I've mentioned it before in earlier reviews, but the novellas that TorDotCom are knocking out are a gift that keeps on giving. Lately I've been reading some of them aloud to the better half as she's recovering from knee replacement surgery. She brings pain. I bring words to counter that. It feels like a good trade. Here's another solid addition to their library from an author who has five novels to her name thus far, none of which I've read but most of which I'm hungry to find. Her 'Diabolist's Library' series plays with underground cults in Victorian London.

I'm not sure how the library of that series title plays into proceedings, but this novella is about an entirely different home for creative works, a museum located on the other side of our galaxy but which currently houses a good deal of our greatest art treasures. They've already been there for almost three centuries, exchanged for identical copies with the Celerians, when they offered us a way out of all our worst problems in 2037. They're preservationists, they call themselves, a catlike race with prehensile tails, and they rescued us from ourselves at the most crucial time for a newly spacefaring race.

One of the great ironies of this novella is that we spend precious little time at the museum, which I would dearly love to move into. Are they hiring? Inquiring minds want to know. However, Tanzer is happy to provide us with a detailed look at our future, as we neared our collective demise then as we used the tools the Celerians left us to fix our broken world. They left us a universal vaccine, translation implants, algae to eat the plastics in our oceans. They even gave us Genesis trees, not just carbon scrubbers but providers of clean energy that grow everything from new organs to the communication devices of choice. And, after giving us all this, they left.

Fast forward three-hundred years, to a point when our climate is fixed and poverty eliminated, a utopia compared to what we have now and indeed what we will have in 2037. Apparently, when we agreed to the Celerians' terms, we did so as a planet, though a few pockets of unrecognised rogue states refused. I got a kick out of the New Confederacy, "ruled from its capital city of Mar-a-Lago by a Large Language Model trained on speeches made by former president Donald Trump", but it turns out to be radical Cascadians who detonate a nuclear bomb in Denver International Airport, an environmental mess cleaned up by an effort that inadvertently created the Great Mycelium, a giant sentient fungal growth covering an astonishing range.

I could talk about Tanzer's vision of the future for hours, but it really doesn't matter except as an impeccable backdrop. What does matter is that we've got past the bad old times and now we want our art back. However, the Celerians don't want to play ball and that leads us to the story battling its way through all this glorious detail, namely an intergalactic art heist. Fennel Tycho is part of a five-person crew who have acquired, at great expense, precise copies of six great works of art that they aim to swap out with the originals in the Celerian's giant space museum. It's a tasty pitch for a novel, even if it doesn't really turn out to be what we get.

As a heist novel, this is frankly lacking, but Tanzer knows that there are deeper discussions for us to have and those are joyous. At heart, this is about the difference in worth between what's real and what's fake and it's not only about the works in the Celerian museum. It digs further into the balance between roles of creator and preservationist, what heritage means and what's inherent to its ownership, how copies play when the artworks in question are sentient, and the limits of an incorruptible benefactor. There's a lot here beyond the impeccable backdrop.

The characters are fascinating too. Fennel and the team leader, Tarquin Lennox, are a relatively straightforward pair of participants in a space heist, but their cohorts aren't. Arakachi Misora is impeccable muscle, not just through extreme training but through being a set of sextuplets with the ability to merge into one body through the magic of biotech and then back out again into as many as half a dozen. The captain of their ship is Tchik-tchik, a two-metre-tall insectile alien with a name that may or may not be theirs or just that of their species.

And then there's Jack Kirby. Yes, Jack Kirby. He's one of a set of five sensynth curators built by an imaginative trillionaire in his own image to preserve the art that we kept after that epochal deal with the Celerians. And, perhaps, the art that came after, because unless I blinked at the worst of all moments, I'm not convinced that's ever brought up. With the collected heritage of our planet now safe and sound on the other side of the galaxy, do we continue to create more? We should. Is it an innate human urge? Or does it have a different level of value, either having been left behind or created afterwards? There's so much to discuss here! Anyway, Jack prefers the term "synthetic sentience" to that of "artificial intelligence", but he's really a living work of art, along with a slew of other things.

You should have an idea of what's here, as much as an eight-paragraph dipping of a metaphorical toe can provide, but I want to talk about the ending. I can't, of course, because spoilers, but it's a finalé that delivers something very different from what we might have expected going in. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I certainly wasn't disappointed by it, even if I still want to read what I thought I was going to get, that intergalactic heist novella. What I will say is that it leaves a heck of a lot open for more exploration.

Is Tanzer going to return to this universe with a further work, even if it's one featuring different characters? Will there be a sequel to turn this into a duology of novellas? Will it become a series of its own? I could easily imagine a swathe of stories set against the backdrop she introduced this time out. They could even be of different genres. There's a whole space war brewing worthy of a novel of its own. Most of all, I want to go back to this museum for a longer, deeper visit. I want to wander through the Earth galleries to see what sort of job the Celerians did and I want to work a lot further into its depths. After all, it's been there since the pre-Cambrian era. That's a heck of a lot of time to collect! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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