The question of tone is perhaps underexplored in criticism and reviews. A book or film can be simplistically written, or clumsy, or can perpetrate various aesthetic delinquencies without alienating its readers if it hits the right tone. By the same token, a book can be admirably written and achieve interesting things and yet be tonally alienating to the point it is fundamentally unlovable. This latter describes, I sometimes fear, some of my own best books. But I was put in mind of the former reading Mitch Benn’s Terra trilogy. Not that Benn writes simplistically (although he pitches these books at younger readers, and avoids any more complicated stylistic fretwork, or indeed fireworks) or that the trilogy is clumsily rendered: it's not, it's well-plotted and cleverly handled. The register is classic SF through a comic lens, somewhat after the manner of Douglas Adams or Pratchett’s YA books. And the result is funny. Not roll around on the floor, lose-control-of-your-bladder hilarious, but certainly funny. My point is that, tonally, the whole thing possesses great charm, a thing that is perhaps surprisingly rather rare in SF. I enjoyed this trilogy very much.
In book 1, Terra, we follow the titular heroine, who was ‘rescued’ from Earth by a well-meaning alien called Lppb (he acted, even though doing so violating his species’ principle of non-interference, because he believed Terra’s parents to have died in a car crash leaving the baby alone). She has been brought up on the utopian planet of Fnrr. At 12-years-old she is about to start alien high school as the only human in class. Fnrr is nicely drawn: a rational, ordered if vowelless place full of Pulp SF wonder-tech, and Terra is a likeable protagonist. The story, such as it is, concerns malign forces readying for war. Terra has a key role to play in saving her adoptive world, bringing her unique human-ness to bear on the threat; and at the end she is reunited with her not-dead-after-all human parents. There’s a satirical edge here, about how shabbily we are treating our own irreplaceable planet, but Benn doesn’t press too insistently on that pedal.
Book 2, Terra’s Earth, picks up two years later, with Terra not particularly enjoying her time back on Earth (the question of where ‘fits in’, where she feels herself to be ‘at home’, runs through the whole trilogy). This instalment gives Terra a sidekick, a boy called Billy Dolphin, annoyed that the appearance of actual flying saucers in the skies of Earth has killed his beloved science fiction. Things are looking grim on planet Fnnr, though. For one thing, a dictator, who has acquired the human knack of lying, previously unknown on the world, has seized power (shades of Ricky Gervais The Invention of Lying here, although Benn handles the premise to make more of an anti-religion point). For another thing, a strange black featureless planet is hurtling in on a collision course. Terra and Billy save the day from the Borg-like giant ball of nanothreat.
In Book 3, Terra’s War, an anomaly called the Everywar is spreading, like ‘a crack in the sky’, across the cosmos. Through it emerge swarms of monster-alien attackers (‘big, quadrupedal, the four limbs seemed to operate as arms or legs as required, breathing a sort of oily black liquid,’ Terra notes. ‘We saw its thoughts, we felt its feelings. It was consumed with hatred for us. I’ve never felt anything so horrible’). There’s a broader canvas in this third instalment: the story takes the characters all over the shop, and is rather more violent than the previous two. There are different theories about the Everywar: an invasion, a kind of cosmic sickness, or perhaps a cosmic immune reaction (‘Yes, said the Kwad Shar Chen matter-of-factly. Perhaps our universe has become diseased, corrupted. Perhaps what we now observe is simply the immune system of the cosmos in operation: purging the infection so that the universe may ... heal’). The reality behind the Everywar is somewhat different, but I abjure spoilers.
Various strands from the first two books are picked up again; there’s a bit more religious satire (‘A doctrine of humility being preached from a church the size of a moon, thought Terra. If you say so ...’), a smidgeon of time-travel and a good deal of what the film classification geezers call ‘mild peril’. If the first volume was a trifle under-plotted, the next two volumes make-up for that: each, I'd say, is an improvement on the last. It seems fatuous to describe the trilogy as ‘proper’ SF—it is, but you might well prefer improper SF—but it’s readable, enjoyable, ingeniously plotted stuff, and, to return to my original point, genuinely charming. Also: in this vol, Benn coins a new word, ‘Propilogue’. I very much hope this will catch on.
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