Outlaw Planet by MR Carey

MR Carey’s Outlaw Planet is a coda to his multiverse Pandominion duology (Infinity Gate and Echo of Worlds). While no knowledge of those earlier books is needed to enjoy Outlaw Planet it definitely helps. Particularly as readers are thrown into a world in which the main characters is a dog woman who earns the monicker Dog Bitch Bess. Knowing from the earlier books that the Pandeminion is a multiversal society in which beings can Step into different realities and there are variant planets with rabbit people and dog people etc can only help. But also make readers start asking questions when they are presented with a society that is made up of multiple sentient humanoid mammals.

The world of Outlaw Planet seems to be restricted to a single continent that feels like a simulacrum of the United States before the civil war. Dog woman Elizabeth leaves home and takes up as a teacher in a small southern town. She is starting to build a new life but the onset of war between the North and the South sets Elizabeth on a different path. Armed with a sentient gun who calls himself Wakeful Slim, a remnant of a former civilisation that no one knows much about, she becomes Dog-Bitch Bess and goes to war. Interspersed with this story is the story of a group of Pandominion soldiers who step through a gate and find themselves marooned on Bess’s world (sometime in its distant past) but also learn that these is more to this world than first appears.

By building on an established universe, Carey is able to make Outlaw Planet work on a number of levels. On the surface it is a Western, with all of the usual Western tropes delightfully rendered from highwaymen to frontier politics to a downtrodden underclass known as the Pugfaces (for reasons that are eventually explained). But underneath that driving plot is a deep mystery involving that old time tech and the strange towers that dot the landscape. And it is all connected back to the Pandominion and is slowly and satisfyingly revealed to both Bess and the reader in different ways.

Outlaw Planet by MR Carey

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8.0/10