𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘 𝒔𝒑𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝒃𝒚 𝑾𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝑵𝒐𝒘! 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑱𝒐𝒏 𝑻𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒆.
Last month I told you how much I enjoyed Bretton Loney’s historical speculative fiction novel Unsettling Time, wherein a time traveller discovers 1749 Halifax. This month, we’re going the other way: into space, and into the future.
Nova Scotia’s most famous UFO sighting came in Shag Harbour in October 1967. Locals saw weird orange lights on an otherwise dark October night. The lights dove toward the water, scuffing along the surface, leaving a yellow wake. They haven’t been seen since.
Mire doesn’t specify that his aliens are our friends from Shag Harbour, but I decided to think they were. And they have returned.
Instead of abducting a random person off a lonely highway, these aliens decide to abduct Nova Scotia. All of it.
Patchworld Nova opens on the 103, near Yarmouth, where our hero Troop was born. “The world saw the spaceship coming years before it arrived. It was enormous. A flat disc of a thing, four times wider than the moon,” Mire explains. “The math had it tearing through the solar system like a speedboat, rearranging everything in its wake. A terrible, world-ending cosmic speedboat. Everyone panicked.”
And then Nova Scotia was surrounded by huge pillars of light, extending from the soil to space. The massive space ship, which they call the Dyson Platter, slices Nova Scotia right out of the planet and sets in on a mysterious craft heading far from Earth, purpose unknown.
Troop was born when all of this happens, right on the 103. “What remained of the province, transported to the alien vessel, was roughly 37,000 kilometres. Supposedly, Earth was something like 500 million square kilometres.” Troop can’t quite believe Nova Scotia was once the small part of anything.
The novel gets through this in a brisk preamble and then the main adventure takes place on space Nova Scotia a few decades later.
We meet what may be the first Mi’kmaq in space, as they handle the change better than anyone and soon have an independent community known as the Abidance up and running. In a repeat of early settler history, when the first Europeans relied on Mi’kmaq kindness and craft to survive the early 1600s, the space Scotians are soon seeking help from the Mi’kmaq.
Suddenly, the boss aliens abandon the Dyson Platter and the Nova Scotians discover that the platter has hundreds of slices of stolen worlds. They must reach the Spire in the centre to avoid disaster. The rest of the book unfolds like Dungeon Crawler Carl, or Ready Player One, taking on a video-game level of fun as the Nova Scotians sprint through slices of world and battle an array of aliens.
Mire’s imagination runs wild here, with some aliens looking like mobile oil spills, others so tiny they colonize someone’s ear, and one nasty fog-like beast that is ravenous to eat the entire platter.
Troops and the others realize that the fate of their platter world now depends on what happens to space Nova Scotia.
I met the author, Jude Mire, at HalCon in 2024, where he personally sold me this book. He wrote it, he edited it, and he published it. All so you can have fun for a few hours, and never look at Nova Scotia the same way again.
I’ve always loved historical fiction, or local literary fiction, for the long-lasting ties it makes to the landscape I see every day. I hadn’t realized that you could do the same thing with speculative fiction.