"The Best of All Possible Worlds" by Karen Lord (2013)

 **A fantastic journey told with a unique voice.  If you don't know Karen Lord, you should**

I've always liked the narrative structure I call a "road trip" novel.  There's probably a technical term for it, feel free to let me know.  But it's a narrative structure in which basically the only consistent feature is the main character or characters.  Characters are introduced in one part of the novel and then left behind, never to be seen again.  Chekhov's gun remains comfortably on the wall.  Each scene or episode is a new one, and yet (when this type of structure is done well) the main characters change and grow.  It doesn't necessarily have to be an actual "road trip", but that's certainly the simplest way to accomplish this

The classic examples on opposite sides of the world are "The Journey to the West" and "The Odyssey", and to some degree any "road trip" novel written in one of those literary traditions is, consciously or otherwise, thinking a bit about one of those two.  I bring up those examples because of that, but also because I've always found that "road trip" novels do have that big, large Mythic quality to them

(amusingly though, real life is more or less a road trip novel, or at the very least it doesn't follow a literary narrative structure.  Huh)

This brings us to "The Best of All Possible Worlds" by Karen Lord.  It's a fantastic road trip novel, our group of main characters traveling and visiting different worlds and civilizations.  But one fascinating point is that, unlike the Western and East Asian traditions I mentioned above, but as part of the modern Caribbean literary tradition.

Let's back up, for a second.  Karen Lord is a fantastically global writer.  She was born in Barbados, went to university in both North American and the United Kingdom, but very much lives and writes as part of (at the forefront of) the Caribbean literary scenes.  She has an absolutely wonderful narrative voice which, well . . . if you have a few minutes, go read her remarkable short story "Hiraeth: A Tragedy in Four Acts".  I'll wait

Ok so, here is where I need to step a touch carefully.  I will admit that I am not nearly as familiar as I'd like to be (I'd say Junot Díaz and Nalo Hopkinson are the only two Caribbean writers whose work I've read extensively).  So I don't want to make blanket judgments and say that all almost 50 million people from 13 countries feels this way or etc.  But I will say that I can see so many echoes of Karen Lord's mindset throughout this book, a way of viewing the world that i so deeply informed by her heritage

A common theme in Lord's work is displacement.  People are far from home, and more specifically far from their ancestral home (in "Hiraeth", we never actually see the main character on Earth, he is flung out into the solar system and the stars.  But he still reflects on his tethers to Earth).  This idea is reality for so many people of the Caribbean, people who have grown up and lived their whole lives in their Caribbean culture but still very much have links to the traditions of Africa or the Middle East or any of the multitudes of homelands represented in the modern Caribbean

Which brings us, much later than usual for these threads, to discussion of the book.  The setting of the book is an aftermath of tragedy, as the entire world of the Sadiri people is destroyed in an instant.  Lord deals with this tragedy, and its effect on the survivors who were off-world, with compassion and dignity.  But in the end, these survivors have to move on, and that is where our story begins

And so.  Our refugees tour around Cygnus Beta, a world full of communities that is a mix of other indigenous and refugee cultures.  The parallels to the Caribbean are obvious, and it is with great joy that Lord presents her science-fiction interpretation of her home.  In fact, she states it rather explicitly in the Acknowledgements section:  "The Caribbean is to me the new cradle of humanity.  It was easy for me to imagine an entire planet just like it, with people from every corner of the world."

The two main characters are a Sadiri, the head of the group looking for a potential new home for his dwindling people, and a local Cygnian who has been assigned as his guide and is given early in the book one of my favorite character intros in a while:

One of the advantages of having languages as a hobby is that it can take you quite a while to run out of swear words.

And thus . . .it's road trip time!

In many ways, this is science fiction at its simplest, modern cultures transplanted into the stars and allowed to grow and flourish.  It's not completely simplistic, you're not going to be reading each chapter and going, "oh, this one is obviously Trini.  Oh, this one is Cuba."  But on the other hand, when she was reviewing the book, Nalo Hopkinson relates, "This former Trinidadian resident was thrilled to find the Trinidad Carnival’s annual 'las’ lap' around the Savannah — a 260-acre national park in Trinidad’s capital city of Port of Spain — transplanted into a science-fiction setting."  Hell, Lord even gives one of mankind's oldest jokes to the Sadiri:

“A woman had three sons, and when they were grown, the first came to her and said, ‘Mama, I love a girl and wish to marry her.’ She replied, ‘Son, this gladdens my heart, but of what lineage is she?’ ‘Alas, Mama,’ he told her. ‘She is half Terran.’ His mother raised her hands and shook her head and said, ‘A tragedy, but I will cope.’ 

“The second son came some time after to inform her of his desire to marry, and, worse yet, the bride he had selected was half Terran, half Ntshune, with no taSadiri in her at all. But again his mother raised her hands, shook her head, and said, ‘A tragedy, but I will cope.’ 

“Finally, the third son came to her and said he was engaged. When she inquired about the girl’s lineage, he answered smugly, ‘She is all taSadiri, Mama.’ ‘Wonderful news,’ his mother cried. ‘Of what family?’ ‘She is of the Other clan,’ he confessed. Whereupon his mother rose up with her blade and slew him without another word.”

I loved this book because it just feels a little bit different, a little bit out of step, from a standard science fiction novel.  As our main characters travel, they explore countless new cultures and ways of living.  They learn and hopefully they grow in the process of their road trip.  And hey, maybe we the readers get to explore some new cultures as well, and maybe we the readers get to grow a little bit

I loved this book

“Remember your ancestors, dream of your descendants, and work hard while you’re living.