Book Review: Sargassa by Sophie Burnham

Selah rides in an attollos – an elevator – with her colleague. After the recent murder of her father, she inherited the role of Imperial Historian to Sargassa, a speculative version of the Roman Empire divided over human enslavement. Almost 800 years after The Great Quiet, twenty-two-year-old Selah hopes to shift society with education reform for the servile castes. Ever idealistic, she misses the full picture, raised as a full citizen. Riding upward in the attollos through the Imperial Archives, her colleague informs her that servae lift the elevator in teams. Shocked, Selah asks, “This is manual?”

In Sargassa, one citizen’s rising depends on the invisibility of forcing others to lift her. (Arguably, like our own world.) Worse, even though Selah’s attollos colleague trains her to become Historian, he is not free. Her father owned him, and now, Selah does, too. As the first volume in the speculative Ex Romana trilogy, Sophie Burnham’s Sargassa (DAW, 2024) contains many books in one. Social critique. Spy novel. Queer love story. Murder mystery. Six dynamic characters serve plot twist after plot twist. The old Historian has moments to live and must entrust his inheritance to the right person: an ancient atlas and a strange book.

Theo, a thremid (Sargassan for nonbinary) spies for the Revenants, the network fighting for political independence from the Imperium. Darius wants to be a good man, unlike his father, and as part of the Intelligentia, he will do anything to uphold its rule. After a lifetime of playing by the rules, Tair is about to become a free citizen, but unexpected violence changes her life. Selah becomes the new Historian, but she can only dream about Tair. Military conscript Arran is the old Historian’s son, yet he lives between worlds with a serva mother. He says, “The world isn’t built for people like me to exist.”

Burnham worldbuilds Sargassa through diverse characters who don’t fit its rules. Sargassa is a celebration of misfits who slip between the cracks, a book for rebels who believe that the world not only can change, but that it must. A Rhode Island native, Burnham received their BFA in Acting from Syracuse University. They built Sargassa’s story on a history of enslavement, crafting meticulous laws that still allow the novel to speed forward at breakneck pace. Full citizens in Sargassa have 63 rights, while servae claim three, and vernae – the children of servae – have only four until age eighteen. Inhumane loopholes arise. When a verna fights back against an attack by full citizens, they are punished because they are not considered human: “No persona, no self. One cannot defend what doesn’t exist.” The Imperium becomes a mirror for political rhetoric in our world. When the supreme leader rejects the abolition of slave labor as radical, he says reform would be “an enormous strain on the annual budget.” Human or capital? That old argument.

Yet the characters also fight about revolution, fearing fast power grabs from one hand to another and the past repeating under a different banner. Queer characters fuel the resistance. They steal, sneak, and hide. They question authority. They reclaim their lives when the law says they do not exist at all. The thremids “live undefined outside gender roles and concepts” beyond the Imperial realms, who view thremids with narrow minds despite elite education. Sargassa ties queerness together with radical action, understanding that living outside a system also provides a radical angle. And yes, the queer romance is tender. When a lover returns to save a character used to surviving on their own, I admit it: I got emotional. Burnham offers queer love not only as a reason to keep fighting, but perhaps, as the fight itself. (But stay tuned for other Sargassan fights. There’s a gnarly thirdact gladiator pit.) Ultimately the Sargassan conspirators bundle together, skeptical of each other’s motives. They snarl and joke like a flawed band of a reluctantly-found family. Tair remembers a mentor saying, “If you’re waiting for pure ideological alignment, you’re going to be waiting for a very long time. And in the meanwhile, you’ll get nothing done at all.” While Burnham’s novel is a fun read and often incredibly funny, Sargassa is deeply eye-opening.

Burnham puts us in the rising attollos with Selah, forced to reckon with the ways we’re being lifted in our own world. Arran asks, “Who would willingly see something when their entire way of life depends on never seeing it at all?” Sargassa urges us to open our eyes, playing out the repercussions of keeping them closed for too long. But once you’ve seen the truth, what will you do? (Other than waiting patiently for the next two Sargassa books.) •

Sargassa is available now in print at your local bookstore, and as an eBook & audiobook wherever books are sold