**4-Star Review: *The Galaxy Game* by Karen Lord**

*The Galaxy Game* by Karen Lord is a richly imagined blend of science fiction and social commentary, set in the same universe as her acclaimed novel *The Best of All Possible Worlds*. The story follows Rafi, a young man with psychic abilities who navigates a galaxy filled with complex cultures, advanced technology, and the mysterious, high-stakes sport of Wallrunning.

Lord’s world-building is a standout feature, weaving together diverse societies and their political and social intricacies with seamless detail. The novel explores themes of freedom, belonging, and the power of community, all through the lens of Rafi’s personal journey. The concept of Wallrunning—a sport that combines physical and psychic skills—is inventive and adds an exciting layer to the narrative.

The prose is elegant and thoughtful, with a lyrical quality that brings the galaxy to life. However, the book’s pacing is uneven, with moments of introspection and exposition that can slow the story’s momentum. Some readers may find the plot less linear and action-driven than expected, as Lord focuses more on character development and philosophical musings than on traditional sci-fi thrills.

Overall, *The Galaxy Game* is an intelligent and imaginative novel that will appeal to readers who enjoy character-focused, thought-provoking science fiction. While it may not suit those seeking fast-paced action, its depth and creativity make it a rewarding read for fans of Karen Lord’s work.

I loved the author's previous book, The Best of All Possible Worlds, but this one didn't hold up nearly as well. Interesting premise, but I wasn't emotionally invested.

I had no problem enjoying this story as a stand-alone, but I do believe that reading the preceding novel would have gone a long way towards steadying me in the unfamiliar gravity of Lord's world. As it was, the shock of fermented sugar helped the narrative medicine go down, and after the whirlwind of politics and personalities, I found myself licking my lips.

This book was read for a podcast interview at the link provided below! Sorry for being so late to post this... The interview has been up for a while.

I downloaded this years ago and no longer have access to this title, I am sorry but I no longer intend to review it. Thank you.

PROS: Lord gives a realistic look at splintering cultures, diaspora, and cultural identity issues; I appreciated the time she took to show how different cultures value telepathy and other talents; brilliant twist at the end regarding the popular sport of Wallrunning.
CONS: I wish the game of Wallrunning had been explained better; prologue is info-dumpy; a few scenes felt needlessly rushed.
BOTTOM LINE: Highly imaginative with smooth and poetic prose, The Galaxy Game will more than satisfy readers interested in social science fiction that offers a large cast of characters to root for, fascinating biological technologies, and a view on how space faring cultures would deal with a diaspora (and the subsequent return).

I received this book in exchange for an honest review. This is a story of three friends who are all psychically gifted, which makes them both a valuable resource and a possible threat. Featuring large in the plot is wallrunning, a competitive form of science-fictional parkour performed variable-gravity vertical surfaces. Recommended for fans of SF featuring psionics and character growth.

The bonds that tie us closer than blood have been the subject of many a fictional enterprise, likely ever since skittering drawings in red chalk began appearing on cave walls. What Karen Lord brings to the questions of intimacy and entanglement, in her third novel, The Galaxy Game (Del Rey, 2015) are the workings of a mysterious, ruthless universe – and the compulsions, human and alien, that shape it.

Fourteen year old Rafi Delarua, estranged from his mother and sister, makes for one of the Lyceum’s most reluctant, and most gifted, pupils. Charged with the task of training and monitoring charges blessed (or burdensomely saddled) with telepathic ability, the Lyceum cannot contain Rafi’s curiosity for the worlds beyond. Nor is the Lyceum a match for his psionically talented friends, Serendipity and Ntenman, both of them hungry for more from life, and from the reservoirs of their own untapped potential – but for wildly distinct reasons. Leaving the psychic academy opens the triad up to a literal galaxy’s worth of adversities. Separately, and occasionally hand-in-hand, they head for distant stars, on an infinitely chartable series of planes where the threat of warfare is barely masked beneath the greater game of political manipulation.

In The Best of All Possible Worlds, the society-establishing expeditions of Cygnian Grace Delarua (Rafi’s aunt) and her Sadiri teammate Dllenahkh opened the diasporically-centred, rich outpost world of Cygnus Beta to the reader. As a sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds, The Galaxy Game holds each of the principal civilizations – Sadira, Ntshune, Zhinu, Terra – in the palm of its worldbuilding hand, and expands the borders of each.

Lord extends the territories and empires she founded in Grace and Dllenahkh’s story, showing us more of the complex machinery that runs her novels’ mainframes. We travel, with Rafi, Serendipity, Ntenman (and a whole host of others, including fondly familiar figures from The Best of All Possible Worlds), and the worlds within The Galaxy Game reveal themselves, in the heights and chasms of their petty, powerful superstructures, their economies of dominance and coercion, their stratagems during armistice, political drought and the probability of peaceful rule.

Unsurprisingly, then, the novel hinges and expends much of its dramatic and psychological action in matters of game theory. Wallrunning, a sport of blood, brotherhood and betting, is at once the most important game being played across the societal span of the humanoid register, and the least innocent of sports imaginable. The game is an exquisitely articulated extended metaphor for both thwarting and enabling diplomacies – as are most games, as anyone who’s given more than a cursory examination to cricket as a post-colonial instrument will wager. Nor do the games played in and across the worlds of Cygnus Beta, Punartam and Ntshune focus merely on the sweaty, plasma-patinated forms of figures grappling, contorting and twisting their bodies on an antigravity field. Rafi seeks to become one sort of Wallrunner, and becomes instead another, one whose responsibilities reflect and reveal more of his fraught nature – and how much he must quell his rage and indecision, for clarity, for the sake of his own team.

Rafi as a vehicular-propelling narrator is often indistinct, separated from the truth about himself in ways that render him in fragmentation. He becomes better perceived through the eyes of others, and the core inhabitants of the novel each tell Rafi’s story (sometimes, directly to him) as they untangle the interweaving skeins of their own. Ntenman’s buoyant first-person narration does this with greatest efficacy, painting its speaker as a younger, slightly more callow Han Solo type, one whose keenness to further the cause of his own initiatives is often underpinned, convincingly, by the smudged slate of his anxieties.

The Galaxy Game doesn’t do trope-insistent speculative fiction readers any favours. It confounds easiness, and ease, in favour of systemic precision that speaks to multiple intelligences, with a communal intensity of purpose. Lord’s new novel issues kindly, stern edicts, not from on high, but from the cluttered aisles of the galactic marketplace in which we all war, love, barter and steal from each other, in and out of good, sometimes ungovernable faith.

The Galaxy Game will be published by Del Rey (Random House) on January 6th.

Different and interesting. Definitely interest in reading more from this author!