Not that kind of book.

 I have had the incredible privilege to beta read a spectacularly wonderful book.  The beta version was good; then the author offered eARCs to the beta readers (and paid subscribers to her substack).  And the eARC I've read was better.  I can't wait to see the final version.

The book is huge, so she has split it into thirds.  It'll be volume 1, then two weeks later volume 2, then volume three two weeks after that.  

I've read the first volume in eArc--the second one's not out yet.  

So, what is this book?  Who is this author?  It's Sarah Hoyt's No Man's Land.  First book in a series that has lived in her head for most of her life, the Chronicles of Lost Elly.  

The setup is...weird, but great sci-fi normally is.  The first colony ships would...teleport, basically, from one planet to where they were going to colonize.  Only problem was that half of them didn't arrive as expected.  They just...vanished.*  Later, it was discovered that the teleporting ships did not take time into account.  And that is important.

 Those ships ended up creating colonies, all right.  In that world, the various space polities would run across a lost colony every so often.  Most of which had forgotten their origins.  

One of the main point-of-view characters is from the Star Empire of Brittania.  Which was founded by a bunch of people who believed in what England was once like...or at least its public relations image.  He's a diplomat, and sent to another planet--a semi-barbarian one--to bring them into the empire.  

Things go drastically wrong, and he ends up jumping out of a window ahead of a murder attempt, and falling through a portal into another world.   

This brings him into contact with the other main, point-of-view character: the Archmage of the world of Elly.  

I can hear you thinking, "Sounds like a faerie tale.  Or Alice in Wonderland."  

Nope.  It isn't.  It's still sci-fi, not fantasy or a drug trip (regardless of what that particular point of view character thinks).  It's a lost colony.  A colony where the founders deliberatly lost themselves, all so they could play with a My Little Genetics kit, and perfect humanity.  By making them hermaphrodites.  Yes, it mostly breeds true.  And by using nanotechnology to give them abilities that most of the rest of humanity uses machines to achieve.

NO, this book is not about gender issues or sex, or even sexual preferences, proclivities, and alignments. Not at all.  The book is about family: both found family (really weird found family), and about realizations that any kid makes about their parents as they reach adulthood (that none of us know what we're doing when raising kids, we just love them and do our best).  This book is about children.  Babies.  About what it takes to have a baby, and to be able to keep one alive in a society with no formula.  This book is about what the fuck did the founders do with their My Little Genetics Kit to make these people able to teleport, and make and use portals?  And about realizing that, in spite of all the weirdness, humans are still human, and valuable for that more than what they can do.  

I will be buying this book.  It will be going not just in my re-read pile, but my comfort re-reads pile.  I don't want to live in Elly, but it's absolutely wonderful as an escape.  

*I, personally, given the chance, would absolutely board a ship with like-minded colonists.  A fifty-fifty chance of getting where we were going is better than no chance of improvement under oppressive political systems.  But I am a special kind of crazy, and I fully acknowledge that not everyone is.