Even the bakkies (pick-up trucks) run on bugs (and I must say I was delighted to see the word “bakkie”, along with other South African terms, like veldt).

In this way bugs are used for many things, from providing light to screening for bioweapons and regrowing limbs or entire bodies. The magicians in the novel are not the usual fantasy kind, but people with an innate ability to control bugs by altering their pheromones and reprogramming insects at the cellular level. It sounds stupid and it made me squirm (I loathe bugs) but somehow Hurley makes it work. There’s the weird bug-tech for example – almost all the technology on Umayma runs on bugs. There is so much about this novel that I found admirable or at least memorable. Together with their team, they accept a bounty from the Nasheenian queen to track down an alien woman who has the means to end the war, not peacefully, but in one nation’s favour. Rhys and Nyx are completely different people – he’s a devout Muslim, she’s an atheist, and that’s just the start – but they need each other and end up forming a bond that’s both comforting and frustrating. She loses her prestigious position and carries on as a bounty hunter with a team of mercenaries, including a magician (not what you think), a shapeshifter, and another hunter who once tried to kill her. This ‘black work’ gets her in trouble with the other bel dames. But she also works as a bounty hunter on the side, and now she’s started “selling out her womb on the black market”, using it to grow zygotes for gene pirates. As a bel dame, Nyx has spent the last three years cutting the heads off draft dodgers and deserters. In Nasheen, boys are sent to war at sixteen, and they can “either come home at forty or come home in a bag. Nyx is a Nasheenian ex-soldier and a bel dame – an elite government-trained assassin. Religious differences between the two eventually led to a war that has now been raging for two centuries.

Since then, the world has been divided into two main states – Nasheen and Chenja. Umayma was settled three thousand years ago by a group of Muslims now known as the First Families. Set on the planet Umayma in a post-Earth future, God’s War does not make the usual assumption that, if humans go out and colonise planets, it’ll be western nations that do it. Author Kameron Hurley elegantly weaves an unbelievable amount of characterisation, plot and intrigue into those slick opening lines, and one thing you know for sure after reading them is that this is not conventional sci fi. It’s one of the best I’ve ever read, and it continues to impress me. God’s War has an opening that should not be ignored. Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley

God's War by Kameron Hurley