Catch as Catchkeep can

[bloodygranuaile]

 I purchased Nicole Kornher-Stace's Archivist Wasp from the Small Beer Press table at Readercon 2015 (I know because it's signed), and in true me fashion, I didn't get around to reading it until last week. I'd heard good things about it, which is why I bought it, but I hear good things about lots of books. Sometimes I hear a bunch of good things and then nothing for a while and then I hear more good things and go "Huh, I have that book around somewhere," which is basically what happened here.

 

In this case the second round of good things I heard was that it popped up on a couple of rec lists for books that are low on romantic content, and there's not always a whole lot of those written for adults! So I was pretty stoked to see how that panned out.

 

Archivist Wasp is definitely My Kind of Book in a way that is different even from most of the books I say that about. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic civilization with a haunting and not-overly-explained religion based on constellations. Our protagonist, Wasp, is an Archivist, which at this point means she's a ghost-hunter who takes field notes and keeps prior field notes around. Her position is one that is considered very important but also very creepy, so the townspeople are generally scared of her, and the only person she interacts with regularly is the douchebag priest in charge of raising the other girls who will compete for her title every year. Wasp doesn't really like being Archivist; she has nothing against ghosts and a lot against the priest; and she has attempted to run away before but is always brought back. So when she meets an unusually strong ghost--one strong enough to talk to her like a normal person--she is quite easily convinced to go off on a harebrained quest to help the ghost find the ghost of his old fighting partner. I wouldn't exactly say that Wasp and the ghost of this dour supersoldier from the pre-apocalyptic civilization get on well, especially not at first, but they do eventually learn to work together as very lethal and fucked up comrades, and thus we have an emotionally moving plotline about FRIENDSHIP and TRAUMA BONDING with NO ROMANCE WHATSOEVER and it rules.

 

It's also very dark; there's quite a lot of fairly intense violence, and a lot of very bleak and pointedly political stuff about war, organized religion, accumulated power, human experimentation, and other such classic science fiction themes. Though the "supersoldier program gone horribly wrong" trope is hardly new to scifi storytelling, it doesn't feel at all stale because it's tied in so well with the post-apocalyptic cult of Catchkeep, which is definitely not quite like any other wacky fantasy world religion I have read before.

 

If, like me, you like brutal worldbuilding but also The Power Of Friendship, then this book is for you.