The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord

There's a starman waiting in the sky

Yeah, I know. Lots of first contact here (and here and here)… But then this is Futureboy - what do you expect. Also, there is another pattern here for me: Just like with Ann Leckie’s Translation State, I ended up with a novel set in another book’s universe The Blue, Beautiful World is neither sequel nor prequel to Karen Lord’s other books, but does reference back to other works of the author and without having read those other books I sometimes felt like I was missing some context in this book .

The Blue, Beautiful World is split into two parts: In the first part, we are introduced to Owen, a world-famous singer and philantropist (think of a male Taylor Swift on steroids). Set in the future, when earth is at a “tipping point, ripe for salvation or destruction” Owen has taken the world by storm and is building a business empire (and cultural, political and economic influence) with the help of his manager, Noriko, and his head of security, General Ahn.

When Noriko is attacked, she realizes that there is more to Owen. Unknown to the world, humanity has been infiltraded by aliens for centuries and their competition is gradually heating up (and culminating in an attack on one of Owen’s concerts). While Owen’s motives are not fully clear (does he seek power or is he trying to protect humanity from other alien factions), the scale of the alien presence on earth and their influence on human technology is quickly becoming more visible to Noriko (but not yet to the broader population).

In the second part of the book, set decades later, the focus shifts from star and manager to a group of students in a global leadership program, where a simulated “first contact” assignment - unsurprisingly to the ready - turns out to be preparation for the real deal as the world realizes aliens have been present on earth for quitesome time.

This second part, unfortunately, leaves a lot to be desired: You’d expect quite a lot of excitement on earth about aliens going on live TV to anounce their presence, but a lot of this is glossed over. Instead we have strange side-plots: Is there another species lurking in the ocean? Our new alien friends helping to bring people physically together through wormholes on earth (as if they couldn’t just all get on a an airplane) and strands of alien politics are left only partially resolved (and difficult to understand).

The story does work - the plot does get (mostly) resolved, but it feels like Karen Lord wanted to add more depth to the book than she had pages for. Maybe some of this would have been easier to digest with more background knowledge from Lord’s other books.

As s stand-alone novel, however, I would rate this book average at best - which is unfortunate given a strong first half of the book.