Na Viro

Gina Cole

Huia

Otago Daily Times, November 5th 2022

Auckland lawyer Gina Cole has followed up her Ockham award-winning short story collection Black Ice Matter with a glorious, queer, Pacifika space opera that confirms her place as a unique voice in the genre.

Although Tia Grom-Eddy is the best navigator in her Academy class and comes from a space-faring family (her father is Martian, her mother away in deep space most of her life), she has no intention of leaving Earth. Instead, she plans to join the Global Indigenous Alliance, where she will monitor the Pacific currents for gravitational disturbances. But when her sister Leilani goes missing while investigating a newly-emergent deep-space whirlpool, Tia is forced to join the crew dispatched to rescue her – a mission that will bring her into direct confrontation with her estranged mother. She eventually flees Academy forces accompanied by a member of the first alien species to be encountered by humanity, the Thraean captain Sotrakkar, and two of her crew mates, including the sentient AI, Turukawa, for whom she feels a disturbing attraction.

 Cole has adopted a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to her worldbuilding and the nature of Tia’s future Earth. There are allusions to Water Wars and a recovery made possible by the discovery of an exotic substance called ‘exo-ore,’ but we are given little other history of the world. Similarly, interstellar whirlpools clearly distort gravity and, it seems, time, but their cause and nature (wormhole? Rift in the fabric of space-time?) remain a mystery. It is a technique that avoids the need for lengthy and intrusive exposition, leaving the reader to fill in the details from context and imagination.

In some cases, this works well, such as the presence of characters with unfamiliar ethnicities, genders and identities – Grom, Matifon, embod – designations that need little or no explanation but reveal aspects of broader social structures. At other points, however, exoticism felt more strained. People ‘spin their iris circuitry’ when looking at things, for example, and the prefix ‘exo’ is attached to everything from building materials to beverages, as if to highlight the story’s science-fictionality.

Like Cole, who is of Fijian, Scottish and Welsh descent, Tia is of mixed heritage, and the novel is unashamedly centred in the Pacific. The Academy where she and her sister are trained is in Tāmakimakaurua, and the text is peppered with a melange of Māori and Fijian (Tia’s second language). Water – from lakescreens to the gravitational whirlpools – forms the lens through which the story is literally and figuratively filtered. The image of Tia sailing through space in a sentient drua as easily as the seas on Earth is profoundly evocative, and the threads of Polynesian history and culture that tie Tia so strongly to Earth further highlight the wrongness of the Academy’s colonial ambitions towards Thrae and its people.

Na Viro will not suit all tastes, but it is an accomplished work of science fiction that expands the horizons of what is still a white, male-dominated field.