3.5 stars-Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this novel, releasing August 29th!

I'm a BIG fan of The Best Of All Possible Worlds (the first book in this trilogy) and generally liked but wasn't wild about The Galaxy Game. This ties in many characters and references from those novels but I think can probably be read as a standalone if you're okay with figuring out much of the worldbuilding as you go. I did enjoy this quite a bit (still LOVE Karen Lord's writing style). The book is informally sectioned into two parts with a timeskip in the middle-the first part felt a bit incongruous and was harder for me to get into, but I really enjoyed the second part (around the last 2/3rds of the book). I love sociological/anthropological sci-fi, and Lord does such a wonderful job with these concepts in a speculative/futuristic setting. Probably worth reading the first two books before this one, but still recommended!

The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord, the latest in her Cygnus Beta novels, is unlike any science fictional work I’ve recently read. It depicts familiar elements: a vast scale of galactic politics, a humanoid diaspora in space, a climate-changed Earth where cities are being enclosed in protective globes and many current nation states have disappeared. But it also probes family relationships and projects a kind of human transformation as a future that can save the galaxy.

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This latest novel, which can be read as a stand-alone (though all the references to the galactic background might take time to sink in) combines epic scale with powerful feelings that can unite humanity, yet without any simple pitting of good against evil or set-piece battles. It is intense without being violent and offers a vision of a potentially peaceful future that humans could enjoy – or could break apart. The Blue, Beautiful World is a story I love, even though it underplays all the usual SFF tropes after leading you to expect many of them to drive the story.

At one point, we read that the Earth, a couple of centuries from now, is at a “tipping point, ripe for salvation or destruction, angels of deliverance or barbarians,” and Karen Lord manages to keep the reader at that difficult point of balance. The story begins with a brief scene at the coronation ceremony of the Patrona (monarch of an unnamed planet) and a question from a bumbling emissary, who first praises her rise to the throne in place of her whimsical brother, then abruptly asks where is that brother. She answers: Paris, with a “Did you not know?” that reveals the limitation of the emissary’s spy network. We are not told any more about the monarchy or who the emissary represents. Instead, the scene shifts to Paris where “the streets were screaming” as the entourage of the world rock star, Owen, the Patrona’s errant brother, drives past adoring crowds.

That first section dramatizes Owen’s vast popular appeal as a rock star, but his elaborate security force, headed by General Ahn, hints at a far different purpose than simply ensuring the safety of a pop icon. Owen has the kind of power that could turn him into a ruler of the world, or perhaps its unifier in a more benign way. An attack on his manager, Noriko, is revealed as one prong of an attack on Earth by an advance guard of aliens who have for centuries been infiltrating all walks of human life. They are effectively concealed by masks, but Ahn’s security force can readily identify them through a tell-tale shimmer under the chin. Noriko, who has been kept in the dark about this larger purpose of Ahn’s security force, is finally brought into the loop of Owen’s inner circle, and we see through her eyes as she realizes just how widespread the alien threat has become.

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The way that larger story develops, however, is completely different from most with such a space operatic setting. At one point, the Patrona announces to the citizens of Earth (in a terrifying first contact experience) that they have been infiltrated by rogue actors and that these are being eliminated by the Galactic Gendarmarie. But that occurs mostly offstage, and the action the novel brings to the foreground is the multi-dimensional effort, led by Owen, to unify the contending factions and rulers of Earth so that they can take a place on the Galactic Council for the first time. Owen’s attempts to do this test his resolve to use his charismatic power over people for good.

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The Blue, Beautiful World is a truly visionary novel that projects a path for humanity through the long-term recovery from colonization to a potential recognition of all that its many peoples share. It’s a path fraught with danger, the abuse of power, backsliding into ancient enmities, but capable of leading to a fundamental transformation. Reading it, I find myself compelled to go back and reread the earlier books set in this universe to see how all of its worlds and ideas fit together. Karen Lord’s work in this series is a treasure of insight to the possible future of humanity.

(Full review originally published on SciFi Mind, June 16, 2023)

First, in case you didn't realize it, this is science fiction.
I love science fiction!
I did not love this book. I liked it.
One of the main characters, Owen, is a charismatic performer. From the beginning, it seems he needs to be reined back to not use his "powers:".
The surrounding cast of characters were believable. That is, until one character had two names (in one location) and two other names (in another location). But that didn't come to light until later.
So, the world is falling apart. Beings from elsewhere (i hate to call them aliens) are trying to ready the world for First Contact.

I don't want to give away any more. But, some important information isn't given until later on.

Also, this book is the third in a series. I don't usually read the third before the first and the second. You decide for yourself.

Time well-spent. I would recommend. I give it 3-1/2 stars.

The Blue Beautiful World is the latest science fiction novel from Barbadian author Karen Lord, one of the more recent greats of Science Fiction and Fantasy, at least in my opinion, even if she's not well known by many even within that space. The book is technically the third book in a series which began with The Best of All Possible Worlds (a book I absolutely love) and was continued a while later with The Galaxy Game (which I didn't really like), although the novel is not advertised as part of a series at all. The series has always dealt with human connections, anthropology, and how people come together (the first book was part anthropological sci-fi, part romance, the second book featured magic-like technology that used personal and emotional connections to impact the real world) and this book brings that to a future version of our planet Earth, one which has seemingly covalesced into a global society....even as outside forces begin to make contact.

And the result is...interesting, for sure. The story uses its third person narration to follow a number of characters, dealing with lots of ideas based upon the darker history of the world - colonization and human domination - and how to try to avoid those situations going forward. It features a bunch of interesting tech ideas and more far out concepts, some of which are based upon ideas from The Galaxy Game, and features as its protagonists a number of younger people all trying to work to help the Earth move forward as part of a well established and somewhat fractured at times galactic society. And yet the book doesn't keen in on this idea until its second act, with the narrative suddenly switching course after its first third in what seems possibly like a jarring fashion. It's an interesting book and I'm not sure how well it works - certainly I'm curious how well it works without having read The Galaxy Game (although I think it works significantly better than that novel) - but I'll try to review it anyway.

Note: The novel features references to the prior two novels, especially the events of The Galaxy Game, although those references are minor for the first third before becoming more prominent thereabout. There's also a conclusion to a plot thread from that book....sort of....in the book's ending (I think that'll be dealt with more fully at this point in probably a future book. So you may want to read the prior books first, even if this is not advertised as part of a series.




--------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------
In the near future, in a seemingly more tight knit global society on Earth, a pop star named Owen is somehow constantly making waves - despite not being the most beautiful or having the best voice or even having his own songs. But there's something unearthly magnetic about Owen that makes people drawn to him, and makes him connect with so many around the world....and also for some reason, puts him and his crew in the targets of some unknown adversary. For Owen is not some ordinary pop star, and his agenda is to do something far more comprehensive than merely getting famous, but to put together a team of technological, analytical, and philosophical experts and geniuses to connect the world through art, sports, and more. And Owen's adversaries will do whatever they can seemingly to stop him from upending the world order for Owen's mysterious purposes.

Years later, a group of aspiring government servants - mostly young people, with the oldest a mere 26 year sold - from small nations will be brought together to be part of the Global Government Project's first ever Diplomatic Group. Assigned to be part of that group, Kanoa, from the Federated States of Polynesia, isn't quite sure what to expect - he's still struggling with the loss of his father, and of strange dreams of his father still being present in the Sea somewhere. But what Kanoa and the rest of the Diplomatic Group soon learn is that they are being set to examine a first contact scenario, one in which Earth is the latecomer to galactic society, and where joining that society will require the utmost skill to avoid Earth being placed in an inferior position to its conquering or colonizing betters......
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The Blue Beautiful World is a difficult book to talk about, because honestly both the plot summary provided on Amazon and on the book's back cover and the one I've provided are kind of mildly spoilery, in that they both deal with a character who doesn't appear until 1/3 of the way through the book and after an 11 year time skip. But to be fair, there's no way to really talk about this book otherwise, with the book's first act following Owen as he galivants around the world putting together a team of experts in various technological and psychological fields and also performing as a pop star for unknown purposes while unknown probably alien adversaries attempt to threaten him and to stop him....and then pivoting to seemingly a different more first contact-y plot focused on different characters thereafter. The different parts of this book are clearly all related, and if you have foreknowledge of who Owen is and what his abilities and intentions likely are you'll be able to get that sooner than someone going in fresh, but it's kind of misleading to just describe part 1 in the plot summary above.

That said, Lord does make each part of this book read incredibly well and in an incredibly compelling way - her prose just somehow reads so easy to me and allows me to consume it incredibly quickly, and made me care about each of the characters really really well, even with the books' faults on other levels (discussed below). In the start, Owen's quest to gather people around the world without taking a dangerous heel turn and his manager's struggle to help him with that while being in the dark about who Owen actually is works far better than it should (even if said manager basically disappears after that first act). In the middle, Kanoa's struggle to deal with both his own grief and his attempt to do good for the world with the young people of the Diplomatic Group is really strong, with it being really easy to care for both Kanoa and the rest of the group as they struggle to deal with the ideas of dealing with a strange far more advanced and dangerous new alien galactic civilization (and even go overboard at times, which honestly is kind of delightful). And the book's final act, as things all come to a head is written as well as it probably could have been.

That said, I'm not sure that conclusion works, for similar reasons to that of The Galaxy Game - there just isn't enough time for the ideas involved that Lord is playing with (Saving the world and bringing it into galactic society not as a colony or a conquered world through mental connection and cooperation) to really be explored such that it feels like the conclusion kind of comes so abruptly that I had to read it multiple times to get what was happening...and I still don't get fully how it worked. This is another short book and it honestly shouldn't be - and that doesn't even go into page length that is devoted to small running plot threads from the prior books that advance only a little and don't really matter to this book.

Lord makes Our Blue Beautiful World still interesting because of how well she writes, mind you, and others might find it works better for them, especially if they liked the Galaxy Game. And even for me there's enough here that I enjoyed reading this, even with my confusion, and would be back for Lord further exploring this universe. So this is a solid book, It just didn't hit that super high level of amazingness that some of Lord's other works have hit for me.

Don’t read the publisher-provided summary. It gives far too much away and will mess up your expectations.

The first 75% of this is truly excellent. It tightly follows a few characters—Owen, a magnetic pop star, Noriko, his badass employee who makes everything happen, and Kanoa, a member of a council selected to work through hypothetical challenges (kind of like a super involved global Model UN). You really get to understand the characters and what they care about even if you don't really know yet what's happening overall.

The last 25% felt rushed: more like a series of events that happened rather than the conclusion to all these people's stories.

I don't really want to say more than that: this is one of those books that's better if you go in knowing as little as possible.

Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey!

I thought I would really love this but it just wasn't the book for me!

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review!

This book started out with an exciting premise but seemed to lose it's way. Chock full of ideas, but one is picked up and put down too quickly without actually expanding the thought of it.

I wanted to like this book, but I just couldn’t get into it. The first fourth of the book was boring and only hinted at something interesting happening, but not enough to make me care what it was.

After enjoying Redemption in Indigo immensely back in 2020, I’ve had Karen Lord on the list of authors to revisit for a few years. I bought a copy of The Best of All Possible Worlds, but when I saw she was coming out with a new first contact novel, I decided to rearrange my TBR to read The Blue, Beautiful World.

The Blue, Beautiful World is set in the same universe as The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, but it’s designed to be read as a standalone, and I had no trouble following the story without having read the other two. It’s a bifurcated novel, feeling something like a book and its prequel—or a book and its sequel—being combined into a single work. The first half features a pop star working with political and cultural leaders to build the leadership structures that Earth will need when the extraterrestrials he knows exist finally make themselves known, and the second skips decades forward to watch those seeds sprout, following students in his program dealing with the realities of first contact. 

In theory, I really like the move of splitting the story in that way, getting to see both the plans and the outcomes without compressing the story into an unreasonably small timeline. But in execution, I felt the second half just wasn’t fleshed out in the same way as the opening portion. The first half zooms in on a hyper-competent but out-of-the-loop manager, trying to gather all the necessary resources and calm her famous employer as he spreads himself far too thin, but without being privy to the details of why his work matters so much. It’s a fascinating opening that develops a quality side character and interprets the lead’s challenges through her eyes, all the while putting so many balls in the air that the reader can’t help but wonder where they’ll all land. 

The second half, on the other hand, feels too much like checking boxes—especially in contrast with such an excellent opening. The primary perspective switches from the manager to a student in what is now a long-standing leadership program, meeting other future leaders from around the globe and working through a first contact assignment that the reader understands is very much the real thing, presented in the guise of fiction. And the new perspective character is plenty interesting, but he’s also entirely out of the loop, and by the time everything becomes real, the problems barely have time to be introduced before they’re resolved. The lead’s long-term internal struggles are fought almost entirely off-page, squeezed into the decades between the times of the two perspective characters, and a side quest that does become a major subplot feels too decontextualized to make a big impact. The story hits every plot point needed to give a satisfying resolution to the questions raised in the first half, but they simply don’t have enough room to breathe, robbing some of their emotional resonance. 

Overall, there is still a lot to like about The Blue, Beautiful World. The first half is excellent, and if the ideas it raises don’t get quite enough breathing room as the story progresses, they still give the story enough structure to end on a satisfying note. Unfortunately, not having yet read The Best of All Possible Worlds, I can’t make a firm recommendation on whether to jump in with the new release or circle back to the first book set in this universe. But I can say that Karen Lord has set up a compelling world that I plan to spend more time reading. 

Recommended if you like: spending more time on the prep work than the first contact. 

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.

A really well-written novel about aliens here on earth in the form of a super star! The story is a slow burn with reveals coming at a slow and steady pace. Characters are relatively nuanced and the plot is compelling.