The next in line of the Hugo nominees. A young male-to-female transsexual, Katrina Nguyen, loves her violin and has learned to play it more or less by herself. She plays mostly video game tunes on YouTube and has some followers. She has earned some money by prostitution and video sex and is running from home to escape her abusive and intolerant parents. Shizuka Satomi is a violin teacher who has taught six most accomplished young violinists. She is seeking her next student. But she has made a deal with the devil: she must give seven souls of brilliant musicians to save her own. One more to go… they meet and Shizuka sees something in Katrina’s playing. There is a passion in her playing that Shizuka has not really seen before, and she decides that Katrina will be her next and last student. It takes some time for Katrina to believe she isn’t falling into some sort of exploitation scam when Shizuka offers her free violin teaching. Well, she is falling into a scam, but a very different one than she ever could have imagined.
And then there is an alien family who have a donut shop and who are hiding an interstellar conflict and “end plague“ which always destroys civilizations that have advanced far enough. The mother of that family and Shizuka meet and befriend each other. Maybe spaceships, self-aware AIs, and power by matter conversion might be able to beat a devil?
A pretty unusual book - I don’t believe that there has ever been anything that mixes a “deal with the devil” plot with a hard science fiction story - and the book even manages that admirably well after the reader gets past the style of mixing the genres. The writing is good and the personalities of the main characters are interesting and well described, although the aliens feel a bit too human and are a bit poorly defined. All in all, a pretty good book.
372 pp.
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