Soledad In the Desert

Willis's first book about the Second-World, The City Built of Starships, tells earthlings who crossed interstellar space to colonize “the planet with two suns” and start a new civilization. Colonization does not go well. The First-World emigrants had already divided into the rulers and the ruled even before landing on the Second World. When the new planet failed to provide sufficient food, tensions erupted into civil war.

Soledad in the Desert offers the vivid, often terrifying backstory for how this class division brought a remnant of the human species close to fratricidal extinction. Fed up with the “hands” (masters), a small group of malcontents flees the City Built of Starships and finds refuge in the desert. These malcontents are Seekers—practitioners of nonviolence and meditation—who attempt to establish an alternate way of life in the new world. One of them is Soledad, a precocious pre-teen girl whose coming-of-age story dovetails with the desert Seekers’ efforts to survive. Among Soledad’s gifts is an ability to collaborate with yaegers, sentient pterodactyl-like creatures whose openness to the young woman presents her group with the best chance for prevailing against the harsh landscape, the difficulty of staying fed, and—worst of all—the growing threat from human enemies who haven’t been left behind after all. Soledad in the Desert tells a sci-fi tale worthy of Ursula K. LeGuin’s best-loved novels,