Reading: Empire of Bones

Liz Williams' Empire of Bones was a random Oxfam bookshop purchase a while ago, as part of my effort to read more SFF by women, and more female SFF writers. It's a first contact story, centred around Jaya Nihalani, former leader of a failed revolution in a near-future India where a conservative government has reintroduced strict caste differentiation, and also the first human being to have evolved to a level where she can communicate with the alien ship which has been hidden on the fringes of the solar system ever since it seeded the Earth with genetic material millions of years earlier. The Earth is now ready to become a part of the galactic empire, and emissaries are sent to make contact with the population.

The Indian setting allows Williams to produce an interesting postcolonial take on a fairly standard SF story, and her alien society has a rigid caste structure which parallels the reinstated caste system in India. However, although I really enjoyed the setup and worldbuilding I felt that the resolution of the plot was rather rushed, with a lot of events happening "offstage" and being reported and one major conflict resolved in an almost incidental way, and a lot of threads seemed to be left dangling, particularly about the alien society and the political conflicts which form the background to the first contact mission.