I am one of the judges of team Space Girls for the SPSFC3 contest. This review is my personal opinion. Officially, it is still in the running for the contest, pending any official team announcements.
Status: Cut
Reached 29% of the novel (I cut it here because it was the ending of a chapter)
This story is... confusing. The action takes places in a moon-planet called Arter (?) inhabited by a humanoid race where most characters have blue eyes and red or brown hair. Officially, everyone is infertile. Now, this is quite a cool concept, since it changes the entire world's dynamics. If women have zero fears of having an unplanned pregnancy from the beginning of history, then she would be able to stay in school and doesn't need to get married at a young age. Society would believe women never getting married is the norm, and would find polygamy to be perfectly acceptable because there are no concerns about the inheritance of their parents' assets.
This concept was slightly explored in an anime called Twelve Kingdoms. That story happens in a parralel mini world where the native humans and animals are always infertile. Babies are born from magical trees that grow in pods and crash on the ground upon birth. The Twelve Kingdoms story mentions a male and female couple are expected to place a ribbon on a magic tree and pray a child will grow. However, the story hints Rakushun's mother was always single and accidentally placed her ribbon on an animal growing tree (which is why Rakushun can shift between a human and large talking mouse form). Basing on the theory that single parents can successfully have children, it makes sense the Twelve Kingdoms is a far less patarichal society than our own. It is very normal to see female queens and women working in important government positions. In the Twelve Kingdoms, humans from our own world can sometimes get trapped in magical tornado storms known as shoku and have created their own communities in the kingdoms. They tend to be ostracized due to their poor language skills and because natives think their method of internal reproduction to be unclean.
The reason why I mention the Twelve Kingdoms comparison is because there is one way humans in the Arter book can reproduce: by obtaining the magical seed of fertility from a demigod insect that roams the world. These insects are somewhat rare and we don't know whether obtaining their seed kills the animal or not. Therefore, the people that have children tend to be the most economically affluent. Once two people consume this egg, they are permanently fertile and can theoretically impregnate anyone that also consumed it. I really liked this reproduction concept. It would have made a very cool society where polyamorous families create their own communes and everyone raises their own neighborhood together. Since these people are already wealthy, I could envision a world where great political power is shifted between family communes (there might even be certain degrees of incest involved). If the book's worldbuilding had been rewritten with this kind of social structure in mind, it would have worked insanely well and not harm the plot of the story at all.
Our protagonist would still be an oddball university researcher that spends his days building a dream sharing machine (I am assuming this machine is designed to lure more fertility insects into the cities?). We would still have an arrogant politician try to attain power and the mysterious military assasin side plot would also work. Even better, changing the society dynamics would not affect in any way the other subplot of a female teenage priest apprentice that is destined to become the next oracle.
Unfortunately, this fabulous worldbuilding concept is not used and we get a society very much like our own where women are sidelined and ironically, society hates children (which didn't make sense to me since children are such a rare and valuable asset for the affluent). I didn't understand why characters feel pity for families that have 4 children. Does it mean less wealthy people by dumb luck sometimes snatch fertility insects and become a social burden when they start producing large families? This story concept would have been fun to explore and also worked quite well with the university guy named Unel.
I could envision a story where Unel is so hypefixiated with his invention that he doesn't even realize he consumed the fertility insect by accident. From the first 1/3 of the story, I am still unsure what he is supposed to do in the plot. He spends 90% of the time obsessed with his machine and then oops, I forgot! I am married! Wait... I have a wife? Yikes, I feel sorry for Trellia. Having a character that only cares about his own pursuits that he ignores his wife in a society where women don't need to stick with a specific sexual partner could have created a fascinating dynamic.
It is such a bummer how the book handles this relationship dynamic. If women can have any sexual partner and job choice, why would she stay with a man that doesn't pay any attention to her? Is it because they both come from powerful commune families that wish to join forces? Is it because Trellia's family owns Unel's university and he only married her to get a tenure job to pursue his interests? So many possibilities that went unexplored!
Instead of having a character that tries to threaten Unel to pay more attention to her, Trellia is... uhh... What does Trellia do for a living anyways? All we know about her is that she swooshes her hips like a maraca and thinks her husband is so perfect. Is she under some kind of magical spell? Does she just stay at home doing nothing all day except daydream about when he will remember a few weeks from now he is married and visit her? Maybe she just spends her time swaying her hips at home and brush her hair. Quite frankly, I felt very ambivalent about Trellia. She is just... there and does... uh... swoosh her hips.
In fact, it seems like every adult female character in the book swooshes her hips. Are their hips like really, really big? Do women learn belly dancing in school and everyone likes to do this? Is it a tic? Or does the swaying hip movement attract the fertility insects? These things make me scratch my head.
I was pretty invested in the story of the teenage priestess that for no apparent reason was chosen as the oracle and future liason between the Arterians and their worm shaped god Sumattra. She was the only female character that didn't spend her days doing the hip swoosh thing or slobber over a particular male Arterian all day. The idea that she is unwilling to fulfill the priest annointing was quite fascinating and should have been explored more. There are no hints she chose to become an oracle, or the mechanics of why a certain person has to become the oracle in the first place.
In fact, for a planet where fertility is so heavily restricted, I was expecting it to be heavily religious. It would be logical to see people swoon the temple and offer their gratitude she is destined to become the next liason. All we get in the story is how everyone is well... unusually agnostic. It feels very contrary to ancient human civilizations that venerated fertility gods.
At almost 30% of the book, I still have no idea what the story is. It feels the book is taking far too long trying to set the stage for the plot. Is it a marriage story? Murder plot? Political drama? Religious dystopia? Sometimes this is okay for me because epic fantasy takes forever to develop worldbuilding, but I would have wanted the stakes to be offered by now. I have read tons of books that clutch you within the first 20%, and even if you are still discovering new things, you have a hunch where the plot is going. In this book, I feel the story is taking too long and didn't get a vibe about any of the female characters. Nobody seems to be in command of her life and is only blindly following the orders of their male counterparts. While I think there's some interesting worldbuilding concepts in this novel, I am sorry to declare this is a cut for me.