Raisa Freelund, daughter of the Chief Guardian of Upper Earth, is not naive enough to think she lives in a utopia. Her scalplink floods her mind with news of imminent threats of attack from Lower Earth brutes who endanger the peace and technological progress her people have built. Nor does she need her father’s vigilant monitoring, and readjustment of her thoughts through her scalplink, to know she should not take her duty to marry Lower Earth’s Crown Prince, Lein Verg, a union that will unify the splintered factions of humanity, lightly. Raisa knows better than to question the rapidly spreading news that declares her to be the Fledgling of Lower Earth legends, a prophesied symbol of prosperity and freedom who encourages citizens to embrace a mass-scalplinking project that realigns everyone’s minds to Upper Earth’s civilized ways. However, it is only after she is kidnapped en route to her own wedding by Nada, a deposed Lower Earth princess and revolutionary – and meets those willing to give up their lives to protect their free will and resist subjugation of their minds and bodies – that she realizes she’s lived life as a caged bird with the illusion of being free.

The gripping first instalment in a duology, S.K. Ali’s science-fiction debut, Fledgling: The Keeper’s Records of Revolution, tackles themes of mass surveillance, alteration of personal information, and classist prejudice that fuels corruption and war over limited resources by weaponizing and propagandizing religious and cultural ideologies. It also explores totalitarian plutocracies masquerading as beneficent democracies, and how the act of spreading truth and hope can be the most powerful resistance. (Despite the story being set more than 100 years in the future, this rings disturbingly true to our present.) 

Even the way the novel is structured – as a collection of written records secretly gathered to tell the revolutionaries’ unaltered stories – embodies the novel’s central theme of resistance. Ali masterfully weaves a cohesive story out of nine characters’ accounts with memorable, nuanced perspectives that never feel convoluted or overwhelming. By integrating character and world-building elements inspired by Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures, Ali creates a stunningly original, richly described world and provides non-orientalist representation for a culture that is not often centred in science fiction. The book is a masterful exposition that satisfyingly lays the groundwork for the second volume, and this reader is excited to join Raisa and the revolutionaries on a journey to expose, disrupt, resist, and revolt.