OUTLAW PLANET by M.R. Carey – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Outlaw Planet by M.R. Carey
Published by Orbit on November 18 2025
Genres: Adult, Science fiction
Pages: 465
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads

The nitty-gritty: Stellar writing and characterization, imaginative world-building and unexpected emotional gut-punches make Outlaw Planet an unforgettable epic sci-fi adventure.

“I made my life into a story and threw it into the well of my children’s hind-brains, so deep I couldn’t hear the splash when it hit. Some day they’ll need me, the story goes, and on that day I’ll rise.”

Don’t believe any negative reviews you see for this book. Sure, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I think some readers are just giving up because they’re hoping for a quick, fast-paced story. Outlaw Planet is meticulously plotted, a sprawling space western that unfolds at its own pace. And although it isn’t being marketed as such, it’s clearly set in M.R. Carey’s Pandominion world. As far as I can tell, it takes place after Echo of Worlds, although the way the author weaves together different timelines, I could be completely off base. In any case, I don’t see any issues with starting here first, as it’s a self contained story with only brief references to the Pandominion. Carey has written (once again, I feel like I say this with all his books) an emotional and intimate character-focused story that is, at the same time, a grand, nail-biting adventure.

The story follows two main points of view. First we meet Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, a young school teacher who later—through circumstances—becomes a notorious outlaw known as Dog-Bitch Bess. Bess lives in a small town called Ottomankie, part of the State’s Union, a lawless place where raiders pillage and kill on a whim and life is very much lived on the edge. Not only that, but a war between the North and the South is brewing, sure to bring heartache to the many souls who live there. After one such skirmish where the woman Bess was in love with is killed and her schoolhouse is burned to the ground, Bess decides it’s time to leave. Hell bent on revenge, she’s aided by a strange gun she took from a dead man, a gun unlike anything else Bess has ever seen.

Calling himself Wakeful Slim, the gun is a rare Precursor weapon, said to be created by a long dead race of people. He also contains the soul of his previous owner, although who’s to say which owner that is, as Slim is very old. Slim is Bess’s best defense against her enemy, Paulus Rondeau, the very man who led the charge to destroy Ottomankie and was responsible for the death of her love Martha.

In alternating sections, we meet a group of soldiers led by an engineer named Vel Esten. It’s clear right away that Esten and his team are from a different time and place, with weaponry and technology far removed from anything in State’s Union. Esten’s team has used Step technology to go after a group of True Imperials, or “True Imps” as they call them. But the world they’ve Stepped to is unfamiliar, and they can’t find their quarry anywhere. As hours turn to days and months, the team realizes they can’t get home and they’re stuck in this strange land.

Slowly these two narratives come together, although Carey takes his time getting there. Bess’s story is the focus of Outlaw Planet, and she’s a fantastic character. I loved seeing her grow from an idealistic young woman to someone suffering great loss and needing to change her trajectory. Bess learns how to shoot a gun with such deadly skill that she becomes a legend, earning the name Dog-Bitch Bess. It doesn’t hurt that she owns an almost mythical gun that can not only kill in multiple ways and make its own bullets, but has the ability to use satellites to see what’s coming. But as deadly as she is, Bess cares deeply for her fellow citizens and doesn’t really want to hurt anyone. The reader gets to know Bess intimately over the course of the book, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the way Carey slowly developed her character.

Then there’s Wakeful Slim, a wonderful idea for a character (a character type Carey seems to revisit over and over—the sentient object). Slim’s story is both wondrous and shocking. It isn’t until the end of the book that all of his mind-blowing secrets are revealed, and by that time I was so invested emotionally in both Bess and Slim and their relationship with each other, that those reveals caught me completely off guard.

And while the characters alone make this an outstanding story, Carey’s worldbuilding is pretty amazing as well. State’s Union is a preindustrial society, much like the Wild West of the mid-to-late 1800s in the United States, complete with familiar elements like gun fights, slavery, segregation and more. Carey’s story mirrors our own history in some very uncomfortable ways, but instead of humans, this society is made up of sentient, anthropomorphic animals. Oh, did I forget to mention that? Bess is literally a dog (Labrador, in fact), and she’s surrounded by groundhogs, deer, bear, squirrels and more, all intelligent and able to speak. Carey doesn’t dwell on this, though, and to be honest, I often forgot that Bess and the others were anything other than human while I was reading.

There’s also a race of people called the Pugface, very similar to our own Indigenous people, and when the penny finally dropped and I realized “who” the Pugface were, so many little details came together and made sense.

As Carey’s story takes shape and all the pieces start snapping into place, I was literally blown away by what was going on. Story elements like the mysterious dream-towers, another Precursor weapon called Flycatcher, a Pugface named Dima Saraband (who turns out to be a very important character) and many more that I don’t have time to talk about show the depth of Carey’s creativity, which is one reason I keep coming back to his books. Outlaw Planet is not only a thrilling adventure, but a thought provoking work of imagination that will stick with me for a long time.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.