Becoming Terran by Mark Roth-Whitworth (Novus Mundi Books, 2024)
Review by Lis Carey: It’s 2077, with climate change hitting hard, trillionaires bent on world control, and ordinary people in many places struggling to survive.
A young woman from Niger is working in a hotel in North Africa, when it is seized by one of those trillionaires, Phillippe Tolliver. She catches his attention, and manages to impress him enough that he decides she worth recruiting as his newest personal aide. Renamed Francoise Trouve, she insists on taking her little sister, renamed Amelie, with her.
She takes advantage of all the education he gives her, by AR and intense study, and her sister is tutored until she’s sent off to an elite private school in England. They both get genetic engineering to soften their curls and lighten their skin, and Francoise works hard at making herself indispensable to him. First as his aide, and later as a skilled business operative he can send into any of his corporations, both to learn more herself and identify and solve problems, she does.
But Tolliver has recruited someone who will be useful only as long as it serves her greater goal, which is no longer just advancing herself and her sister. As she has learned more about Tolliver, and about the 400 trillionaires who don’t believe they’ll have enough power until their control is total. She wants to bring them down.
The story, and the world, are a bit dark, but absorbing, with good worldbuilding and good characters. Francoise is already a strong woman when we meet here, and grows in knowledge, understanding, and judgment. Amelie, a little girl at the start, also grows into a strong woman, with a different temperament entirely, but the same values–and the same ultimate goals, though she pursues them by her own path.
There’s political intrigue, business intrigue, other interesting characters who are varied and important to the beneath the radar struggle in their own ways. This is in the end a thoughtful and hopeful book.
I received this electronic galley as a gift.
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Clickity
Ooh! That sounds great!
Clickity
I heard Mark read an excerpt of this at a con. Looking forward to reading it.
Roth-Whitworth has bitten off a LOT by deciding to write from the POV of a Nigerien woman (or two). Is he up to it? I am extremely wary. Their ethnicity is likely to be at least as important to them as their nationality, for instance. Is there an acknowledgments section thanking his sources, preferably including a sensitivity reader?
@Doctor Science–There’s no acknowledgement section in the ARC I read.
Francoise and Amelie, and other women characters, struck me as convincing women, and Francoise in particular as a woman who had experienced trauma. As Nigerians–I am not qualified to say. It did not seem to me that Mark was Othering them on that basis, but whether they are convincing Nigerians–I really don’t know.
I don’t know what appellation should be used to indicate that a person is from one country or the other but Niger and Nigeria are two different countries.
@Mike Glyer–On the one hand, yes, I know that. On the other hand–see why I’m not qualified?
Just an old white guy here, no expert, but I would say that Doctor Science is correct here when she used Nigerien for people from Niger, and aside from the softer vowel sound at the end, the first syllable of Nigerien is nee while the first syllable of Nigerian has a long i.
I got curious reading the comments and (carefully) looked it up. Wiktionary would seen to agree with Jeff: “The term Nigerois occasionally appears (in Merriam-Webster, older editions of the CIA World Factbook, and The New York Times style guide), but since that is not used by the people of Niger themselves, Nigerien is preferred. Nigerien is distinguished from Nigerian, which denotes a person from Nigeria.”
TIL that Nigeriens are from Niger and Nigerians are from Nigeria.
Regards,
Dann
I say, that Power must never be trusted without a check. – John Adams
Me, too
I decided I was the logical choice to take the hit of saying explicitly we know these are two different countries before anyone else leaped into the breach with a “correction”.
@ Mike
I hope my comment wasn’t taken as criticism of anyone. I knew there were two countries, but I’d never done the dive to discover their respective demonyms.
Regards,
Dann
Nothing succeeds like undress – Dorothy Parker (12 years late)
@Dann665–
And I’ll third that.
Mike, brave and noble, for doing that for us.
Mark did ask and got sensitive readers. There is one character with a disability based on me, and I had to approve everything he wrote about her. The only problem was that he had to standardized the spelling of her speaking as the copy editing software had a fit with the different mis- spelling of how I actually speak.
@Ellen–That’s good to know. Thank you!
Pre-ordered.
First, one of my Big Things in my writing is that White Male Americans are going to go out and conquer the universe.
Second, as we go out, it will be all of us. You know, like on that old show no one remembers, where on the bridge, they had a Japanese American 20 years after the end of WWII, and a Russian, in the middle of the Cold War, and a black woman as an officer….
Feel free to pick up my first novel, 11,000 Years (that got reviewed in Asimov’s in 2022) to see what the crew looks like, if nothing else.
I’m looking at Africa, which will NOT stay the wreck that it is 100 years from now, but will have nations that will be more like India in terms of power, etc.
ObDisclosure: I chose Niger (“nee-jer”) (rather than Nigeria) because the young woman and her sister are poor, and I’m assuming Nigeria will be one of the big, if not most advanced in Africa, given that has the largest population. Oh… and one of my closest friends was in the Peace Corps, and she was in Niger.
They were out of Niger several years before the book starts, and taken to France and the Great Britain (I mean, there’s an independent Scotland…) and the culture they’re forced into is that of the trillionaires.
And if by “sensitivity reader” you mean did I get someone to see whether I’d written them properly, well, if you’ll allow a black woman from BSFS who’s a) Jewish (converted for her late husband) and from the Caribbean read it, and she liked it, yes.
Note that I take the old “write what you know” and append “and what you don’t, do research, preferably from primary sources”.
Read the book, and you decide.
@Ellen: thank you, that’s good & important to know! Though wow, it’s frustrating that copy editing software was allowed to veto the author’s judgement about style & authenticity.
Re: Nigeriens vs. Nigerians: I had to check Wikipedia to make sure I had the demonym right, I wasn’t sure offhand myself. But that’s just a small example of why I was very wary about an outsider writing about people from the area working without a net.
The danger isn’t really “Othering”, it’s “whitening”, not unlike the cosmetic treatments the characters get. That could be done well or very very badly. The plot as described (here & elsewhere) could have all kinds of fruitful resonances with colonialism & imperialism, I just wasn’t sure from the descriptions that Roth-Whitworth was aware of the issues he was playing with.
I have no problems with white writers writing from the POV of non-white characters and other cultures–but they have to acknowledge that it’s difficult, not assume their own omnicompetence. That’s why using sensitivity readers is such a good sign, it shows awareness of one’s limitations.
Doctor Science: done nicely? Hell, no. Cosmetic? No, they’re genengineered. A trillionaire cares about nothing except what they want. He decides that their names are “too difficult” and renames them. They have no choice.
The trillionaire who picks them up is French-American, and he prefers the French. That’s what he usually speaks. And… ok, think of Dilbert Musk, but who actually knows what he’s talking about, and perhaps less principled. And yes, I did mean it the way it sounds.
Actually, if you like, I’m going to read the first chapter at the WSFA third Friday meeting next Friday. If you go to the wsfa.org website, you can get the zoom address.