Or maybe it's because sci-fi YA is still a niche, compared to the popularity of the genres I mentioned. I think it's especially rare, to this day, to find queer characters in sci-fi.well, rarer than in contemporary or even fantasy (?) books, I guess. Īs I said, lots of diversity has been weaved into Fourth World.

That's not to say that this book (or series) hasn't a few things going for it though, especially in the rep department.

I liked the taste, but the whole dish didn't ultimately amount to more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it had more to do with the execution than with the ingredients. On the other hand.I'm not sure if it was because I recognised a few tropes that I was left wanting more. Maybe not exactly fresh, you know, but as a combination of different themes, it works. Also, there are conspiracies going on in both timelines, and a bunch of diverse characters both in the sexuality spectrum (lesbian, demi, ace) and the ethnicity one. Here he befriends a privileged, but questioning girl (Nadin), and they set on a journey to save Mars' native people (and possibly, to send Isaak home). The premise is interesting enough - Mars became an Earth colony, though I'm not sure how it could be accomplished a teen guy (Isaak) searching for the answer to his father's disappearance finds more than he bargained for, and gets whisked to a past where the planet is on the verge of dying, with all its original inhabitants. And I did like it.but less than I expected. Fourth World technically had all the ingredients for my kind of story.

Different Worlds by Lyssa Chiavari