Benny is 21 years old and gets her first big break as an archaeologist on the planet Jaiway where nothing has ever happened. Or has it?
Benny is 21 years old and gets her first big break as an archaeologist on the planet Jaiway where nothing has ever happened. Or has it?
Genius Loci
Ben Aaravonitch’s first full novel in how many years?
Genius Loci is something of a departure for the range. We’ve dropped the ‘Professor’ from the title. We’ve dropped the Collection setting, and Jason Kane, and all those adventures with the Doctor, and almost everything else that she’s been carrying around for over twenty years. This is the stripped down version that goes right back down to the core character first introduced in ‘Love and War’ only it’s not even that. There she was experienced and a little tired of archaeology. Here’s she’s young and fresh and eager to stick her oar into things.
The writer previously presented a taste of young Bernice in the short story collection ‘Something’s Changed’ which gave some choice intimate moments of Bernice’s traumatic army training. Genius Loci takes things pretty much from there… Ideal for new readers? It probably is, but in actual fact its perfect for old fans looking for a way to relax after the mind numbing twists in ‘Crystal of Cantus’.
Spiders are scary. Their long gangly limbs present the image of fear that the real life miniscule critters are never able to really present. Up close they’re soft and squishy and horrible. In Genius Loci though spiders aren’t small and soft, they’re armour plated and 150 kg large. So Ben scores marks for his choice of subject matter, initially presenting us with these dangerous monstrosities then pulling back the realms of history to give us a real, breathing, fully functional alien race. It’s refreshing to have a story which really is ‘about’ the archaeology at its most fundamental, with the slow unveiling of a thousand years of history turning the plot in completely natural yet unexpected directions. Yet by the monsters aren’t the true villains of the piece, as it becomes apparent that Bernice’s obsession isn’t simply ‘justice’ but ‘truth’.
There are a few references to the future Bernice we already know. This is the period where she first encounters 20th century Earth and is introduced to the eponymous ‘Goddess’ concept she became so flippant about up until the ‘Goddess Quandry’ last year. By the end of the story she’s a ‘real’ archaeologist as opposed to be a fraud with a chipped ID card. These are all peripheral elements to the story however, and Ben Aaravonitch instead focuses on the formation of that practicality and obsession we know Bernice for. Here, right at the beginning, before she even ‘was’ an archaeologist she just ‘had’ to have the truth, and somehow through the story her natural qualities as a leader start to shine through.
This is a well written book that treads that fine line between Science Fiction and Fantasy exceedingly well, using the imagery and scene setting to let the characters shine and to create new and novel mortal dilemmas. At first glance I thought it had ended on a cliff hanger but actually after rereading the last chapter it ends just where it needs to, with the last thing that this ‘young’ Bernice needed to set her down the path to becoming the woman we now know.
Exciting stuff and refreshingly isolated from the rest of the series.
8 / 10