Hidden Treasure: Navigating other worlds

Grimspace by Anne Aguirre

By Jim Matthews

There are three places at Orphans Treasure Box where you can find books of science fiction. One is in the mass market paperback room, one is the hardcover fiction room, and one is in the children’s section on the young teen shelf. Last week I placed on the shelf in mass market a tome called Grimspace by Anne Aguirre. This is a representative example of a trend in sci-fi fiction propelled by the success of The Hunger Games and Divergent series in which a young or youngish protagonist struggles to understand and survive in a dysfunctional society. The protagonists are fierce, independent, and usually anomalous to the social system in which they find themselves.

This is certainly the case in Grimspace where Sirantha Jax, a woman in her early thirties, is a “navigator”, meaning she possesses the “J-gene” that allows her to jump spaceships through huge chunks of space by passing through what is called “Grimspace”, a colorful explosive void that seeks to lure the navigator to remain. It is common wisdom in this universe, under the control of the Corp, that navigators can make only a finite number of jumps before they succumb to the temptations of Grimspace. After Jax is involved in a horrible crash, she is held for “observation” and soon guesses the Corp would like to make her disappear; the plotters behind the crash hoped for no survivors.

Escaping from detention Jax joins up with the usual assortment of marginalized people and agrees to serve as a rogue navigator in a series of planetary explorations looking for a way to break the Corp’s control of trade and social value. Much of the novel is written in the mind of Jax as she strives to overcome her innate cynicism and learn to trust her team of strangers. This is complicated by the necessary merging of minds and souls between navigator and pilot in order to make the jumps. She is put off by the pilot of her rogue band, who is the archetype of the masculine presence she abhors.

Anne Aquirre has written a fine book that became the first of a series. Publishers no longer look for fine novels; they are more interested in establishing franchises, and Aquirre has created a corker. She has a deft touch with words, if not with plot surprises. She carefully plants a hook at the end of each chapter to keep you reading, and it is a hard book to put down even as you can guess what comes next. There are six volumes in the series, and I suspect the action and the characters make it well worth our while.

Grimspace was a surprise to me, which is one of the joys of working in a bookstore: there is at least one surprise waiting for us on every shelf.