A world where humans are descended from a variety of mammals endures its own equivalent of the U.S. Civil War—the northern, industrialized Parity arming against the southern, rural, and slave-owning Echelon. When a marauding Parity gang’s rampage in a frontier Echelon town kills otter-descended schoolteacher Martha Good, her lover, dog-descended fellow teacher Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, joins a group of Echelon guerrilla fighters, seeking a violent revenge that the gentle Miss Martha never would have wanted and earning her the moniker “Dog-Bitch Bess.” Assisting her in these brutal endeavors is Wakeful Slim, a multifunctional AI gun that’s a piece of ancient Precursor technology. In the distant past, a Pandominion strike team pursues rebels seeking a return to the old government’s policy of conquest over parallel Earths; the chase strands the rebels on an Earth whose inhabitants are unwitting participants in a terrible experiment. These two storylines converge after Bess, who’s on the run from Parity forces, picks up a new companion with a mysterious mission. In addition to the iconic tragedy of the gunslinger, whose bloody path can only have one ending, Carey adds the tragedies of the sentient gun and armed drone; this is probably the first time you will sympathize with actual weapons. Perhaps the messaging around the racism directed toward the novel’s Black and Native American analogues is a bit obvious, but it does two very important things: It highlights both how artificial the categories are that we put people into, and how the thoughtless acceptance of those categories leads to more brutal consequences.
