Her efforts to keep her motley crew together are admirable and arguably more than they deserve but as they know it’s only her will to survive that keeps them alive. We do see a more vulnerable side to Nyx despite all her best intentions to keep it hidden. She’s created a heroine in Nyx who is the epitome of toughness but I couldn’t help but grow to like her. Kameron Hurley has a powerful voice, no punches are pulled, violence and aggression are commonplace. But religious codes and ethics have shifted and distorted, been forgotten. Others we encounter are reminiscent of Christians. The people of Nasheen and its great enemy Chenja live according to a religion with a familiarity to Islam. But, as the title suggests, this planet might seem Godless to us but not to its inhabitants.

Body parts can be sold – we meet Nyx just after she has sold her womb to gene-stealing pirates – and babies are born in litters. Sexuality is also blurred but while homosexuality is tolerated between women, between men it is not. Not everyone is entirely human – some can shift shapes and those who do, the half-breeds, are prejudiced against. The ‘wise’ people of society are bug-controlling magicians while its entertainers are boxers. People get around in bakkies, pug-powered organic vehicles, lights are lit by glow worms, everything is powered by bugs. This is science fiction world building at its finest but what a world! It’s difficult to imagine a more revolting place – the bugs and insects everywhere, some as big as a dog or bigger.

But when Nyx and her gang are hired by the Queen to hunt for one particular missing person, one who might be able to end the war, her chance to redeem herself quickly becomes a scramble for survival that is as dirty and brutal as the planet itself. In a world where pain and torture have been taken to new levels of refinement – replacement limbs are common (best not to think where they come from) – its safe to say their plans for Nyx are not pleasant. Nyxnissa, or Nyx, is a Bel Dame herself until her little bit of private enterprise sets the sisters against her, along with almost everyone else in the bounty hunting game. They are hunted by the Bel Dame, a sisterhood of bounty hunters, whose mission is to collect their heads. Those who flee from the front carry, allegedly, disease and contagion. Its men are sent to the front at 14 years old, inevitably to die, but if they survive to the age of 40 they are allowed to return. The almost entirely female country of Nasheen is committing gender genocide. Umayma is a planet like none other – it’s a desert world, fuelled by insects and grubs, scorched by a cancer-burning sun and divided into two by a dirty war of chemical and biological weaponry that has lasted for centuries.

God's War by Kameron Hurley