THE GIRL WHO RODE THE UNIHORN

Dubh offers a Gaelic twist on the “dying Earth” genre in this SF epic, the first in a series.

The Great Melt has redrawn the Earth’s surface. Now, there is the verdant, mountainous polar region of the Wayp—home to the Children of the Mother and a number of prehistoric megafauna—and the polluted, burned-over the DownBlow, populated by various human subspecies and governed by the vast, ruthless Monstrato Corp. In the Wayp village of Balnabane, Ròna of the Spreckled Cheeks shepherds her family’s mammoth herd from atop her unihorn steed Dìleas—an impressive feat, given how resistant the unihorn is to domestication. She also serves as the unofficial protector of the area’s woods, fields, and waterways, fending off any poachers “trimming the hair of Mother.” Meanwhile, the denizens of the DownBlow—a colorful assortment of “Natborn Zziipppaeis, humanoid ex-vitro Anboarnhs, even some emancipated aiReps, and half-speesh Unclassifieds”—crowd into Monstrato’s monstrous stadium to take in the realm’s favorite sport: Mixed Maximum Martial Melee Match, or MMMMM for short. The gladiator Cuilean, a foundling whose path crossed Ròna’s long ago, has risen to prominence fighting in the pit against half-naked ape-people like Slaiya the Rainer of Painer. When Cuilean and his gladiator friends are conscripted to serve on a Monstrato expedition to the Wayp with the express purpose of stealing the crystal waters of the Children’s sacred lake, he finds himself unexpectedly among his native people—though an outsider to their now-foreign ways. Where does his loyalty lie? With the dying corporate world that sent him, or with the remarkable girl who rides a unihorn and whose fate seems to be intertwined with his own?

Dubh is a writer of great imagination. In addition to the dystopian futurescape, which features a sulphuric garbage-ocean and a bull-beast called a mìneotarbh, this Earth’s most notable features are linguistic. The Children of the Mother speak a language called the FT (the Forbidden Tongue), which seems to be very similar to Scottish Gaelic. The FT sits cacophonously alongside the Orwellian, acronym-laden Simspeek of Monstrato and the TokTok syllable-smashing patois of the virally mutated Zziipps. These elements combine in a cantering, comic narrative voice that reads like a combination of Flann O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon, and Dune (with plenty of much-need footnotes). A taste: one minor character (a gameshow host named Fellatio Hibiscus) is described as having “lifted their jaw and exposed a neck like that of a desserliz about to lick a flying cockroach out of the air and waved a hand in a bored and self-satisfied benediction to the imagined crowd represented by the cameras.” (A desserliz is, of course, a desert lizard. Other character names include Harishandra Higginsbottom, CacaHed Docherty, and Priamus Thorben Beezow Doo-Doo Zipitty-Bop-Bop Buttwater-Bates.) The narrative is highly digressive, and the story is not helped by the frequent and unattractive illustrations (credited to one Tuigse NicFhuadain, though they are clearly AI-generated). The book’s intense world-building is worth the price of admission, though, assuming this initial, sometimes-plodding volume is setting up a more dynamic plot for the next one.

A sprawling, linguistically playful dystopian novel.