Tinker Tailor Stellar Spy
Synopsis
Devoted mother and career woman.
A sleeper agent, poised to act.
Tessa lives a double life. She’s the security counselor to Finn, the leader of the planet.
He’s her ex-husband and father of her children.
She’s still in love with him.
But she has a far worse problem. Tessa is also a deep cover operative for an enemy planet, and turns out, her next mission is to betray him. And when her lives collide, she has to fail her family, or forsake her ideals.
Review
I love a good genre mix, but one I don’t see that often is sci-fi (or in this case, space fantasy, sci-fi with magic, think Star Wars not Star Trek) mixed with a good old-fashioned spy story. Enter indie author Maya Darjani and A Stellar Spy, Book 1 of the Children of Gaia series, which takes the witty writing and strong characters of her space opera series Broken Union and transposes them into a science fantasy spy thriller. If the idea of a double agent employing all their spy tricks to avoid detection, but in a society of advanced tech and magic appeals, then I have good news, because not only do you get this but you also get a superbly written, darkly funny, twisty, thrilling adventure with a heartbreaking emotional core. I knew Darjani was good, but this is really, really good and if you like spies and magic then you need this more than a blood transfusion after a vampire orgy.
Plot wise, we are on the planet of Rula, home to both standard humans and the Navasi, human magic users, most of whom are forced to be chipped—have their magic curbed—to live in society. Tessa Daevana came to Rula years ago as a spy for the planet Elitha, where the Navasi live free. But in the process she fell in love with Finn, an ambitious, idealistic politician, and left her spy life behind. Finn became the planet’s president, she his wife, with two kids. Now divorced, she’s his security advisor and still sees her family.
But when an unchipped Navasi attempts to hurt her family, the government decides to activate a program to curb all their magic, which Tessa wants to stop, so she makes contact with her old spy masters. She wants to protect her family while also upholding her pro-Navasi ideals, but soon she’ll discover that she can’t do both—and that she might be about to be discovered.
If that sounds a lot then yeah, welcome to spy thrillers, but Darjani ensures it’s always complex but never confusing. What struck me first is how nicely the science fantasy and spy thriller mesh together. The concept of a magic underclass treated badly, and an allegedly idealistic leader who ends up using the government to curb their civil rights in the name of stopping terrorism, is an obvious but effective real life allegory. Another cool idea is that even the normal humans have minor magic powers, often ridiculously specific; my favorite being the person who always knows where the bathroom is (a devastatingly useful power, tbh).
But ultimately it was the spy part not the science fantasy part that stood out for me. Darjani was clearly inspired by a John le Carré spy thriller here, and one of the key motifs of a le Carré tome is the idea of a spy being trapped in multiple webs of betrayal. Tessa wants to protect her family while also stopping government overreach. The old spy theme of being torn in different directions and morally compromised is ruthlessly utilised here.
These themes work particularly well because of the character of Tessa, and how well Darjani writes her voice. On the one hand, she’s ruthless in her spycraft, manipulating people, constantly assessing the “pressure points” of everyone she meets. Like many of the spies in the le Carré canon, she’s addicted to the spy life, loving the dirty spycraft and the manipulation of it. But she’s also heartbroken as she can’t spend more time with her family, and desperate to protect them. And because Darjani writes her so well, we see vividly the pain it causes her. She’s also witty, self aware, and chaotic even as she’s also ruthlessly competent —which means it’s both a very funny book and a heartbreaking one as the true cost of her sacrifices for her family (or herself?) start to tell.
It’s also tremendous fun. At one point Tessa notes that spycraft is in many ways indistinguishable from magic, and this is a neat way of describing how fun it is to read her detailed descriptions of her spy routines and tactics. There’s a lot of old school spy stuff here—evading tails, secreting or extracting documents, paranoia about said tails—and when combined with the advanced planetary tech this is endlessly fascinating. I can’t wait for Book 2.
Overall, A Stellar Spy is a stunning achievement, a science fantasy spy thriller—space magic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but from the perspective of the mole—which combines utterly thrilling spycraft with a deeply emotional take on the personal sacrifices of a spy. If le Carré had written speculative fiction, it might have looked a lot like this.
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