ADOLESCENT GIRLS ARE so passionately convinced that they are right about everything that it’s no surprise to find that novels about girl prophets have become popular among the early teens. Odin’s Voice, the latest work from the marvellous Susan Price, takes prescience into the realms of science fiction, with a society divided into the Freeborns and their wretched Bonders. This is a dystopia in which the rich get the very best of every- thing, including genetically enhanced hair, and the poor not even their liberty. Its consequences are easily imaginable as our own society hurtles forwards.

Kylie is a chippy slave who seems extraordinarily attached to the small blond Freeborn boy Apollo, whom she even sneaks into her religious gatherings. Her mouth is “the mouth of a small cheap Bonder girl, but the voice and words were those of the greatest, wisest and most masculine of gods” — Odin. Whether her prophecies are true is left very much in doubt, but Kylie’s cleverness is born out of desperation not only to escape the life of a slave but to take possession of Apollo, who is, in fact, her own son — conceived as a result of rape by her master, whose wife then decided to take the boy as her own.

Meanwhile, the spoilt, pretty Affie (Aphrodite) is a Freeborn girl who is so overindulged and druggy she hardly knows she’s born: in fact, she feels she is, like the other “nice” people she knows, designed. With her pretty pet cheetah and hair fluorescing with jellyfish genes, she feels herself perfectly free to physically attack her bonder servant in a fit of petulance. Free, that is, until her bankrupt banker father kills himself and, having been given as security for his loans, she loses her status, sinking to the level of the Bonders she has despised. This is, of course, rather better for her moral nature than for her looks. Affie goes to work for the family that Kylie has just left, and the two girls are drawn together by mutual misery and considerable naivety. For Kylie has not only convinced her rich Freeborn backers that she is Odinstoy with psychic powers, but is determined to get herself and her son fake identities to smuggle them into Mars, and a new life.

This fast-paced thriller has many elements that will be familiar to readers of 12+, especially those who remember Julie Bertagna’s haunting novel Exodus, set in our future world drowned by global warming, or the equally remarkable Siberia, by Ann Hallam, in which the genetic code of animals must be smuggled across Arctic wastes in order to bring them back from extinction. There are details here straight out of Total Recall, such as when the two runaways get their electronic identity tags taken out and put into rats to mislead the police, but the domestic details are both horrible and original, and one longs for it to reach the big screen. Science fiction, once the preserve of clever, nerdy boys, is being reinvented for clever, hip girls. This is harder, edgier, nastier than Price’s Sterkarm trilogy, with none of the comforting shimmer of magic and romance left over from the author’s forays into fairytales. Instead of corporate betrayal and manipulation, there is a strong sense of how untrustworthy girls can be to each other, pretending to be best friends while working to a different game-plan. By the end you care about both girls and hope they succeed in the promised sequels.

Price’s Gods-obsessed future world, with its deities drawn from both Greek and Norse myth, is less convincing. If monotheism has disappeared, we need to know why, just as it would be interesting to learn how civil liberties have been stripped away. Cassandras past, present and future know they are right to warn us of impending doom, but we still need to have a road map to see how to get there.

ODIN’S VOICE
by Susan Price
Simon & Schuster
£12.99; 256pp
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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