Red Spawn Delivery

Johnson’s inordinate fondness for confusing language is a major barrier to engagement with her offbeat, ostensibly humorous third science fiction thriller featuring “every-alien” carter Ganpril Webrid (after 2013’s Blue Diamond Delivery). The text is full of similes that can mean nothing to earthlings, or at least to newcomers to Johnson’s universe: “Her voice rasped like a Seven-Nosed Snardos warning her children about the olfactory perils of public lavatories.” Slapping alien descriptors on items like food (“shintal crisps, fatty zempra salad, and steamed shamtibby on the half-shell”) is hardly thoughtful worldbuilding. This time, Webrid finds himself in the midst of a search for kidnapped babies. His quiet picnic on Bexilla with his friend Zatell is interrupted when a Glospra-Sharozda named Narmoi begins giving birth through spawn sacs on her legs. Not long after the newborns emerge, they are abducted by “winged prism beasts” called Snatch Vroogi. Narmoi ropes Webrid and Zatell into joining the quest to identify who is behind the snatching and rescue the little Glospra-Sharozdas. Unfortunately, the flimsy plot is accompanied by paper-thin characterizations. (Mar.)