If Hidden Sun is anything to go by, those Angry Robots have really raised their editorial game, steadily staking out a sweet spot between depth and accessibility. I particularly admire the efficiency with which Fenn sets out her board and game-pieces, deftly and swiftly showing character, but shifting to telling where necessary to keep things moving. Noble proto-scientist Rhia is pretty much nailed onto the page by the time you’ve turned the first five of them, and if angry orphan Dej seems a little simpler, well, she had simple upbringing in a skylander crèche… and a gift for theft and rebellion (with an attitude to match) is more than many would manage to escape with from a childhood so narrow. The story ticks over at a reasonable RPM during the set-up, and I thought I was in for a lively if somewhat YA-ish adventure yarn until, perhaps a quarter of the way through, Fenn decides everything’s in position and stomps on the gas, at which point the plot slams into high gear: adventure, intrigue and violence ensue.

Not gratuitous violence, mind you—no visceral gore and buckets of blood. Rather, Fenn’s strong on the psychological impact of disruptive events, and on the discombulatory effects of violence on those untrained to it. Both Rhia and Dej end up far closer to killers and killing than either had reason to expect, and the shock and shame and repulsion is well-handled; no glorification here, but no flinching either from the facts of life and death.

So what’s it all about, eh? You might be fairly fooled into thinking you were reading a contemporary take on the planetary romance, but there are subtle hints along the way that you’re actually experiencing something closer to a classic Dying Earth set-up. There’s a similar sense of deep future-history here as you’d find in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, with our current epoch reduced to the merest archaeological rumour, and the desperate geo-engineered meddlings and modifications yet to come all but forgotten, their effects quite literally normalised. At some point, you see, a series of shades were raised above the Earth to shield it from the savage sun, but the coverage is incomplete, a patchwork—though whether that’s deliberate is not yet clear. The result is a rather neat “same planet, different worlds” situation, providing the geographical and sociotechnical schism between the the skylands and the shadowlands (and their respective kin) that powers the plot.

Shadowkin, it seems, are pretty much baseline human beings, albeit ones reduced to a sociotechnical state that varies between late medieval and early Renaissance: no electricity, no high technology and—perhaps most importantly—no metals, as they’ve all long since been squandered (by thee and me). The skykin, by contrast, are some sort of posthuman adaptation to the relentless solar onslaught of life in the lands that lie beyond the shade. And it is an adaptation, rather than a speciation: that’s why their children are given over to crèches in the shadowlands to be raised, before being reclaimed in their mid-teens and taken back to the skylands to be bonded with their animus, a long-lived (but ultimately mortal) implant-symbiont that gifts them with a supersense of their surroundings, scaly sun-proof skin and (when it works properly) the memories of its previous hosts, going back generations. Like all great gifts, it comes at a cost: skykin are shorter lived than their shady cousins, and the animus implantation ritual bears no small resemblance to being dosed up on entheogens and crudely trepanned next to a desert campfire. Such is Dej’s fate, though she’s less lucky; as a sort of skykin orphan or reject, she gets given an old and janky animus that doesn’t function as it should, and ends up rejected twice over, taking up—less by choice than brutal necessity—with her fellow clanless rogues of the skyland, who eke out a maladapted (and justifiably embittered) subsistence through hunting weird skyland fauna, and raiding the occasional shadowkin caravan.

Rhia’s circumstances are considerably more privileged, and she knows it—though not as well as she might. Orphaned daughter of a minor but wealthy noble house in the shadowland of Shen, she has inherited her late father’s role as an “enquirer”—deliberate hints of the Renaissance rise of the natural philosophers, here—at which she excels by both aptitude and inclination. Only it’s not a role that the rather inegalitarian shadowland culture approves of women holding, and her position is further complicated by the absent-without-leave status of her rakehell younger brother, in whose absence she is by default the heir to the household’s powers and responsibilities. For reasons as yet unclear, he skipped town for another shadowland a while away, and when the duke of Shen sends a small party to retrieve him, Rhia’s impetuous inner investigator directs her to derelict her duties and trek off with them in mufti. Thanks to the sociopathic power-plays of a rogue priest with a dark (or rather bright) past and friends in places high and low alike, murder and machinations in t’other shadowland result in Dej and Rhia’s lives colliding quite spectacularly.

There’s loads going on here, presented in a style that is readable yet intellectually sophisticated, which is a tricky tightrope to tread. I am also reminded somewhat of Anne McCaffery’s Harpers of Pern novels; something to do with the combination of deep worldbuilding, dramatic plots, and courageously stubborn young women in leading roles, perhaps. (As someone who all but teethed on the Pern books, that’s meant as a compliment!) Will the Shadowlands series achieve a similar status? Only time will tell—but I see few reasons it shouldn’t.