N.K. Jemisin’s First Space Opera Is Everything We Wanted it to Be

Given the chance to read a new novel co-authored by N.K. Jemisin, I fairly jumped at it: I was blown away by her Nebula-award winning Broken Earth series, which just wrapped with The Stone Sky. Getting my mitts on another Jemisin novel so soon basically amounts to an early Christmas present. One problem: Mass Effect: Andromeda—Initiation is a tie-in novel to a video game I’ve never played. (The other co-author is Mac Walter, a creative director on the game.) Oh, and it’s a sequel and a prequel, taking place before the events of the Mass Effect: Andromeda game, and published after the first Mass Effect: Andromeda tie-in novel, Nexus Uprising. Which I also haven’t read. (That may be more than one problem.)
While tie-in novels are of course designed to deepen and expand an existing (and evolving) mythology, they are also novels in their own right. I can’t judge Initiation on the merits of its relationship to Mass Effect, but I can say something about how it works as a novel. Also, I have this handy teenager living in my house who is a pretty serious gamer, and after grilling him about Mass Effect—and asking a teen gamer about the plot of a video game is as annoying as you imagine it would be, yes—I was ready to dive in.

The novel opens with a fish out of water scenario, one made all the more strange by the fact that it focuses not on a stranger in a strange land, but a human soldier who is having a hard time coping with her fellow humans. Lt. Cora Harper has just finished a four-year tour with the alien asari commando unit known as Talein’s Daughters; she was part of something of an exchange program to allow her to hone her prodigious natural biotic powers. She waits in in a docking bay, watching her fellow humans scurry about, and finds them suddenly messy and disorganized, knocking into each other and pursuing vagaries. It’s a common enough experience for a returning soldier—the feeling of strangeness with the once familiar—compounded by the fact that she’s not just been posted within an alien culture, but with literal aliens.
Things get worse when Harper is jumped by a reporter asking a series of leading questions about her next gig with the Andromeda Initiative, an outfit planning a centuries-long mission to colonize the Andromeda galaxy. The reporter questions everything about the mission, including Harper’s own humanity, and she doesn’t respond so well. Later, Harper is set upon by anti-alien bigots, only getting bailed out by an old asari friend, Ygara, who has turned mercenary. By luck or fate, she and Ygara end up getting sent out together by Alec Ryder, a former (somewhat disgraced) Alliance marine and now head of the Andromeda Initiative, to retrieve critical data stolen by a corporate interest. (Gamer teen informs me that Ryder and Harper are major characters in the game, but not Ygara, for reasons that become obvious very quickly.) This mission goes about as well as Harper’s attempts to have a sandwich in peace at the docking station.

As a reader of Jemisin’s fantasy novels (though the Broken Earth trilogy definitely straddles the line between fantasy and science fiction), it was fascinating watching her work her way through the tech blitz and frenetic action of space opera. And the Broken Earth books in particular aren’t what I’d call escapist reads, emotionally speaking, as they grapple with intense interpersonal and societal stuff. Yet the through-lines of this tie-in novel are laid down with that same deft touch, the kind of care that made me not cry at the end when that one thing happened. (I wasn’t crying. You were crying.) Not crying aside, I can tell how much fun the writers were having with this thing: ranging across the galaxy, upending dastardly plots, engaging in shoot outs, snapping on the gear and letting ‘er rip. Mass Effect: Andromeda—Initiation is a blast, for more than one meaning of the word.
Is it accessible to non-gamers? True, the thing fairly tumbles, dropping you into the middle of a complicated, spinning galaxy, where you hit the ground running. But then, that’s de rigueur in the genre, and certainly Jemisin and Walter don’t try to dump the whole mythology on you at once. You learn what you need to learn about Cora Harper’s past and worldview, and see the big bad galaxy through her eyes. This is my kind of space opera: not overly interested in holding your hand as you shoulder your way through the galaxy, but legible enough that you always know where you stand. As the title says, it’s an initiation.
Mass Effect: Andromeda—Initiation is available now.