KOBO

In Allen’s SF novel, a teenager struggles to survive on a world where humans are treated as pets.

Fourteen-year-old Kobo lives on the planet Pavin with two much-larger grobs, each with three fingers on each hand and a trunk instead of a nose. Like all humans in this world, Kobo is treated like a domesticated animal, has no language, and only occasionally finds himself around others of his kind. His situation changes when the grobs get a 15-year-old female human, Ra, to be his companion. The humans bond with each other and later have offspring, and they’re understandably upset when their children disappear. In fact, Kobo responds so violently that the grobs send him away. He ends up on the planet Loma, doing hard labor in the mines there. Over the course of his harrowing journey, Kobo learns to communicate with words and meets other human miners who can do the same, in a limited way. In Loma’s labyrinthine tunnels, he befriends a community of humans who live in hiding. Kobo, however, wonders if life would be better on the surface, even though that’s where the grobs are. In this debut series starter, Allen adeptly depicts Kobo’s growth among his fellow humans. For example, Kobo comes to understand the notion of slavery and unexpectedly discovers that not everything humans say is the truth. Ra, who also escapes to look for her children, proves to be skilled at survival. The author’s straightforward prose maintains a consistent momentum, and the story has several big reveals, including how the humans wound up on Pavin and the names of familiar locations. Human behavior is, at least initially, animalistic with a fair amount of violence, including attempted sexual assault. The novel works well enough as a standalone, although there is already a published sequel.

A dark interplanetary tale with intriguing character development.