User:Sandstein/Drafts/God's War

God's War is a science fiction novel by Kameron Hurley. Her first novel, it was published in 2011. It was nominated for the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Novel and won the 2011 Kitschies Golden Tentacle award for best first novel.

Setting
God's War is set in the far future, on an arid planet colonized by Islamic settlers and isolated for centuries from the rest (if any) of humanity. Most of the world's technology is based on insects, controlled by "magicians" – for this, the novel has been tongue-in-cheek called "bugpunk." The world's two main nations, divided by a disagreement about whether government should be religious or secular, are locked in perpetual biological warfare, and after generations of men have been sent to the front to die, the kingdom of Nasheen has become a women-led and almost exclusively female society.

The principal character, Nyx, is a Nasheenese bel dame, that is, a woman who hunts down and kills male defectors to prevent them from spreading bioweapon infections incurred at the front. The profession is inspired by the ancient Akkadian term bēl damê, "owner of the blood," which appears to refer to a kind of blood avenger or assassin. This term's similarity to beldam ("witch") and belle dame ("beautiful lady"), inspired Hurley's original idea for the novel. The novel tracks the adventures of Nyx and her team of bounty hunters, including Rhys, a middling magician and refugee from the more traditionally patriarchal enemy nation of Chenja. In a "conspicuously deliberate inversion of the usual gender relations in a thriller of this sort", Nyx is a violent nihilist, while Rhys, one of the novel's few male characters, is the voice of empathy and reason.

Themes
Despite its unconventional, non-Western and female-dominated setting, ... ''Pornokitsch's reviewer, "God's War is remarkable not because it pushes the boundaries of science fiction, but because it is a novel in which those boundaries are already gone."

God's War is the first in a trilogy of novels, and is to be followed by the sequels Infidel and Rapture.

The novel was well received by genre reviewers.