Odin's Voice

Kylie is a ‘bonder’, owned by an agency and bonded to a ‘freewoman’ whose house she cleans and child she cares for. Her clandestine visits to the ‘gatherings’ at Odin’s temple lead to her being viewed as a prophet, the voice of the god Odin himself.

Affroditey, meanwhile, lives a wealthy and pampered life until she loses her free status and becomes bonded herself. She and Kylie become close, and together they plan an escape as émigrées to Mars, where a free pioneering society exists. Many parallels, both historical and for the future, exist between our world and that of Kylie. Genetically-designed characters, I-D cards depending on biometric data, a cctv-observed life, plus hackers determined to break through security barriers bring, chillingly after 7/7, a possible future to light.

I was reading Price’s A Sterkarm Kiss when this arrived: though set in a very different world, she once again provides a fast-moving story which comments on the ways in which government and society exploit or are exploited, mixing historical elements and displaying her interest in dialects as she tweaks the language to differentiate between speakers of different backgrounds. Her message is one of ‘power to the people’ – it will be interesting to see how Kylie and Affie fare in the next volumes of the Mars trilogy.