Everybody’s Perfect

An exercise in elaborate worldbuilding, this ambitious outing from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Walton (Or What You Will) transports readers to the fantastical city of the Serenissima, “built on nothing but layers of magical mist and memories and dreams.” The Serenissima’s geography shifts with the fog that drifts through it, “opening a new square here, closing up an old canal there, like a face caught in the fleeting act of changing expression.” Its waterways, maintained by shared belief in their existence, connect eight disparate worlds, including Earth. The Venetians believed the Serenissima into being first, and through it soon found neighbors: beings who look much like the Venetians, but with the faces of cats, dogs, or domino masks garlanded with flowers and feathers, and who connect to the magic of the Serenissima in their own ways. Against this inventive backdrop, a fisherman wakes from a dream that the city will elect its first doge. A local mystic confirms that she can see this coming to pass—and also sees a cure for the plague that blights the fisherman and his lover—after which the city itself pulls everyone around him into the rush to fulfill the prophecy. Told through the eyes of nine different characters, each with a perspective and backstory rich enough for its own novel, the relatively low-stakes plot still manages to feel personal and affecting. This fascinates. (June)