The Emergent by Nadia Afifi
(Flame Tree Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is the follow-up to The Sentient, in which Amira Valdez escaped from the fundamentalist religious compound in which she was born and raised and became a talented ‘holomentic’ reader, able to read peoples’ memories. Hoping to work on one of the orbital space stations, she was instead assigned to the Pandora Initiative, which aimed to produce a human clone by using three women as hosts for their own cloned embryos. After two of the women died, Amira was given the job of exploring the memories of the third, Rozene, in an effort to discover what went wrong. When she discovered that Rozene’s memories had been tampered with, Amira found herself caught between the machinations of the fundamentalist Elders and those of the Cosmics, a pseudo-religious group who believe in the ‘Conscious Plane’, a kind of web of consciousness that acts as the ‘binding glue’ of the multiverse.
The Emergent begins where the previous book left off and not only hits the ground running but maintains a frenetic pace throughout. Rozene has had her clone-baby and Amira, supported by her motley crew of friends, is facing trial in Westport on the spurious grounds that she sabotaged the project. Within the first few pages she is exonerated thanks to the intervention of Tony Barlow, the head of Pandora who of course has his own designs on Amira and her talents. What those are, exactly, emerge during the course of the story but suffice to say they do not sit well with either the compound Elders or the city Cosmics!
The result is a somewhat bewildering mash-up of convoluted politics and brutal violence, with a dash of assorted reflections on life, death and the nature of consciousness, as Amira struggles to protect Rozene, her friends, and herself, whilst also trying to understand the strange connection she has with compound Elder Reznick. A meeting in the Dead Zone with one of the founders of the Cosmics reveals that they can both access the Conscious Plane and are somehow bonded after being caught together in a disastrous early experiment with Tiresia, a powerful mind-control substance extracted from living subjects under horrific conditions. Converted into photons using ‘polaritons and quantum wave-particle manipulation’ this can then be broadcast over a wide area, allowing the likes of Reznick to turn unwitting members of the public into murderous puppets. Unfortunately, this was one of the several ‘Wait… what?’ moments that snagged the narrative for me and which started to pile up as more and more elements were thrown into the mix (Gun battles! With robots! In an abandoned casino!). Amira herself barely makes it out alive from one action scene after another, and even then it is only with the help of her friends, one of whom is the kind of digital wizard that it seems almost every story must feature these days.
Indeed, for all her lauded talents, Amira is buffeted throughout this way and that by the actions of the other, mostly male, protagonists. Returning to Westport, Barlow finally reveals his true intentions, not only to her but to an assembly of Cosmics and, yes, further mayhem ensues! After escaping the carnage once again, Amira makes a fateful decision to go back into space and the book ends with a shocking ‘fast-forward’ reveal. This clearly sets things up for the sequel but also presents Amira as, despite her abilities, unable to escape her past as a compound woman, used and abused once more by powerful men. It may be that a resonant socio-political point is being made here but still, a little more strength of character and a little less frenzied action would have made for a less frustrating and more satisfying read.
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.