[Book Review] The Knife and The Serpent — Tim Pratt
This battle of girlfriends is … out of this world. Maybe out of this universe!
The Knife and The Serpent is a quick schlocky sci-fi tale of multiverses, secret agents, underworld crime lords, moody hyperintelligent AIs, badass women, and good ol’ fashioned BDSM!
The novel follows the perspectives of Glenn, a nerdy submissive boyfriend as he navigates his debauched, but otherwise happy and healthy relationship with his girlfriend, Vivian. Oh, by the way, Vivian is a multiverse secret agent. Think Aeon Flux meets John Wick. She is the Knife. The other perspective is of the ambitious Tamsin, who finds out that her grandmother has been found murdered. By the way, Granny is a refugee warlord from another parallel universe, who escaped her universe with baby Tamsin when a rival family nukes her oligarch family. Tamsin is now on the path to return to her home universe, exact some righteous vengeance, and take her rightful place! Meet, the Serpent!
Alright, you have all the facts I had going into this book.
The Knife and the Serpent promised a violent, bombastic narrative, with engaging characters and dynamics with that unique premise. Unfortunately, the short length of the novel prevented the narrative from really digging to any depth and left me with a very shallow plot with wafer-thin characters. The three major characters, Glenn, Vivian, and Tamsin get reduced to one-dimensional trope-lists so quickly that they quickly become realistically unbelievable and mere archetypes to carry the story along. Vivian, the hypercompetent secret-agent with a domme persona and a heart of gold with deus-ex-machina level gadgetry; Glenn, the bumbling, but still surprisingly competent insert character merely there to serve as plot fulcrum and exposition sinkhole, and Tamsin, the least developed of them all. The so-called antagonist is given such one-ply motivations and no space to develop her megalomaniacal endgame, that the whole affair felt more vacuous than rewarding. Add to that a duo of quirky but ultimately meh AIs, and you have an entire cast of beige characters, none of which will hold particular appeal to anyone well-versed in the genre.
The overt prevalence of Vivian and Glenn’s sexual relationship with the power dynamic pops up often enough throughout the narrative, along with Glenns expression of gender fluidity, by Pratt is curious. On one hand, inclusivity is always welcome in SFF spaces, and sci-fi has always been a bastion of pushing the realms of social stereotypes (along with technology etc.). On the other hand, with such little bearing on the plot besides adding to the pizzazz of Vivian’s general badassery, I found myself wondering why this aspect was such a focal point of the story. In any case, it checks both smut and LGBTQ+ bingo boxes on your reading lists folks, so chalk it up as a win?
My major issue with The Knife and the Serpent is that Pratt commits the cardinal SciFi and Fantasy sin of failing to “show don't tell”. The majority of the book is an exercise in “tell don't show”. Paragraphs upon paragraphs of lackluster exposition dumps litter the entire length of the novel, robbing the reader of ever being able to stop and “experience” the world created by the author. With a premise as diverse (though overplayed by this point) as a multiverse, the author spends more time having Vivian merely talk to Glenn (supposedly the audience insert) about various facets of the tech and lore of the many worlds. Add to the fact that very little about said multiverses ever really becomes seminal to the plot, and you’re left wondering why Pratt chose this particular backdrop when the narrative could have been more impactfully laid out on one world, without all the tropes and trimmings.
Pratt’s chosen prose style also veers dangerously close to being YA, which makes The Knife and the Serpent difficult to pin down. It has the yuppy shlock of other sci-fi standalones, but with overtly modernized prose and shallow characters, I find this book a hard sell to adults, or worse, sci-fi nerds.
All things considered, if you want a quick read of the archetypical battle between two badass women, along with some good-natured domme-sub characterizations, then perhaps The Knife and the Serpent is for you. For everyone else, there is little else to enjoy here.
