Making Amends

World Fantasy Award winner Shawl (Kinning) strings together a deeply philosophical but often puzzling series of interconnected stories about a corporate government’s attempts to set up an interstellar penal colony. Throughout, Shawl leans heavily into the grisly stakes of their worldbuilding. “In Colors Everywhere,” for example, explores the visceral body horror and sexual coercion involved in populating a new planet and the questions about reproductive freedom that come with it. Both “Over a Long Time Ago” and “The Mighty Phin” delve into the complications of existing as a disembodied consciousness on a ship database for over a century, while “Deep End” carries this scenario through to its most terrifying conclusion as one such consciousness is downloaded into a cloned and possibly radiation-poisoned body subject to uncontrollable pain. Shawl’s themes are clear and powerful, but the literal events of her nonlinear plots often prove difficult to understand, especially as readers must track characters that inhabit various forms, whether their own body, the duplicated body of their dead exes, or a simulation. While the uninitiated will struggle to follow what’s happening, Shawl’s devoted fans will find much to ponder in this unsettling vision of the horrors of interstellar settler colonialism. (Jan.)