TITLE: Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters
AUTHOR: Aimee Ogden
112 pages, TorDotCom Publishing, ISBN 9781250782120 (softcover)
DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): Gene-edited human clans have scattered throughout the galaxy, adapting themselves to environments as severe as the desert and the sea. Atuale, the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, sparked a war by choosing her land-dwelling love and rejecting her place among her people. Now her husband and his clan are dying of an incurable plague, and Atuale’s sole hope for finding a cure is to travel off-planet. The one person she can turn to for help is the black-market mercenary known as the World Witch—and Atuale’s former lover. Time, politics, bureaucracy, and her own conflicted desires stand between Atuale and the hope for her adopted clan.
Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters has all the wonder and romance of a classic sci-fi novel, with the timelessness of a beloved fairy tale.
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Aimee Ogden’s Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters may use The Little Mermaid as its base and starting point, transferring the action to a far-future interstellar setting, but I wouldn’t categorize this novella as a retelling of the fairy tale. Rather, I think it’s the sort of “what happened next” story that has always intrigued me (it’s not chance that of all the musicals based on fairy tales, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods is my favorite, or that I list Bill Willingham’s comic series Fables and the first season of the television series Once Upon a Time as favorites as well). I quite enjoy stories that explore the “happy ever after” (or not-so-happy, as the case may be), and Ogden delivers the goods.
Rather than start with a straight retelling of The Little Mermaid and progressing linearly from there, Ogden dumps us right into the “no longer so happily ever after” described in the back cover copy: in the very first scene, Atuale (the “mermaid” of the story) leaves her husband’s sick-bed to seek the aid of her former “pillow-friend” Yanja, known more commonly as “the World-Witch:” a smuggler/dealer/scientist who years before created the gene modifications that allowed Atuale to leave her controlling father’s sub-sea kingdom. Hints about those events, about Atuale’s relationships with Yanja, with husband Saareval and his family, and with her estranged father are dropped throughout the story but don’t dominate it. There’s just enough for us to recognize the basics of the original fairy tale, to see how science replaces magic in the narrative, and to understand just how much things have changed for Atuale and Yanja.
And things have changed: the World-Witch is not physically the person Atuale knew and is no longer disposed to acquiesce to Atuale’s needs just for old times’ sake. And of course Atuale is no longer the same person she was when she first left for the surface world. Through dialogue and quiet moments, Ogden explores the question of whether two people who used to love each other but have been estranged for a long time can find their way back to some kind of mutual respect and peaceful co-existence. It’s a beautifully told arc woven around all of the other stumbling blocks the pair encounter, both on-planet and off, attempting to reach Atuale’s goal. I don’t want to spoil any of those stumbling blocks in this review. Suffice to say, they varied from the personal to the societal and none of them felt contrived or forced.
I also must compliment Ogden on how, as someone else put it, “casually queer” the novella is. Atuale and the World-Witch’s former relationship isn’t played for shock or as anything outside of the societal norm, nor are the physical changes in Yanja. It’s always nice to read stories about alien cultures that do not have the prejudices we have here on Earth in the present day.
Although Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was written pre-pandemic, it came out during it, and it was hard not to see echoes (perhaps unintentional given the time) of it in how different the response to such a fast-spreading plague is from culture to culture across not just a planet but star-systems. This, and references to miscarriages as well as a bit of body horror, may make the novella a harder read for some folks.
In the end, Aimee Ogden delivers a fast-moving star-spanning adventure in which the lead characters discover/rediscover themselves during a quest to help others regardless of the personal repercussions, expanding on the questions of identity and belonging that are a part of any good retelling or expansion of The Little Mermaid.
I received an Advance Reading Copy from NetGalley/TorDotCom in exchange for an honest review, which is clearly being posted far later than anticipated. Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was released in February of 2021.