EXTREMOPHILE

This second installment of a series finds a human Watchman attempting to keep the peace between two combative universes while a third force interferes.

Violet Rain is a virtual reality engineer from the 25th century. She’s also a Watchman, a select being for whom the boundaries of time and space mean little. From the space station STS-99, she conducts “multiverse surveillance” alongside fellow Watchmen Ben, Ralff, and Yverra. As Violet explores the Yin-Yang Boundary between two clashing universes—using the body of a microscopic tardigrade—something attacks the station. A “timeslip” to an adjacent dimension saves the Watchmen. Golaeth, the “baby-sitter entity” that tracks new universes, confirms that a rogue cosmos is on the loose. In the midst of the Watchmen’s search, Violet visits her human ancestors, Virginia and Alan, in 21st-century North Carolina. They introduce her to Janus Parker, a VR “whiz kid” and co-founder of the pivotal tech company Canny Divide. Meanwhile, Emperor Calaneris, hell-bent on destroying the Yin Universe, plucks Xoan-Paulo Hilario, Violet’s former fling, from the doomed Mars Colony. Calaneris turns Xoan-Paulo into the Enforcer, a deadly cyborg loyal to nobody but the emperor. While Janus shows Violet around California and Las Vegas, the Enforcer begins hunting these two instrumental figures protecting the Yin Universe. Rew’s latest adventure doesn’t overplay its cosmic motifs, keeping plenty of action Earth-bound after the setup. There’s a lively weight to the Enforcer’s chase and a self-aware reference from the film Terminator (“Come with me if you want to live”) that will make SF fans chuckle. Violet is a protagonist readers may be divided on; she’s spunky but says glib things like “I never thought about the 21st century much. Everybody mostly remembers it as the century where the world ignored climate change.” Readers meet the story’s titular hero, the tardigrade, which can survive extremes of temperature and pressure and even “go into hibernation and reawaken years later when conditions improved.” The author’s joy in combining hard science with high-concept space opera is evident on every page, though the grandeur of universes in motion sometimes threatens to diminish her characters.

A smart, if dizzying, SF sequel that never slows down.