SIX FIGURES

In their quest for an all-powerful weapon, a vicious intergalactic empire enslaves people in the 19th-century United States in Chatman’s SF novel.

During the alien Ragnaw people’s conquest of the noble, mystic Obasyn, the latter dispatch a crystal of vast power to a secret hiding place. The Ragnaw’s search for it takes them to 1850 Earth; where President Millard Fillmore yields to their demands to become the new enslavers of a million Southern Black people. However, the aliens’ captives use Ragnaw energy weapons and powered body armor to turn the tables and begin an uprising worldwide. Lagos, Nigeria, becomes the new capital of the Legion one-world government, which creates a society in which White people are stripped of rights. The Obasyn crystal, it turns out, landed near Memphis, Tennessee, and was discovered by a plantation owner, James Wright Sr. Transformed by the crystal’s power, he and the formerly enslaved Abah (whom James considers family), form the nucleus of a superhero-style team called the Six Figures, who fight against the Legion. Over the course of this SF novel, a comic-book tone flavors the mayhem, and Japanese anime is also an influence, with mechanized, armored suits in perpetual play. The ruthless Ragnaw are similar to the Star Trek franchise’s Klingons, but without the charm (“Their mouth held uneven, jagged bones that they used to tear apart their food, and sometimes their enemies”). However, what may strike readers most strongly is the book’s uncomfortable message that an oppressed people, given the opportunity (and weaponry), might enthusiastically turn into oppressors themselves. The slam-bang action concludes with plenty of opportunity for sequels.

A lively superhero-versus-alien actioner that tackles difficult issues of race and privilege.