Barbados - Cygnus Beta Trilogy

Country: Barbados  
Book: The Best of All Possible Worlds/The Galaxy Game/The Blue, Beautiful World
Author: Karen Lord
Publication Year: 2013/2015/2023
Genre: Speculative/Science Fiction

Sometimes on this journey/exercise, we will have very little to say about the author’s country of birth. In turning to Barbados, our subject takes her Caribbean home and expands it into an entire world.

If you draw a line between the works of Octavia E Butler and Ursula La Guin, somewhere along its length you will fine Karen Lord. Her novels have the world building of Le Guin coupled with the extended friend and family networks of Butler. Lord’s trilogy of books featuring the world of Cygnus Beta feel like Butler’s Parable or Xenogenesis books placed in the worlds of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle.

Like the Hainish Cycle (or Iain M Banks’s Culture series), each book of the Cygnus Beta series is a standalone novel with only some loose connections between them. In creating the world of Cygnus Beta, Lord’s stated aim was to create a world of islands and archipelagos, like the islands of the Antilles wrote large.

That said, only the first book n the series, 2013’s The Best of All Possible Worlds, takes place exclusively on the planet. It’s sequel. the Galaxy Game, published in 2015, is a mixture of on and off world adventures.

After an 8 year break, during which time Lord returned to her fantasy series, Redemption, she wrote the third Cygnus Beta book, The Blue, Beautiful World, published in 2023. However, this time the action takes place almost exclusively on Earth with many of the scenes set on a futuristic version of the island of Haiti.

Each book is quite different, but contain the idea of an extended friend and family group that is a common feature of all of Octavia E Butler’s books. In The Best of All Possible Worlds, a society whose planet has been destroyed and the survivors who reside on Cygnus Beta are mostly male. The book plays out like an island hopping adventure as a team of scientists look for likely candidates to help preserve the race.

However, this is really just a backdrop to the real story, which is the burgeoning romance between the two main characters, the human, Grace Delarua, and Dllenahkh, one of the surviving Sadirans.

Obvious comparisons are drawn with Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, but there is also much of Butler’s Patternmaster series in evidence, especially with Dllenahkh’s manipulative behaviour, reminiscent of Doro in Wilde Seed and Mind of My Mind (but without the body snatching). Though there are a number of characters who use their psionic powers in much the same way as Doro.

Those psionic powers return in The Galaxy Game. Rafi Delarua, Grace’s nephew in The Best of Possible Worlds, had been essentially kept in detention due to the psionic powers he has inherited from his father. He eventually escapes Cygnus Beta for the planet of Punartam, where his psionic powers are a little more accepted. The Sadrian plot from the first book returns with one colony attempting to take passion of all of the remaining females capable of breeding.

To be honest, of the three books in the series, I found this one the most confusing. The narrative routinely switches from the first to third person and back again and I’m not entirely sure who the first person sections are meant to be. Serendipity, I think: the character. who returns in the third book. It’s a kind bildungsroman with some elements of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, but feels much less like a science fiction book than The Best of All Possible Worlds, despite featuring a number of different planets.

The Blue, Beautiful World is another sort of book altogether. In fact it kind of feels like two or three different books shunted together. It starts with Owen, a charismatic pop star as he tours the world with his entourage. But soon this switches to recruiting a series of young people to take part in a training program using sophisticated VR in Haiti. The real purpose of this training is only revealed to the trainees at the end.

In all, they’re not the best sci-fi books I’ve ever read, but they’re far from the worst either. Somewhere  to the right of average. Lord wears her influences lightly, but the beams of Butler and Le Guin cast long shadows. The idea of a planet like the Caribbean is revolutionary, but doesn’t really persist beyond the first book.

It’s perhaps a little frustrating for a project such as this that when we do reach Earth and the islands of western Atlantic that we don’t land in Barbados itself. Or in Grenada (see: Grenada) or Trinidad and Tobago (see: Trinidad and Tobago). But then so many convergences and connective threads have woven themselves n the books we have reviewed up to now, we shouldn’t be disappointed when the stars do not quite align. Besides, we have visited three Caribbean islands in a row. It’s too much to expect they should all connect together. Time to move on to some other part of the world. Though I will circle back around at some point to the read the two books of the Redemption series. 

Karen Lord