The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord is, appropriately for its title, the most optimistic book I’ve read in a long time. Reading it felt so good that, when I finished, I immediately wanted to turn the book over and start again, to spend a little longer in Lord’s cozy, diverse world and become even better acquainted with its characters.
I say this even in light of the tragedy that begins the book: the planet Sadira is destroyed by an offworld enemy, leaving one of our protagonists, the psychic scholar Dllenakh, in an overwhelmingly male group of Sadiri refugees who just happened to be out in space at the right time. Sadira’s colony worlds are unprepared to take in so many new people, and many of the refugees have become depressed and violent as a result of losing everyone they’ve ever cared about. So the remaining Sadiri send an expedition, including Dllenakh, to the planet Cygnus Beta, which has been taking in refugees from various human species as far back as anyone can remember, and therefore must have some Sadiri expats somewhere.
And this is where the story really begins, with Cygnian government biologist Grace Delarua becoming a liaison to the Sadiri new arrivals, and a friend to her opposite number Dllenakh, and joining the expedition to visit every ex-Sadiri population on the planet to find out if any of them are still genetically similar to the new group.
From this point onward, the book becomes a series of travelogues, with each chapter relating a visit to a different community. Cygnus Beta is wonderfully diverse, and each community has its own traditions: one is in the midst of an Earth-style Carneval when the expedition arrives; one is a hunter-gatherer society that lives in harmony with nature but raids neighboring tribes with deadly efficiency; one has modeled itself on Celtic mythology in order to stop a decade of inter-family feuding; and one is a racist feudal city-state that Delarua decides to overthrow, all by herself and at the cost of her own career, by reporting to the planetary government that the city’s lord is the father of most of his servants.
I swear this book earns its happy ending.
Each setting comes with a different degree of willingness to accept the differences between people and groups of people. (It’s worth noting here that a number of the characters have dark skin, and Delarua’s mother reveals herself late in the book to be bisexual and interested in polyamory, though since the rest of the relationships described in the book are male/female, it feels a bit like an afterthought.) In an author’s note, Lord says she modeled Cygnus Beta on the diversity of the Caribbean, which makes a lot of sense.
Even when all the different species of humanity live together peacefully, though, there are still stereotypes about what each is capable of, not only based on appearance but also on expectations of psychic ability, which is something nearly all the characters have some amount of. The Sadiri are known for cultivating mental discipline and for forming Vulcan-like psychic bonds with their spouses, and breaking those bonds (whether through divorce or by the destruction of an entire planet) is extremely painful. Delarua's abusive ex-boyfriend once psychically manipulated her into caring about him, and one of the subplots is about her dealing with both the long-term effects on her mental health and the hold he now has over her sister. Delarua herself has ancestors from a species of human who psychically project happiness, a group that members of other species still tend to be suspicious of, and the story spends a decent amount of time on the ethics of telepathy, mostly from the perspective of Delarua both recovering from what has been done to her and getting over her fear of harming others by accident. Her character development here parallels Dllenakh’s process of grieving, and they grow closer as they heal in the kind of slow-burn romance that I am incredibly on board with every single detail of.
To this extent, the book earns its happy ending. As a result of the journey, the Sadiri refugees start meeting potential wives and have the choice of passing on their own culture or integrating to different degrees into local cultures. Delarua gets a new job working directly for the Sadiri community and their new families. She marries Dllenakh, and it makes total sense.
But there's another story going on under the surface, one that I didn't mind but that will probably seem out of place to some readers. Many Cygnians believe in a group of godlike beings who rescue human communities from global tragedies and bring them to Cygnus Beta. This includes some tragedies that don't seem to have actually happened, like a nuclear winter on Earth.
The subplot provides evidence both for the existence of these gods and for the alternate timelines that some Cygnian communities seem to have come from. A friend of Dllenakh's who is psychically bonded to a faster-than-light "mindship" is sent to find out what happened to Sadira using some vaguely-defined application of mindship technology that involves traveling backwards and sideways in time. He returns a year later, decades older (and aging backwards!), with a great many stories from parallel universes that he's not allowed to tell, plus a report that the enemy planet whose people destroyed Sadira has been locked away in its own pocket dimension, unable to see or contact the outside universe. A second pilot is able to use the same technology to rescue two members of Delarua's expedition from a cave-in that would otherwise have killed them, at a moment that I think is supposed to be the climax of the novel but doesn't really feel like it.
So yes, there are gods, and there's time travel, and that may turn some people off what is otherwise a very practical book. But the idea that the gods are benevolent is comforting, as is the idea that they are good at identifying and punishing the worst human wrongdoings (which means they're also on the lookout for people abusing mindship time travel). I'm not even bothered by the lack of climax, since each chapter feels like an independent short story, and the time-travel rescue is a suitable climax for the story about time travel.
This book was both a joy and a comfort to read, and I look forward to reading everything else Karen Lord writes.
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