…at least, not if you’re a potentially semi-sentient hybrid cyborg bearing an alien power source that can break that known laws of physics and create a gateway to another universe.

You may remember me screaming about Valerie Valdes’s first novel, Chilling Effect, last year. If not, good news, the internet is forever.

In Prime Deceptions, Eva, Vakar, Pink, Min, and Sue continue their mission to take out The Fridge, a notorious crime syndicate dealing in said alien tech while attempting to avoid annoying Vakar’s Wraith bosses so much they yank him back to base; dodge anyone who has a grudge against Eva (which is really a lot of people); maintain bare minimum contact with Eva’s family; and keep in close enough comms range for Pink to make the big bucks for food, gas, and large, powerful guns from her telemedicine gig.

As is the case with any really excellent story, things do not go to plan.

Sue, the ship’s engineer, who robbed banks to pay her brother’s ransom – believing him to be The Fridge’s hostage – finds out he escaped quite some time ago and didn’t let anyone in the family know. Certain something horrible has happened to him, Sue asks her crewmates to help her track down her brother. They agree, though Eva very much wishes they hadn’t when the search leads them to the planet Garilla, site of the most horrible moments of her life.

I really adore Valdes’s books not only for the plots, which are complex enough to be engaging while not so very space opera-y you lose track of the threads, and the pacing, which is a perfect blend of high-adrenaline moments and more introspective pauses, but also for the time she takes to develop her characters. It would be easy, in a series like The Chilling Effect, to fall back on tropes like the badass mercenary and the flaky plugged-in pilot and let readers fill in the blanks, but Valdes takes the time and care to give us people rather than characters, which means you care about them as much as you do the action and where it takes you.

No one on La Sirena Negra‘s crew is just one thing. Badasses show compassion. Warriors cry. Government agents are sweet and romantic. And moms are utterly impossible yet, at the same time, will break any and all rules for their daughters. Sound like anyone you know? Probably. Real people are rarely just one thing, either.

Another element of Valdes’s world I really enjoy, and one I think a lot of sf/f writers think they’re achieving when they add a character with a different skin color or religion or manner of dress is actual cultural and ethnic diversity. Because here’s the thing: plugging someone who looks a little different or prays to a different higher power(s) into a planet or galaxy or dimensionwide monoculture is a step toward diversity, but at this point, when the world is wide open to us and we have social media, sensitivity readers, libraries, and a million other means of gathering information (such as getting own voices authors to the table), it isn’t enough.

Authors, take your cues from Valdes. People can still be bi (or tri or quadri) lingual without translator nanites. Even people who only speak one language can speak in dialects and idoms that confuse other people who speak the same language. Not all species need to be humanoid; hell, not all of them need to be biological. Humans can fall in love and have sex with other species (and vice versa) without it being weird fetish porn. (Orion slave girls? Original Trilogy Twi’leks? Would you like me to continue?)

Sexuality and gender can be blown way the fuck open. Species can express emotions differently, and it will lead to misunderstandings and effort will have to be made to forge understanding. It won’t always be kumbaya United Federation of Planets. Earth can’t even cooperate with itself; you think we’re going to be able to cooperate with anyone – let alone everyone else?

Valdes gets it. All of it. And her stories are so much richer for the truth of it – Prime Deceptions even more so than Chilling Effect for the space it makes to delve into Eva’s past, before she considered the ripples a single stone could cause not only in a single pond but also in the universe.

Oh, and for all the beta readers and editors out there who still think you’re supposed to italicize other languages and that readers will be confused when bilingual characters drop their second language into dialogue and interior monologue naturally because that’s what people who speak more than one language do? Please see this entire book and its predecessor and chupa mi pinga. (I learned to swear from friends in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and Puerto Rico. Sorry, Eva.)

Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes (Harper Voyager) is available now.