CoffeeAndThorn reviewed Genes of Isis by Justin Newland
Review of 'Genes of Isis' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Set in some version of ancient Egypt, before the biblical flood, but in time when the Jews were well established in Egypt (it’s a fantasy and bit woolly when it comes to timelines) this is a strange and haunting book. The skies are full of water and have been through living memory. A cataclysmic flood is looming.
The world is populated by humans and not-quite-humans, and the ‘humans’ in the story aren’t the way we think of them now. Human society is dominated by aliens from the sun who have built the pyramids to protect the world from harmful forces introduced by previous invaders– but they cannot protect humans from the devastating hybridization which those other invaders have introduced, except by rendering the human race sterile. Are these aliens from the sun benign gods or ruthless technocrats? And the hybrids – are they monsters or something else?
Enter our heroine, …
Set in some version of ancient Egypt, before the biblical flood, but in time when the Jews were well established in Egypt (it’s a fantasy and bit woolly when it comes to timelines) this is a strange and haunting book. The skies are full of water and have been through living memory. A cataclysmic flood is looming.
The world is populated by humans and not-quite-humans, and the ‘humans’ in the story aren’t the way we think of them now. Human society is dominated by aliens from the sun who have built the pyramids to protect the world from harmful forces introduced by previous invaders– but they cannot protect humans from the devastating hybridization which those other invaders have introduced, except by rendering the human race sterile. Are these aliens from the sun benign gods or ruthless technocrats? And the hybrids – are they monsters or something else?
Enter our heroine, Akasha, a ‘human’ woman who cannot accept the forced sterilization of the human race. And who carries the future of the human race in her destiny.
This work is hard to pin down. It has a haunting, shifting, oneiric quality, playing with memories of biblical stories, imagery from ancient hieroglyphs and pyramid paintings, and the reader’s desire to see the human race flourish. The writing is beautiful. For me, though, the book loses a star because of its many lose ends. Hard to list them without spoilers, but there were questions raised throughout the book which I felt were unanswered at the end, and that left me dissatisfied. But I guess human life is like that. Above all, this book worked for me as an interrogation of what it means to be human. It didn’t give me the answer. I didn’t really want it to.