BETWEEN THE WILD LINES

In Krafsig’s dystopian SF series starter, a fierce soldier for a fascistic matriarchy meets and falls for a young fugitive.

On the planet Phyrros, an all-female dictatorship called the Authority arose with the scourge of an almost invariably fatal virus called Heart Blight, which especially devastated the male population. The few male survivors carry the virus, and most are kept in lockdown quarantine. The Authority perpetuates the species via artificial insemination. All romantic relationships are same-sex, and all women receive combat training with procreation as a reward for service to the state; they fight against a violent resistance called Sympathizers. As young Rei eagerly trains as an Enforcer for the Authority, she witnesses the deaths of comrades and an important scientist during a Sympathizer ambush and heads toward a wilderness retreat to recuperate. By chance, she’s captured by Griff, a young male fugitive who largely raised himself in the wild after his father’s murder. The world from Griff’s perspective is very different from Rei’s; he plans to escape to a neighboring free territory—which may or may not exist—and expose the regime’s self-serving falsehoods. However, before he does so, he must care for a wounded Rei. As days pass, the pair develops a sexual fascination with each other. A great deal of Krafsig’s novel recalls Barry B. Longyear’s award-winning novella Enemy Mine (1979), but with a timely pandemic twist and hot eroticism interspersed amid wolf attacks and lessons in woodcraft medicine. Things get steamy for the alternating narrators (“I wasn’t expecting to walk in on her naked,” notes Griff at one point), but before the descriptions get too torrid, the third act returns to a war footing, with engaging action, fury, revelations, and treachery. The tale, which includes amazing coincidences, ends in a cliffhanger, and many readers will want to follow this planned series into the wilds.

A dark, eventful enemies-to-lovers SF romance.