A world where humans are descended from a variety of mammals endures its own equivalent of the U.S. Civil War\u2014the northern, industrialized Parity arming against the southern, rural, and slave-owning Echelon. When a marauding Parity gang\u2019s rampage in a frontier Echelon town kills otter-descended schoolteacher Martha Good, her lover, dog-descended fellow teacher Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, joins a group of Echelon guerrilla fighters, seeking a violent revenge that the gentle Miss Martha never would have wanted and earning her the moniker \u201cDog-Bitch Bess.\u201d Assisting her in these brutal endeavors is Wakeful Slim, a multifunctional AI gun that\u2019s a piece of ancient Precursor technology. In the distant past, a Pandominion strike team pursues rebels seeking a return to the old government\u2019s policy of conquest over parallel Earths; the chase strands the rebels on an Earth whose inhabitants are unwitting participants in a terrible experiment. These two storylines converge after Bess, who\u2019s on the run from Parity forces, picks up a new companion with a mysterious mission. In addition to the iconic tragedy of the gunslinger, whose bloody path can only have one ending, Carey adds the tragedies of the sentient gun and armed drone; this is probably the first time you will sympathize with actual weapons. Perhaps the messaging around the racism directed toward the novel\u2019s Black and Native American analogues is a bit obvious, but it does two very important things: It highlights both how artificial the categories are that we put people into, and how the thoughtless acceptance of those categories leads to more brutal consequences.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A world where humans are descended from a variety of mammals endures its own equivalent of the U.S. Civil War\u2014the northern, industrialized Parity arming against the southern, rural, and slave-owning Echelon. When a marauding Parity gang\u2019s rampage in a frontier Echelon town kills otter-descended schoolteacher Martha Good, her lover, dog-descended fellow teacher Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}