Blog tour: A Fugitive's History of the Known Universe by Nadia Afifi

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘In the sequel to A Rebel’s History of Mars, Azad and his fellow time-traveling historians must contend with the consequences of the dark secrets they’ve exposed…

‘After exposing the dark origins of his world on the distant planet of Nabatea, Azad is a fugitive, hunted across the galaxy by the fearsome Vitruvian authorities. But to lead a passive society into revolution, Azad and his crew must enlist the unlikely help of a space pirate with an agenda all her own.

‘Their adventures once again draw them into the past, into the early days of settlement on Nabatea, where a death continues to haunt the fledgling community and a mother must contend with her son’s monstrous vision for their new home.’

A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe, by Nadia Afifi, picks up soon after the events of A Rebel’s History of Mars. Having played a key part in discovering and spreading some inconvenient truths about Barrett Juul – the revered founder of orderly, paternalistic planet Nabatea – and the two-tier system of standard humans and superhumans (Vitruvians) that supposedly evolved naturally on the mass exodus from Mars to Nabatea 1,200 years previously, everyman turned freedom fighter Azad is hiding out off-planet.

There’s plenty of information left for Azad and his crew to uncover, however. A chance encounter with Vitruvian space pirate Farra puts them on the trail of Juul’s mother, Dr Saadia Hamza – a renowned scientist in her own right who opposed her son’s authoritarian approaches to settling a planet, and eventually disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

Equipped with Barry, their quantum physics-based machine that enables them to view past events (providing someone observed them), Azad and co. travel to the farthest reaches of the Nabatean solar system to learn more about the kind of person Dr Hamza was and what became of her, all while struggling to stay one step ahead of the authorities who will stop at nothing to apprehend them for rebellion and heresy.

I really enjoyed A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe! I don’t know if ‘space colonies so many generations in, there’s a long-established official origin narrative some of their citizens are starting to question’ is a recognised subgenre (see also: Desolation: The Overdue Library, by D. Harrigon and its follow-ups), but as a sci-fi reader and erstwhile historian, I’m very much here for it!

While some of the mysteries of both Desolation and Nabatea can be pursued in a library of one kind or another, an invention unique to Afifi’s duology is Barry the quantum history machine, which can display and record scenes from the past. I found the concept of Barry mind-blowing when I first encountered it in A Rebel’s History of Mars, and Afifi wisely limits its abilities so as not to make things too easy for Azad and co.

On the technical side, Barry has to be at the physical location the event in question happened to replay it (necessitating some very long-distance travel – including through wormholes – while trying to avoid bad actors); the event must have been observed; and its inventor, catty Vitruvian Feisal, is still working on adding sound to its capabilities at the start of the book.

On the human side, the absence of context and sound means that what Barry shows is liable to misinterpretation, and – as the crew are already well aware – distributing the footage isn’t going to immediately persuade people to turn away from stories they’ve been fed their entire lives, let alone leave their gilded cages to rise up against their oppressors.

Considerations of human nature also arise from events in the early years of Nabatea 1,200 years previously, which we witness in full detail through alternate chapters that follow Dr Hamza, while Azad and co. receive an abridged version via Barry (I found it very satisfying when they discovered something I already knew, as well as when I got the full picture of something they’d glimpsed!).

For one thing, the colony is already well on its way to being the tightly-controlled society of Azad’s time: Juul – who we already know from the previous book is a wrong’un – has determined that only a small number of people of his choosing get to be Vitruvians (and therefore privileged), while the masses bear the brunt of the hard, hazardous physical work of building a settlement, are deliberately limited in their choices, and risk being “blanked” (essentially turned into mindless biological machines) if they don’t do as they’re told.

For another, when the settlers spot a mysterious object crossing the night sky, Juul and many others consider it an alien threat they need to pre-emptively attack (it’s probably a good thing Nabatea doesn’t appear to have any native fauna…), whereas Dr Hamza and her allies approach it with curiosity. All of this raises the question: if humans eventually colonise other planets, is it inevitable they’ll just make the same mistakes and perpetuate the same inequities as on Earth?

Like Dr Hamza, I was captivated by the smooth, dark flying object, and fascinated by the properties she discovered it had. Without giving too much away, I found the culmination of her investigation – which we learn about alongside Azad, all those years later – highly imaginative and enthralling, though it also made me feel sad for both of them.

A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe is a compelling, inventive, and well put-together sci-fi sequel.