The Girls from Alcyone

Sigrid is a very special genetic match born to not particularly special parents, deeply in debt in the slums of Earth. That's how she finds herself being purchased by a mercenary corporation at the age of nine, destined for a secret training program involving everything from physical conditioning to computer implants, designed to make her a weapon. Sigrid, her friend Suko, and the rest of their class are a special project of the leader of the Kimura corporation, one that's controversial even among the corporate board, and when the other mercenary companies unite against Kimura's plans, they become wanted contraband.

This sounds like it could be a tense SF thriller, but I'll make my confession at the start of the review: I had great difficulty taking this book seriously. Initially, it had me wondering what horrible alterations and mind control Kimura was going to impose on the girls, but it very quickly turned into, well, boarding school drama, with little of the menace I was expecting. Not that bullying, or the adults who ignore it to see how the girls will handle it themselves, are light-hearted material, but it was very predictable. As was the teenage crush that grows into something deeper, the revenge on the nastiest bully that the protagonist manages to not be responsible for, and the conflict between unexpectedly competent girls and an invasion of hostile mercenaries.

I'm not particularly well-read or informed about the genre, so I'm not the best person to make this comparison, but the main thing The Girls from Alcyone reminded me of was anime or manga. The mix of boarding-school interpersonal relationships, crushes and passionate love, and hypercompetent female action heroes who wear high heels and have constant narrative attention on their beauty had that feel to it. Add in the lesbian romance and the mechs (of sorts) that show up near the end of the story, and it's hard to shake the feeling that one is reading SF yuri as imagined by a North American author.

The other reason why I had a hard time taking this seriously is that it's over-the-top action sequences (it's the Empire Strikes Back rescue scene!) mixed with rather superficial characterization, with one amusing twist: female characters almost always end up being on the side of the angels. Lady Kimura, when she appears, turns into exactly the sort of mentor figure that one would expect given the rest of the story (and the immediate deference she got felt like it was lifted from anime). The villains, meanwhile, are hissable and motivated by greed or control. While there's a board showdown, there's no subtle political maneuvering, just a variety of more or less effective temper tantrums.

I found The Girls from Alcyon amusing, and even fun to read in places, but that was mostly from analyzing how closely it matched anime and laughing at how reliably it delivered characteristic tropes. It thoroughly embraces its action-hero story full of beautiful, deadly women, but it felt more like a novelization of a B-grade sci-fi TV show than serious drama. It's just not well-written or deep enough for me to enjoy it as a novel. None of the characters were particularly engaging, partly because they were so predictable. And the deeper we got into the politics behind the plot, the less believable I found any of it.

I picked this up, along with several other SFF lesbian romances, because sometimes it's nice to read a story with SFF trappings, a positive ending, and a lack of traditional gender roles. The Girls from Alcyone does have most of those things (the gender roles are tweaked but still involve a lot of men looking at beautiful women). But unless you really love anime-style high-tech mercenary boarding-school yuri, want to read it in book form, and don't mind a lot of cliches, I can't recommend it.

Followed by The Machines of Bellatrix.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Reviewed: 2015-04-19