"Outlaw Planet" by M.R. Carey

It’s not often these days that a book manages to take me completely by surprise. But M.R. Carey (also known as Mike Carey) pulled it off with this one.

This book is a standalone follow up to his excellent Pandominion duology. (I think you have to have read the Pandominion books to really appreciate this, but I’m not 100% certain on that) It’s on a world that has devolved from the high-tech of the Pandominion to a mid-to-late 19th century industrial level of technology, though with pieces of Pandominion tech still floating around - usable, if not understood. The protagonist is Bess, who is a species evolved to sentience from canine progenitors in the Pandominion multiverse grab-bag of species. After suffering a loss in a war that clearly draws inspiration from the US Civil War, she takes up the precursor-tech sentient AI gun Wakeful Slim and sets off for vengeance.

My initial feelings on this book, for the first 40% or so, were that it was … fine? The post-technological-collapse Pandominion setting didn’t really work, as the Pandominion was presented in the duology, but I kind of shrugged and said, “Carey wanted to write a Western in that setting with the mix of sentient species” and went with it. The war, with the agrarian slave society southern part of the country vs the abolitionist but still racist industrialized northern part, could have been more subtle in its inspiration, but again, he was writing a Western. The tropes are well-established, and a key one is the proud Southern soldier going West after the end of the war, unbowed and unbroken. As for Wakeful Slim, well, Carey has done the talking-AI-precursor-tech thing before, and frankly it was more interesting as a super kawaii MP3 player, but it's a fun idea and I didn’t mind going along for the ride.

I don’t want to say much more because of spoilers, but I will say that this did not go at all how I was expecting it to. Carey knew exactly what he was doing from the beginning, and there was nothing cliched about this. Like I said at the top, it’s not often any more that a book takes me completely, totally by surprise, but this one managed it. My status as a Mike Carey fanboy continues.