Best Novella - Sun-daughters, Sea-daughters by Aimee Ogden

Publisher – Tordotcom

Published – Out Now

Price – £8.99 paperback £3.64 Kindle eBook

Gene-edited human clans have scattered throughout the galaxy, adapting themselves to environments as severe as the desert and the sea. Atuale, the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, sparked a war by choosing her land-dwelling love and rejecting her place among her people. Now her husband and his clan are dying of a virulent plague, and Atuale’s sole hope for finding a cure is to travel off-planet. The one person she can turn to for help is the black-market mercenary known as the World Witch—and Atuale’s former lover. Time, politics, bureaucracy, and her own conflicted desires stand between Atuale and the hope for her adopted clan.

Retellings we are all used to in genre. Finding new angles on familiar stories is a great way to explore how social attitudes change over time. A lesser taken path though there are many examples is what comes next? Does everyone really live happy ever after in unchanging statis? This is an interesting angle explored in Aimee Ogden’s Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters that reimagines The Little Mermaid and what comes after in a far flung future alien world.

Atuale the royal daughter of a Sea-Clan royal fell in love with a member of the land-clan. She sought out the Witch Yanja and via their gene-editing off world technology technology Atuale found herself transformed and able to live on land banished from her family. But recently a new disease is striking all her new clan and now her partner Saareval is also very ill and likely to die Atuale seeks out Yanja to make another deal but this one will require them to face the stars and hidden secrets that will change their dynamic forever.

I’ve had a mixed reaction to this story and I’m going to caveat that I loathe the Little Mermaid tale so I may be biased. On the one hand what really works for me is the world building and cultyres that Ogden has created. The land and sea cultures; the technology that allows life to edit genes and then we go off world and find all sorts of varieties of human life. There is a nice message here about humanity treating those in need appropriately which in a post 2020 world is for me feeling very true and honest. I really enjoyed the character of Yanja the Witch who we find has now changed themselves to male and here is not a villain but more someone with their own agency and investment in Atuale which is well explored. This world has depth and history to it which is not easy to do in a novella.

My issue was Atuale our central character and narrator just feels very one note. They do this then that and then this. While I sense the idea is to show us that Atuale is just someone who always wants to see and do more they came across as someone who just did what they pleased and there are little consequences for that behaviour. I didn’t really buy the way the relationship with Yanja unfurled and even the restraint that eventually captures Atuale at the end doesn’t feel so strong a choice. As such I never felt too invested in the mercy mission and what would happen next.

Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was a interesting read and demonstrates a writer who is certainly capable of creative science fiction stories. While it hasn’t grabbed me in this story this may be more due to my natural biases against the original story, I think others may find this an interesting tale.