What can teenagers try once they’ve raced through Suzanne Collins, Anthony McGowan, Kevin Brooks and Meg Rosoff? With its high-octane mixture of adventure, romance, philosophical inquiry and speculation, science fiction was always a staple part of adolescent reading. In A Confusion of Princes, Garth Nix has come up with a thrilling adventure that could have been written by Robert Heinlein or Andre Norton in SF’s golden age.
Prince Khemri begins as an arrogant, supercilious narrator whom future technology has made faster, smarter, stronger and less mortal than the rest of humanity. With no recollection of his parents, he has spent the first eight years of his life having his DNA “improved” by the all-powerful Empire. Spoilt rotten, he thinks he’s special — until at 17 he discovers he’s one of a million other princes, all in deadly competition to become the next emperor of the Universe.
Once you’ve adjusted to its technical gobbledygook, Nix’s novel is both funny and moving, like Matrix with a heart. For part of the prince’s relentless preparation is that, after distinguishing himself during his officer training by repelling an alien attack single-handed, he has to be reborn into a mortal body. Sounds familiar? Experiencing what it’s like to be vulnerable is bad enough, but then he finds himself put on a planet with nothing on it but a damaged ship. Inside it, dying, is the sole survivor of a pirate attack, a spirited young woman with whom Khemri, against all his calculating instincts, falls deeply in love.
How he saves her life and that of her people while concealing his true identity, how he realises that the Empire is not as benign as he has been led to believe and how he learns to become truly heroic makes for a classic Boy’s Own adventure. Action-packed, it delights in all that young males love, from existential conundrums to explosions in space, but will also please girls in showing emotional intelligence and a sense of humour. (I especially enjoyed the joke about being “totally in the s*** tank without an environmental recycling unit”.) This is Nix’s best fantasy since Sabriel and reboots SF for teenage readers.
It is entertaining, funny and thoughtful enough to be worth relaxing with after exams.
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A Confusion of Princes, by Garth Nix, HarperCollins, 528pp, £6.99. To buy this book for £6.64 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134)