Helyna L. Clove

I read this novel for The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, SPSFC. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole. Find out more about the competition here and my team, The Space Girls, here, and read all my reviews for the competition here!

Music and magic. Steampunky science. The Dissolution is coming.

Eighteen year old recluse Sam van Oen lives with his aunt, takes online college courses, works in technical support, and tries not to remember the freak storm that killed his parents ten years ago.

But anxiety and reclusion bring up memories he doesn’t want. Just as Sam gathers courage to send in his application for college away from home, the temperature drops and the sun goes dim. Ice forms in August, and a portal opens in his fireplace. This time, Sam can’t run.

This time he’s sucked in.

Now Sam must survive in the flourishing capital of ten alien species, home to thousands who can change the Symphony underlying the universe and alter reality. Sam’s anxiety attacks and fear of crowds transforms the Nether into a frightening, expansive city. To find his home again, Sam must learn to control the music inside him, while devastating voids threaten to destroy the Nether and everyone he has grown to love.

It was very easy for me to get sucked into the world of The Seeds of Dissolution, much easier than for poor Sam into the Nether. I was enamored with the colorful world, the alien species, the strange combination of magic and technology, and I couldn’t wait to find out about the Drains, about Sam’s journey, and where the entire conspiracy-type plot thread with the re-emergence of a feared and mysterious species, the Aridori, would lead. As Sam becomes apprentice to Origon, the eccentric majus whose main interest is in the destructive, enigmatic Drains that brought Sam to the Nether, and meets other apprentices Enos (assigned to Rilan, Ori’s old ~friend and member of the Council of Maji) and Inas, we gradually get to know more and more aspects of this complicated story, visit different planets and cities, and watch as more and more chaos starts to envelope the Assembly of Species.

I continued to really like the music-based magic system which is handled a bit like science and with beautiful, slightly esoteric descriptions. The different houses and the ways in which various maji used their powers (for example Rilan’s “healing” magic which takes form in her being able to strengthen different functions of her body to help in physical fights) were really well-thought out and interesting. Little by little, we also get to know most of the alien species we encounter, and although their introduction is a bit…out of place, maybe, since the large bulk of the story plays out in the Nether which is not their homeworld (and I did wish to see more of the universe in its “natural habitat”) I found all of them exciting and intriguing. They all have unique characteristics in appearance, lifestyle, and often even in their speech that we can see directly on the pages of the book which I thought was really cool. As Origon, Rilan, some of their majus/scientist friends and the apprentices investigate more Drains popping up and some machinations from the shadows that might reach up to the highest layers of the Assembly, Sam continues to struggle with his anxiety but also finds important friendships and community in the strange world he is stuck in. The writing style was always very clear and detail-oriented, keeping me interested in the narrative easily.

One of the highlights for me was definitely Origon’s and Rilan’s characters, both of them extremely interesting and well-built out with their own conflicts and problems, bringing a different layer to the story in addition to the plot threads of the younger characters. The evolution of Sam’s relationship with the twins Enos and Inas was also intriguing and refreshingly different from what I expected, but at the same time a bit more choppy in its execution than I’d have liked. Some of that was for reasons that later become clear, but I did miss a bit more immersion in watching the birth of the initial trust and love between the trio. There are also a lot of characters to keep count of, and a lot of details, which is on one hand, one of the points of the novel, on the other hand, requires close attention. Sam’s personal story also only reaches its crescendo in the final accords of the novel, and the pacing and tension of this part did not ramp up for me as hard as I wished them to, and I felt like a bit more clarity to jump the logical hoops regarding some of the details would have been great, but nevertheless, it is a great final conflict, giving us some long-awaited answers but also more mysteries that can lead us into the sequel.

The novel is definitely an imaginative and original portal-science-fantasy book which I would recommend to lovers of magic schools (sort of), immersive and diverse alien cultures, plots of lost history and conspiracies, and epic, complex narratives about trust, unity, collaboration, and the things that can challenge these.

Goodreads