include the plucky one, the clever one, the tortured-by-their-past one, etc. On top of this, it's also profoundly stupid. It has zero consideration or even awareness of scale, with the protagonists hopping between galaxies in minutes, and across which the empire has a mere *hundreds* of colonies. The empire is also said to have killed many billions of people (and aliens), but a key plot device is a so-called super-weapon that kills *individual* enemies (though, via another MacGuffin, ultimately kills more). Further, despite this background of proper genocide, the lead characters somehow find time to agonise endlessly about their individual transgressions. While the authors are clearly investing their own worthy opinions into the characters, they're oblivious as to whether those views plausibly stack up against the horror of the world described. They patently don't, and the novel fails at every turn, talking about Big Issues while floundering around in a breakneck series of weightless and faux-clever episodes. Other crimes include adding "diversity" by having a character speaking with Oor Wullie-style Scottish vernacular (to indicate they come from solid working-class stock), having regular occurrences of convenient, dig-me-out-of-this-plot-hole technology to get around plot ridiculousness, and, I kid not, "auras".

While I am entirely behind the socially-aware, feminist ideas that the authors clearly started from, this is a poor vehicle for promoting them. Vapid, lazy, inconsistent, and just plain stupid. Avoid this book.