Hospital child-care worker Morgan is trying to find reasons to keep living through an appalling synchronicity of failed relationships, the unexpected deaths of loved ones, and an increasingly reactionary Canada bent on punishing the poor and the queer. Morgan quits her job, takes her inheritance, and flees to a large, empty home that her parents have willed to her. She fills her house with other anarchists, artists, activists, and assorted misfits and barely notices when science fiction’s most cherished trope becomes reality: 12 aliens appear on Earth and declare their intent to learn all they can about humanity.

It can be terrifying trying to follow one’s own hard act. Candas Jane Dorsey’s brilliant first novel, Black Wine, handily garnered a few of science fiction’s most impressive awards. With A Paradigm of Earth Dorsey has taken on some tough challenges. She has created a protagonist too absorbed in loss to engage with her own story, and also engages a classic science fiction motif – first contact – so well trodden in the popular media as to be irredeemably hokey.

Certain facets of the world Dorsey creates don’t entirely convince: this future Canada seems completely totalitarian at some points, and quite liberal at others. What does persuade is the lives of Dorsey’s extraordinary characters, from the homophobic CSIS agent masquerading as a lesbian to the innocent and occasionally frightening alien Blue. Just when you think you’ve neatly mapped out the good guys from the bad, the terrain shifts again, just a little. Life is like that.

The novel is also a love letter to science fiction and the other arts. It abounds with both buried and blatant homages to the likes of Samuel R. Delany, Spider Robinson, and Elizabeth Lynn, among others, all artists who’ve explored the strange places that love can take us. By digging deep into the heart of our longing to meet and know the lovable alien, Dorsey shows us why we tell ourselves this story so often. As she says in her introduction, “First Contact novels are common… This is not a book about aliens.”