[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: USA
year: 2018
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 28.4.24
P. Djèlí Clark’s The Black God’s Drums has been sitting on my shelf for several years at this point, and I finally got around to reading it. I’ve really enjoyed Clark’s Dead Djinn stories (and am looking forward to A Master of Djinn possibly over the summer), so I was optimistic about this, but the blurb does a terrible job of selling it, so I kept putting it off. had I had a clearer sense that this was set in a complex alternate history wherein New Orleans is a treaty-guaranteed de facto independent free city I would have gotten to it way sooner. I love complicated treaty systems, free cities, and de facto independent vaguely-condominia.
my initial reaction is: it’s like if that one story about the Haitian spy in How Long ’til Black Future Month? were good. many aspects of the premise are similar: Haitian independence (in fact, the independence of the “Free Isles” more generally, Haiti having liberated much of the Caribbean as well) is guaranteed by top secret advanced weapons technology. one of the main characters is a bisexual Free Isles airship captain.
one key difference is that this is embedded in a broader context where the main political conflict is not between Haiti and the states around it but rather between the Union and the Confederacy, which have been locked in an extended truce for fifteen years. the Confederate economy remains slave-powered, with slaves’ obedience now ensured by a drug called “drapeto” that suppresses slaves’ willpower.
other key differences are the narrator — who’s not the airship captain — and the presence of the orishas Oya and Oshun, who partially inhabit the narrator and the airship captain, respectively. the narrator is a thirteen-year-old street-dwelling girl (nick)named Creeper who accidentally discovers a Confederate plot to steal an incredibly destructive (both militarily and environmentally) Free Isles superweapon — her voice is very engaging, although the dialect use is at times a bit inconsistent (really the only thing I’d fault this for, and it’s a very small thing), and her perspective keeps the book moving at a brisk pace.
the supernatural elements are also well-integrated into the narrative — I was initially a bit worried they’d be kind of an afterthought, but everything ends up really nicely intertwined without either compromising the steampunk-ish sci-fi elements or falling into being Urban Fantasy™. I can’t say too much more without spoilers, I think.
this is a book that’s doing a lot in a very short space, and it does it very well. I hope eventually maybe Clark will write more in this setting, but given how long it’s been since this was published it seems like he’s moved on to other things, alas.
moods: adventurous, tense