Nisi Shawl doesn't seem to want to make life easy for her readers and how much you'll get out of her work may depend on whether you see that as a good or bad thing. This is a high concept novel of speculative fiction built out of eight short stories, originally written and published separately in a variety of places. They are presented in order, so there is a general flow forward, but they follow different characters at different points in that flow. And that's just the start...

Initially, we might believe that this is about a prison planet, because, well, it is. It's the Amends of the title, the sort of pun that bureaucrats appreciate. The prisoners they send there are supposed to be making amends by making Amends. To take the pun deeper, Shawl's book looks at how that's going to pan out over well over a century, so is even more appropriately titled Making Amends.

To that end, ARPA, sans the D, forms a company in 'The Best Friend We Never Had' to run the plan, a mission also called Making Amends. Josie works for them and wants her team on board the first ship to go out, named Deliverer. That ship goes out but is lost, so a second follows in its wake, this one called Psyche Moth, with a quarter of a million prisoners on board. That gets to Amends in an impressive eighty-seven years, but people only lived a fifth of that, one year on and four years in cryogenic sleep.

There's a lot more advanced technology in play than that and it's part of the high concept.

Is this a straightforward space parallel to the British using Australia as a penal colony? Not really, because the prisoners don't seem to be rapists, murderers or other violent criminals, as we maybe might have expected. They're victims too, teachers who taught the "wrong thing", women who had illegal abortions, presumably political prisoners of all persuasions. Therefore, the goal was never to keep the public safe from them or to rehabilitate them into useful citizens. It's retribution, the ability of the tyrannical to rub salt into the wounds of its victims.

So they're not herded on board physically. They're digitally uploaded, to be stored in simulations where they're forced to work even as data and then downloaded later into bodies cloned from the collective group's victims. A woman who had an illegal abortion could therefore be given the body of a cloned aborted foetus, for example. What's more, the bodies aren't chosen by the prisoners, which means that a white woman could be downloaded into a black man's body or vice versa. That isn't the problem that it could be for them, of course, because the racists and misogynists weren't the ones imprisoned to begin with.

It makes it a little more difficult for us readers, though. Not only do we need to keep track of the various characters in a story, we need to keep track of which ones continued on from that one into this one, even though they may be a different colour and gender now. Josie, the character in the first story, returns in the second but in Yale's body. Who's male. So she now has a dik. Without a C, for some reason. By the time we get to 'The Mighty Phin', seven stories in, Timofeya Phin has both a husband and a wife. Her husband is Doe and her wife is Thad, but Thad used to be the husband of Wayna, another pivotal character from 'Like the Deadly Hands', two stories earlier.

Some of the characters aren't even human. We don't see much of ARPA back home, because their side of things manifests through an AI called WestHem. When the Deliverer is lost, WestHem has to design a new AI for the second ship, the Psyche Moth. She does so within the third story, 'Living Proof', which mostly therefore comprises a conversation between old AI and new AI, mother and son, as it were. The son isn't named in this story, but we get to know him as Dr. Ops. in later ones.

And this leads to a question that I asked myself throughout this book and am still asking myself as I write this review. How much of what happens in this book real, within the confines of the fictional setting? I'm assuming that everything in 'The Best Friend We Never Had' is real, with Josie trying to be part of the mission, while also surviving in a an odd shipboard situation that feels like a sort of combination of 'Rumble Fish', 'The Ballad of Halo Jones' and 'The Warriors', with maybe a little juvenile delinquent genre thrown in for good measure.

But is anything else? When she wakes up in 'Over a Long Time Ago' in Yale's cloned body, does she actually wake up or is she part of a simulation? We're certainly told that the prisoners are data, because they're uploaded to be downloaded into cloned bodies. We're certainly told that they're awake while data, because they continue to work, even when they aren't in a body. We're certainly introduced to virtual characters, because that's what WestHem and Dr. Ops are. If we put all that together, maybe there isn't a Deliverer or a Psyche Moth and there isn't an Amends and none of this is happening outside a simulation run back home, maybe by WestHem. I don't know. The last story, 'You Can Touch Yourself Anytime' only underlines the possibility for me.

If we take it as read and there really are ships and the Psyche Moth does make it to Amends and a prison population establishes itself there and grows over multiple generations in the rest of the short stories in this book, there's a lot more to think about. Nisi Shawl isn't particularly interested in individual story arcs, though she throws us moments. She's thinking across generations, as she did in 'Everfair', though not particularly in its sequel, 'Kinning'.

And so Wayna arrives on Amends in 'Out of the Black' and dies in 'Like the Deadly Hands', but her daughter is a lead character in 'In Colors Everywhere' and her husband, now in a female body, is in both 'The Mighty Phin' and 'You Can Touch Yourself Anytime'. How does gender identity function when your body literally isn't your own and your sex may not match your gender? Well, when this civilisation emerges on a prison planet eighty-seven travel years away from home, it can define it in any way you like. After all, it's hard to keep control over people you've sent off into space.

Some of this feels like light reading but ends up betraying its depths, like 'Living Proof'. Some of it goes to much darker places and so feels much heavier from the outset, like 'In Colors Everywhere', when Shawl looks at systematic rape and forced implantation. We've previously been introduced to the concept of Trustees and Clients in 'Like the Deadly Hands', meaning Guards and Prisoners, all of whom, of course, share the same planet. Even that evolves over time, especially when we're a hundred and thirty-five years into the mission and the last communication with WestHem was a century ago.

I can't say I didn't struggle with some of 'Making Amends', just as I struggled with 'Everfair', but I didn't struggle as much and I didn't struggle in as frustrated a manner. I realise that Shawl likes to tell her stories impressionistically in glimpses and that's fine. With my writer's hat on, I respect it immensely as an approach. The trick is to keep the result accessible enough to be both enjoyable and coherent. I didn't find that with 'Everfair' but I did here. There are even more ideas in play as well, to render this a novel that will camp out in your brain. Even when the characters fade, those ideas will continue to shine. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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