Countess
Suzan Palumbo
Paperback/ eBook/ Audio
ISBN: 9781770417571
ECW Press, September 10, 2024 , 160 pgs

I didn’t really have a Caribbean futurist queer feminine space opera retelling of the Alexandre Dumas adventure classic The Count of Monte Cristo on my 2024 bingo card. Now that I’ve read it, I certainly feel like I’ve won something. Palumbo’s retelling of the famous revenge story holds on to the broad strokes of the original but has an expansive futuristic setting that contrasts exploration with colonization and triumph with deep, painful injustice.

Instead of French seafarers, Countess follows spacefaring Virika Sameroo, who has just become acting Captain of a military vessel belonging to the Æcerbot Empire. Virika and her parents immigrated to the Euro-coded empire’s capital planet Invicta from the Exterran Antilles, a collection of outer worlds settled by the former denizens of Earth’s Caribbean islands. Instead of a warm welcome and economic salvation, the elder Sameroos found themselves working in mines, living in poverty, and trapped in the perpetual limbo of trying to ascend from derided immigrant to rights-holding citizen, which results in the untimely death of Virika’s father. As a result, she works hard to be worthy of her parent’s sacrifices, taking the straight and narrow path into military service and distancing herself from other Antilleans. It seems to be working—she’s fast-tracked into leadership, supports her aging mother, and captures the heart of the lovely Invictan researcher Alba. Everything is going great until her commanding officer suddenly dies of a mysterious ailment and her rival officer Lyric accuses her of a seditious conspiracy in the name of a revolution she knows little about. Virika is tried, found guilty, and locked away on the purple-skied prison planet Tintaris, where she vows bitter revenge.

The general story sticks to the source, but the details diverge in quite a few places. The prose of this book is viscerally sensual at times, which means that the sensory highs are quite high, but the grittier parts of the story are pretty grim. Placing this story in a whole universe rather than just the Mediterranean makes the stakes of the story feel bigger, and the Caribbean cultural foundations add texture and deeper social meaning. Every plate of food described in this story that isn’t prison rations sounds absolutely delicious and Virika’s eventual reclamation of her roots is brief, but beautiful. Also, any tale of injustice, meaningful rage, and hard-won retribution hits really differently when the scorned hero is a queer immigrant woman of color. Instead of being solely about personal revenge, this is also about fighting against systemic wrongdoing, which increases the emotional stakes and fuels the changes in story and character more than the Caribbean futurist setting does, at times.

Speaking of the foundational material, you don’t really need to be familiar with the original Count to enjoy this. It’s a retelling, but it’s not overly dependent on its source material. It stands on its own as an emotionally resonant space adventure. There are far fewer characters than the Dumas version, and—minor spoiler alert—Virika’s final revenge plays out very differently than not only the original, but many of the other popular retellings. I didn’t expect this to end the way that it does, and while it makes sense, it also turns this into a very different story than its source material. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up to the reader and their own sense of justice.