Outlaw Planet

By M. R. Carey

Review by Ant

M. R. Carey has built a career out of refusing to do the obvious thing twice. Across thirty-odd books he has slipped from the quiet apocalypse of The Girl With All the Gifts to the medieval strangeness of Once Was Willem, never quite landing where you expect him to, and Outlaw Planet is another sidestep entirely.

For its first few chapters it looks like a dusty frontier Western, all red dirt and hard men and the long shadow of the gallows. Then Carey lifts a floorboard, and you start to hear the vast, unsettling machinery humming beneath it. It won the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award, and having read it myself, I can say the recognition is thoroughly deserved.

Carey, for those who have somehow missed him, is the pen name of Michael Carey, a Liverpool-born writer whose CV takes in comics (Lucifer, Hellblazer, The Unwritten), screenplays, and a steadily growing shelf of novels. Outlaw Planet is set within the same multiverse as his Pandominion duology, Infinity Gate and Echo of Worlds, though I want to reassure anyone who hasn't read those: this is a genuine standalone. While there is a certain quiet satisfaction in recognising the wider cosmology, the novel asks nothing of you beyond a willingness to go where it leads. You can start here with no homework whatsoever.

The premise is glorious in its audacity. The bulk of the story takes place on a backwater world that knows nothing of the multiversal war raging elsewhere, peopled not by humans but by sentient, bipedal animals, mammals evolved into speech and society alongside a population of giant arthropods.

Our heroine is Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, a canid-descended schoolteacher who travels to settle in a rough frontier town on the edge of something called the State's Union. When violence tears her settled life apart, she reinvents herself as the outlaw who will become legend: Dog-Bitch Bess. Her companion on the vengeance trail is a sentient sidearm calling itself Wakeful Slim, a relic of some older, half-forgotten civilisation, and easily one of the most intriguing inventions in the book. Running alongside Bess's tale, in a separate timeline, is the story of a party of Pandominion soldiers who step through a gate and find themselves marooned on this same world in its distant past, slowly unravelling the truth of how it came to be.

I should pause here, because this is the part where the premise sounds, on paper, faintly ridiculous. Yes, the protagonist is, in plain terms, a dog. A Labrador, more or less, who carries a gun and rides into a Civil War analogue. I must admit it took me some time to get used to this idea. It's not twee or comic; these are straight-laced creatures who talk but are otherwise something that might appear on the cover of a breatrix potter book (albeit with a more sweary, darker story than Potter would write). And yet, Carey performs the small miracle that the best anthropomorphic fiction always manages: within a few chapters, you simply adjust your thinking. Bess is so completely, achingly human in her grief, her stubbornness and her capacity for self-deception that the fur becomes incidental. This is not a gimmick. It is a deliberate strategy because by making his cast non-human, Carey can hold a mirror up to a very human history and let us look at it without flinching away on reflex. This is one of the true powers of science fiction.

And what a history it is. Outlaw Planet is, beneath the gunsmoke, a sustained meditation on slavery, colonialism and the bottomless human (or animal) capacity to designate some other group as less than oneself. Bess finds herself, with no small irony, fighting on behalf of a slave-owning society against her own better instincts, forced to interrogate her own prejudices in the process. There is a downtrodden underclass, the so-called Pugfaces, whose treatment forms the moral spine of the book, and the parallels to the antebellum American South are deliberate and unmissable. What I admired most is that Carey resists the easy comfort of clean heroes. There is no noble Union here to ride to the rescue; everyone is implicated, everyone has dirt under their claws. It would have been simpler, and far less honest, to write it any other way.

The structure is worth dwelling on because it is where the novel's ambitions and its occasional frustrations both live. Carey interleaves Bess's narrative with the marooned soldiers' account that gradually exposes the science-fictional mystery underpinning everything, the secret of how this world was made and who, or what, did the making. It is meticulously plotted, and the slow convergence of the threads is genuinely satisfying. That said, it does mean that the book takes its time to find its stride. The opening movements are deliberate to the point of testing even the most patient of readers (and I know a few who fell by the wayside). I suspect other readers hoping for a fast-paced shoot-'em-up will drift before the engine fully turns over. It is worth staying with, though. Once the connections begin to snap into place, the momentum is considerable, and the climax extracts a genuine emotional toll.

It was somewhere in the back half that I started thinking of Stephen King's Dark Tower books, and I mean that as high praise. There is the same sense of a worn, mythic frontier laid over something far older and stranger; the same notion of a world that has, in some fundamental way, moved on; the same fusion of gunslinger iconography with a cosmology that keeps expanding the longer you stare at it. Carey's sympathies, unlike some who have mined this territory, lie firmly with those caught at the wrong end of the strings rather than the hidden hands pulling them, and that moral clarity gives the book a weight that pure pastiche never achieves.

If I have reservations, they are the ones I have already flagged: the ever-so-slow start, getting used to beatrix potter type creations being involved in violence and all-round badness, and a sense that the sheer density of the thematic material occasionally crowds the page. This is a book carrying a great deal: slavery, colonialism, the question of artificial personhood, the weight of how we are remembered, and there are moments when it strains under the load. But these are the complaints of a reader who wanted more room to breathe within an already generous novel, not the complaints of a bored reader.

Outlaw Planet is Carey doing what he does best: taking a big, strange swing and connecting. It is a space Western that turns out to be about everything that matters, anchored by one of the most distinctive protagonists I have met in years.

Pour yourself something strong, settle in past the slow open, and let Bess and her talking gun take you somewhere genuinely new. Highly recommended.

Written on 29th June 2026 by Ant .