Hope and doubt coexist in beautiful tension in Victories Greater Than Death. The universe provides bountiful reasons to doubt that things will turn out okay, especially for young marginalized people, and especially when there are powerful interstellar bad guys doing their thing. Despite those doubts, the people at the heart of this story keep coming back to hope: that we can do something about injustice, that people who want a loving relationship might actually build one, that we can make it through all this together. (And doubt plays an important role here, too: not only is it literally sacred to some people, it’s essential for interrogating baseless hate in one’s own head.)

Part of the joy of reading space opera is witnessing what Star Trek called “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”. Victories Greater Than Death not only has a diverse cast, but poses incisive questions about why infinitely diverse bodies are so often represented as humanoid. The universal translator gadget, EverySpeak, supplies the correct pronouns for everyone introducing themselves, with a few thoughtful and interesting exceptions. And the relationship dynamics of some species flip the script on human norms, with a member of a three-gendered species looking at two-person relationships the way humans once looked at one-gender relationships. The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane might as well have been speaking of Victories Greater Than Death when he supposed that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” In other YA novels, the protagonist’s best friend being autistic-coded might be all the diversity you get, but here it could almost fade into the background of a grander panorama.

There are also delightfully familiar touches sprinkled throughout: a gag that reminded me of Angel; a trope I first saw in The Last Starfighter; and plenty of terms from the science fiction of yore. But the density of pop-culture references never exceeds 0.01 Clines (and they’re oblique enough that unfamiliar readers won’t notice), so they decorate the story without distracting from it.

Finally, I need to laud the author for having invented perhaps the most appalling bad-guy superpower I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil it, but my gosh, the reveal took my breath away.

I am grateful to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.