Spinning Silver is based on the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in precisely the way that a symphony might be based on a simple folk tune. The themes are transposed, inverted, reduplicated, harmonised with each other. Or, to use a metaphor that Novik works into the action, the rough wool of the old story is re-carded, spun out into a fine thread, and woven into a new and complex pattern. The Rule of Three is a central leitmotif.
The tale is set in a fantasy version of late medieval Lithuania. Miryem Mandelstram takes over from her father as village moneylender, but to prosper, she must harden her heart to ice. As profits mount, copper coins are exchanged for silver and silver for gold. She boasts to her parents that she can turn silver into gold, but they are travelling through the forest that borders on the realm of the frost-fairy Staryk, and she is overheard. The Staryk bring her fairy silver to transform, since they love gold above all things. Luckily, Miryem knows a jeweller who can turn fairy silver into items more valuable than gold: a ring, a necklace, a crown. Each is sold to the local lord. When he puts the necklace on his "not especially pretty" daughter, Irina, who has a trace of Staryk blood through her mother, it becomes
hard even to glance away from her, with winter clasped around her throat and the silver gleam catching in her veil and in her dark eyes as she looked at herself in the mirror on the wall there.
In the mirror, Irina tells us, she sees:
I was not standing in my father’s study. I was in a grove of dark winter trees, under a pale grey sky, and I could almost feel the snow falling onto my skin.
And right there, the components of the plot click together into a finely-crafted mechanism. Swiftly and inevitably, both girls find themselves unwilling queens, each wed to a monster: Miryem to the Staryk king and Irina to the sorcerous and sadistic tsar. Each husband wishes nothing more than to do away with his wife, but the girls find they have magic of their own as well as wit and courage, and they plot to turn the tables. Much of the story turns on fairy-tale logic in which every bargain is scrupulously kept and precise wording is crucial. In a hat-tip to the original story, the ultimate antagonist speaks exclusively in verse, albeit written out as prose, so it took this reader a while to notice.
Novik's prose is evocative and measured. Unlike some fantasy novels up for awards this year, nobody speaks as if they were in Poughkeepsie. She deals beautifully with the liminal magic of the Staryk. The white road to their kingdom can be glimpsed in the forest and even found by the unwary, but never stays long in the same place. Memories of meetings with them melt away like frost in the morning, and when Miryem is carried off to the Staryk kingdom, her parents are only vaguely aware they have lost someone. Wanda, Miryem's servant, takes it for granted that her mother's soul is is somehow present in one of the Staryk white trees...to her, Miryem's writing and account-book make for a far more powerful magic. Themes of belonging and alienation run through the book: as a Jew, Miryem knows she will never be accepted by her neighbours; though they can't easily do without her, but most of the other characters find themselves exiles at some point or another.
Not everything works so well. As Miryem finds herself increasingly responsible for defending and preserving the Staryk people, and as we see that they worry about their children and need to eat, Novik can't stop them from seeming increasingly ordinary, despite their alien customs and morals. The true form of the the antagonist turns out to be a lava monster out of central casting, just like Todd from The Good Place.
It's tempting to imagine that Novik is having a bit of a poke at George R. R. Martin with this book. Not only is the plot quite literally Ice vs. Fire, but Novik also tells it by swapping between a steadily-increasing number of viewpoint characters. Unlike Martin, she doesn't clue us in by starting each section with the character name, and all perspectives are told in the first person. Only a distinctive section break lets us know we are listening to a new voice, but for the most part each is individual enough that there is no problem telling who is speaking; only the siblings Wanda and Stepon, both uneducated, gave me any trouble. And of course, Novik brings the whole story to a close within 500 pages.
I want to talk a bit about the ending, so even more spoilers after the break.
Every now and again a literary writer muses in public that fiction should have more to say about the climate crisis. Cue much eye-rolling in the science fiction community. So how does the current crop of Hugo novel nominees face up to the challenge? On the plus side, five of the six nominees arguably touch on the crisis in one way or another. On the minus, only one really gets the point, and two push a catastrophically stupid concept that is catnip to SF fans, that we can escape the crisis by fleeing the planet.
Let's look at the five novels in a bit more detail (the sixth, Yoon Ha Lee's far future fantasy Revenant Gun, doesn't even mention planet Earth).
In Rebecca Roanhorse's near future fantasy Trail of Lightning, the waters have risen to drown two-thirds of the USA, leaving the Navajo (or Diné) reservation, which spans the continental divide, as one of the few more-or-less functioning polities in the new "Sixth World". But this flooding is explicitly a supernatural event, acknowledged to be far worse than the worst possible result of ice-cap melting. It owes much to Navajo (and Hopi) myths of cyclic birth and destruction of the world, according to which ours is the fourth world (no idea what happened to world #5). In any case, the flooding is merely a plot prop to restore independence and agency to the Diné, and to their gods and other supernatural beings.
A more central role is played in Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, where her fairy-tale Lithuania is imminently threatened by unceasing winter; but lurking in the background is the more deadly threat of permanent conversion to lifeless burning desert. (A remarkably similar Ice vs Fire conflict is set up in Katherine Arden's debut, The Bear and the Nightingale, set in neighbouring fairy-tale Russia). Doubtless Novik would say that she is both using the real threat to add resonance to her tale, and providing a metaphor for climate change. But as metaphor it has little to offer: the resolution based on fairy-tale tropes of clever bargains and the true love of a queen for her people will surely not help in the real world.
Strangely, the book that comes nearest to Getting It is Catherynne M. Valente's absurdist Space Opera. Here the immediate problem for the survival of humanity in the late 2030s is to persuade Galactic Civilisation not to wipe it out like a particularly noxious infestation, leaving life on Earth to try evolving something more plausibly intelligent next time round. Given that Valente is quite deliberately writing like Douglas Adams on speed, it's no surprise that the case against humanity is made with dispeptic glee, and focuses on anthropogenic mass extinction rather than climate change per se. Here, an alien who could self-efface Kai Lung into a small puddle is giving our heroes a hard time:
"On your planet. Have you got any lions left?"
Oort and Decibel glanced at each other. "Well, no, not...overly," Oort admitted. "No, they went extinct a few years back."
"Please forgive the arrogance of a being who cannot even dream of becoming a hat rack fit for the use of those exalted as yourselves, but strictly speaking they didn't go extinct, you made them extinct. Because they were carnivores. Because they were carnivores and they didn't look like you or think like you or talk like you, and they were a danger to you and yours, or at least they were years and years ago, because you're made of the sort of thing they like to eat."
"I suppose, but..."
"Even knowing that I am a discarded Popsicle stick on the sidewalk of intellectual discourse and thus wholly incapable of higher-order thinking, I beg you to tolerate the shrill and childlike whine of my asking: How about rhinoceroses? Dodo? Giraffes? These are herbivores, so they presented no danger to the continuation of your species, but you wiped them out all the same. To a one."
The implicit message is both "you broke it, you fix it", and that fixing it would be straightforward for any species meriting the epithet sapiens.
In Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, climate change is kicked off early, in 1952, by a catastrophic asteroid impact. To some extent, this is merely another plot prop, here aimed at jump-starting the space programme before the advent of electronic computers, thereby making the laborious calculations by (largely female) human computers the key to the first Moon landing. (Apparently the novel was started before publication of Hidden Figures, the book and the movie, made this effort famous.) But there are two points worth making here. The first is that the premise lets humanity, or let's be specific here, western civilisation, off the hook by making climate change a freak natural accident. Given the toxic nature of the "debate" over anthropogenic climate change in the USA, this tweak is going to make the story a whole lot more acceptable to a big chunk of its target audience.
Unfortunately, it also reinforces the common attitude amongst Republicans that even if real, climate change is natural and unavoidable. These people will be particularly satisfied that the asteroid wipes out Washington DC, well and truly swamping the drain. Kowal's scientists seem remarkably quick to understand the long-term climatic effects of the impact. In our world, even simple global climate models like the ones that told us about nuclear winter relied on (electronic) computer simulations that would never have been possible in the early '50s. But perhaps the sums are simpler for an asteroid strike. At any rate, from the prediction of a runaway greenhouse effect that will eventually boil the oceans, the elite of Kowal's world rapidly conclude that the only option is to abandon ship, and try to set up a colony on Mars. Nowhere is there a discussion of what (infinitesimal) fraction of the world population could make it to this life raft, nor of why it would be technologically easier to set up a habitat on uninhabitable Mars, than one on uninhabitable Earth. In this first book, at least, the possibility of terraforming Mars is never raised, but again, it is almost by definition easier to terraform the Earth than Mars.
The escapist theme is even stronger and sillier in Becky Chamber's Record of a Spaceborn Few, her exploration of life on the Exodus Fleet, the generation starships that took the last survivors from a ruined Earth. Chamber's backstory also features a successful Martian colony which explicitly sheltered the ultra-rich elite, so points to her for realising the implications of that. Because Chambers describes her Exodus fleet in considerable detail it's worth following through the implications. There are 32 of these ships, including the one wrecked in the prologue of the novel; the overall layout of the ships is identical and modular, based on a hexagonal grid repeated over seven successively larger scales, from the seven hexagonal rooms making a family home to the six flat hexagonal decks linked in a ring to form the living quarters of each ship. That gives 6^6 homes per ship, or space for one and a half million families in the fleet, perhaps 6 to 10 million people all together. In other words, by the time the fleet is launched, Earth's population has collapsed to a thousandth of today's.
These ships are self-contained eco-systems, intended to last indefinitely, since the Fleet set out with no destination in mind. Famously, in Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora such a self-sustaining system proves impossible to sustain. Chambers does not address this problem, and probably makes it vastly worse by having a far more restricted set of food plants and far more crowded spaceships that Robinson, whose starship contains dozens of self-contained ecosystems to maintain diversity. But even granted sustainability, the real problems are that:
- Launching anything into space is fantastically expensive (think: 4% of the US Federal budget for several years to get a handful of people to the Moon). Even if the most optimistic projections for improvement in launch tech come through, it will still be hugely more expensive to put anything in space than just to leave it on the ground, so building a survival module on Earth for 100 million or even a billion people would take no more resources than building a space fleet for 10 million. And in addition, there'd be no need to build impossible starship engines or worry about setting up artificial gravity.
- A grounded Exodus Fleet, even on an otherwise lifeless Earth, would be surrounded by natural resources: rock, water, air (even if unbreathable) that would eventually be needed for repair and replacement and in space could only be provided by planets, asteroids, and so on; meaning the Fleet would have to "land" at some point anyway, and would be better off not leaving the Solar system.
- By the time world population falls below a billion people, at the current rate of resource use the human population would no longer be a significant driver for climate change, since net greenhouse gas emission would have fallen by a factor of seven even without introducing more green tech. If the population fall was managed well enough to maintain civilisation at the level needed to build a star fleet, a technological fix for excess greenhouse gases would be child's play by comparison. If current rapid progress in climate science, ecology, and genetics continues, there is no reason why Earth could not be made considerably more habitable and ecologically diverse than it is today.
In short, there is no set of circumstances in which building something like the Exodus Fleet (even without the counter-productive attempt to flee the solar system) would be both possible and not an insane waste of resources in a crisis. Like the slogan says, there is no Planet B. If SF still had the faintest spark of its original role as the great bully pulpit for technological progress, it would be saying in a thousand ways that the climate crisis was made by humanity and can be solved by humanity. And if the literature of social change had any social responsibility it would be much less interested in imagining quasi-utopian communities in space and much more in looking at the roadblocks in twenty-first century society that stall effective action on climate, and imagining ways around them. Kim Stanley Robinson has been doing this with ever-increasing urgency for most of his career, but who else? If SF wants to boast, it needs to step up to the challenge.
So here's a twofer: one novel gives Lee an entry into two separate Hugo categories. Is this what they were thinking about when they brought in Best Series? Just asking. It's not even the only one (see Becky Chambers).
Anyway, it's a great escapist read with nice pictures of rocket ships on the front and indeed at every chapter break. Who says trad SF is dead? Well, me actually, this isn't SF, it's straight up fantasy; just because the plot revolves around what Lee calls "calendrical science" doesn't make it not self-evident magic. I bet someone is going to mention Clarke's Third Law at this point. BZZZT!!! WRONG! Read it again:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Does not say: Any magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology. Re-take Logic 101 if you think these statements are equivalent. Some smart-arse will now ask how you can tell the difference between magic and technology or science. Well, start with etymology. Science is Latin for knowledge. Simples. Technology is Greek for know-how, that is, applied science. Magic, on the other hand is the art of the Magi, who were some actual sect/tribe in the Parthian empire, but per the common translation of the Gospels, were generically "Wise Men", where here wise pretty much means having knowledge over and above your common Hom. sap., so...er... OK, let's try again.
Forget about all that stuff about magic not working unlike science because although magic definitely doesn't work (except when it does, in which case it's applied psychology) you end up claiming that Newton's mechanics is magic because it doesn't really work, unlike quantum mechanics, assuming that does work (and let's hope you haven't read anything about the Measurement Problem). But anyway, since there is no actual magic as such I can't point to a laboratory demonstration of the difference; the best we can do is look at how magic works in stories that are widely accepted to be completely impossible, i.e. fantasy.
According to one Western theory of magic, the trick is to ask for help. A magic spell is nothing more than a ritual to get in touch with and toady up to some powerful entity who is in a position to get the job done, by methods the magician doesn't need to worry about. There is no fundamental difference between this kind of magic and the hard core of religion, a contract between a worshipper and their god. In point of fact, this method can sometimes work well if the entity is the Parthian Emperor or the American President or the Head of Department, but strictly speaking it's only magic if the entity is a demon, spirit or otherwise non-existent, in which case the flaw is blatantly apparent.
There are other approaches: for instance sympathetic magic which says that if A and B are a bit alike in some way (the more ways the better, which is why you put the actual toe-nail clippings of your rival in your wax model before stabbing it) then if something happens to A something analogous is bound to happen to B. Astrology is supposed to work something like this ("as above, so below"), although the precise nature of the analogy between, say, the Moon being in the second house, and every Sagittarian getting run over by a milk float on Tuesday, has always escaped me. Yet another theory of magic is that it is all about the power of words, especially True Names. Ursula K. Le Guin took this from the Native American cultures her anthropologist father used to study, and wove it into the most poetic of all magical systems. To know the true name of a thing is to know its essence, and that knowledge is literally power. A spell is simply a command in the True Language, and all things, animate and inanimate, must obey such a command. Earthsea is in truth made of nothing but words. And even in the real world this apparent lie carries a powerful truth. Things of overwhelming importance to millions of people: nations, tribes, political parties, even money, to a large extent, are not just described by words but in essence are words; the thing the words supposedly describe can change utterly but the allegiance is to the word, not the thing.
What, if anything, do all these magics have in common? Underlying them is a deep category error to which humans are particularly prone, which is simply to make people much more important to the state of things than they really are. In its simplest form it conflates "why did this happen?" with "who did this, and why did they want to?". If something cannot have been done by a human it follows that it must be due to some more powerful or at least less visible kind of person: a fairy, a demon, a god. There is no particular mystery here: us simians are particularly social animals and our big brains have evolved precisely to interpret events in terms of the actions of others. That we sometimes can conceive of explanations in terms of unmotivated natural laws is a lucky byproduct of evolutionary overshoot. The magic of words and sympathetic magic are a step more complicated: here, we are confusing the human way of thinking about things with the thing itself.
The physicist Stephen Weinberg once described how to distinguish what he politely describes as "would-be sciences": astrology, clairvoyance, channelling, telekinesis and so on, from the real stuff. He showed by example that we have explored the world well enough already to discern a dense explanatory net: when we ask why? why? why? and follow the answers confirmed by experiment, each explanation points to a smaller and simpler set of laws, and today these chains of "why" reach just a couple of equations of fundamental physics before we have to admit that we have run out of answers. The would-be sciences, says Weinberg,are utterly disconnected from these chains of explanation. But they are also united in inflating human abilities, or at least significance. In most cases the implication is that people, or at least some people, operate directly at the fundamental level of reality, bypassing all known natural laws. Even astrology claims that the position of the planets in the sky as seen from our particular speck of interstellar dirt have a direct, specific, and personal impact on each person's fate. In my terms, all these would-be sciences are instances of magical thinking.
This was supposed to be a review of Machineries of Empire, so let me get back, at last, to that. Lee's premise is that the ritual calendar followed by the population of some planet, solar system, or Galactic quadrant can affect the operation of 'exotic technologies'. In particular, the Hexarchate derives its decisive military advantage from technologies that depend on regular ritual torture and executions. Now, per Clarke's law, it would certainly be possible to simulate this with technology. Seed your victim society with smart dust capable of monitoring human nervous systems and connect it to a dead man's switch on your gravity cannon that turns off the gun if insufficient agony has been recorded, or recorded at the wrong time. There is not the slightest hint in the books that any such monitoring system is in place. But suppose it was; the real question is why would you do it? Especially for military technology, why give your opponent a completely unnecessary way of disarming you, as indeed occurs at various points in this trilogy? So the plot only makes sense if human ritual behaviour directly affects fundamental physics, which is magic pure and simple and as Weinberg shows us, utter bollocks.
So what do we have here? Revenant Gun is a fantasy novel with a super-evil antagonist with no redeeming features apart from being the smartest man in the galaxy and quite a good dancer; although for added pathos the protagonist is in love with him. The good guys are a disparate bunch who are more likely to attack each other than their common enemy, who is practically unkillable anyway. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Our protagonist is a likeable person, actually two different likeable people due to fairly straightforward SFnal machinations, although sadly they are also a genocidal mass murderer (a regrettable recent trend, this). There are some cool applications of SF tropes, for instance spaceships with "variable geometry" don't have swing-wings but instead are using hyperspatial tunnelling to give senior officers a shorter walk from their quarters to the bridge. There are cute robots heavily into trashy TV sagas, just like Murderbot (well, maybe cuter than Murderbot). The writing is smooth and the story is gripping, and despite the bizarre premise it's possible to follow the plot and fathom the scheming of the characters in some detail. This is a definite improvement from the first book in the trilogy, Nine-Fox Gambit. It's not that I object to being dropped into an apparently incomprehensible situation and expected to figure out the world without explicit help from the author. That's more than half the fun of SF. But Nine-Fox Gambit went on and on making no sense, especially in its central battle scenes. I eventually gave up looking for any kind of logic (even magical logic) behind the technobabble, and just read it for the character development, which remained captivating. It's possible that the later books made more sense because I was getting used to the world, but I think Lee really has upped his plotting game.
Revenant Gun is nominated for the Science Fiction Achievement Award, aka the Hugo, named for Hugo Gernsback, who was a charlatan and, depending on your level of charity, either an appalling businessman or a crook. But he really believed in better living through techology, and his garish magazines inspired a generation of American kids who would one day land a man on the Moon. The underlying message that this book sends to their grandchildren is that a world of rockets, space stations and interstellar travel is as impossible as a world of crystal castles, dragons and fairy shape-shifters. I would be sorry to see it get a Hugo Award.
Douglas Adams is dead, alas, but in Catherynne M. Valente's homage to the Eurovision Song Contest, the spirit of Hitchhiker is strong. Valente is a poet, and her prose style is usually rich and allusive, but here, celebrating the world of glam, glitter, and excess, she amps it to the max and leans on the reverb pedal:
Life is the ultimate narcissist, and it loves nothing more than showing off. Give it the jankiest glob of fungus on the tiniest flake of dried comet-vomit wheeling drunkenly around the most underachieving star in the middle of the most depressing urban blight the cosmos has to offer, and in a few billion years, give or take, you’ll have a teeming society of telekinetic mushroom people worshipping the Great Chanterelle and zipping around their local points of interest in the tastiest of lightly browned rocket ships. Dredge up a hostile, sulfurous silicate lava sink slaloming between two phlegmy suns well into their shuffleboard years, a miserable wad of hell-spit, free-range acid clouds, and the gravitational equivalent of untreated diabetes, a stellar expletive that should never be forced to cope with something as toxic and flammable as a civilization, and before you can say no, stop, don’t, why? the place will be crawling with postcapitalist glass balloons filled with sentient gases all called Ursula.
Hi there, Ursula! Admittedly this is from Chapter 1; by the time the story is in full flow, Valente dials it back down to eleven, but even so she is clearly having an indecent amount of fun, using SF privilege to drop this into a description of a sleazy Brighton pub:
...those rickety singleton tables as ringed with pint-glass condensation as an Ent’s arse,...
Eat your heart out, Howard Jacobson. Apparently this kind of thing is too much for some people but I suspect it works really well in the audio book.
It's a simple tale in essence. Galactic civilisation contacts Earth with an ultimatum. Compete in the Metagalactic Grand Prix with your best song and don't come last, or else we will carefully archive your cultural achievements and tidily eliminate your species. The have a helpful list of acts they think might do well. Unfortunately, it's a bit out of date: Everyone from Yoko Ono to the Spice Girls are dead. Björk "lost her voice in an accident with a narwhal and a spinning wheel", and so down the list to Decibel Jones, the only surviving candidate. But Jones, aka Danesh Jalo, is washed-up, twenty years past his half-minute of superstardom, and, besides, he's nothing without his band, which was only a trio and it's lynchpin, Mira Wonderful Star, killed herself in a stupid road accident fifteen years ago, while its musical genius, Oort St. Ultraviolet, aka Omar Calişkan, is barely on speaking terms with Dess. Nevertheless, off go Dess and Oort to the contest, along with the invaders, who closely resemble the Roadrunner and a time-travelling red panda, plus Oort's cat, Capo, who can now talk thanks to the Roadrunner's intervention (or according to Capo, can now be understood by his humans). Will they find a way of putting Mira's untimely death behind them? Will they come up with a song to win the contest, or at least do better than the sea-squirt-like Alunizar, cordially detested for their former Galactic Empire? Will they even survive the preliminary round, in which subversion, sabotage and outright assassination are not just tolerated but encouraged?
Interspersed with the main action, Valente inserts snippets of Galactic history including accounts of previous Grand Prix, introducing the other species in the competition. Top marks for invention, here. Most aliens are amused and slightly disgusted by the human habit of "singing" by producing sound waves from their digestive sphincter, as opposed, say, to releasing a cloud of literally infectious earworms. We also get a good selection from Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts, a compendium of universal truths made unforgettable in part by the temporary agony inflicted on turning each page.
One great virtue of Space Opera is that unlike Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, who really exist just to utter one-liners, Dess, Oort, and the departed Mira are fleshed out enough to make you care about them. All three are from immigrant families, and, rather surprisingly from an American writer, the novel offers a sympathetic portrait of the kind of semi-mythical Englishness that somehow attracts people from all over the world to make their homes in places like Blackpool, Sheffield and Manchester. Given that Valente is inhabiting Douglas Adams' deeply jaundiced view of humanity, it's no surprise that the fragility of that myth is brutally exposed. Mira's death starts by seeming just another rock'n'roll tragedy, almost played for laughs, but the narrative keeps circling back to it and we see more and more clearly how awful the circumstances were, and why it took a sledgehammer to both Dess and Oort's lives. Some UK reviewers took umbrage at Valente's portrait of Britain, but it rings true to me.
Valente's jokes are pretty good, if not quite up to Adams at his best. The book is loaded with easter eggs for hardcore Eurovision fans, most of which went straight over my head, but the entry by perennial losers the Alunizar, “Is Your Continual Mistreatment of Our Entire Species Fair Trade?” by We Are Better Than You, was a low blow, smack on target. Valente's real venom, though, is reserved for the AI species, the 321, who are prone to incarnating as Clippy, the early Windows software assistant. There is a pure gold chapter for true lovers of cats, who of course are under no illusions that cats love them as anything other than a convenient warm pillow.
The book has high production standards, with classy starscape title pages for each part, but unfortunately there are too many editing fails, from the trivial, such as writing Piccadilly Square for Piccadilly Circus, or the nineteenth Metagalactic Grand Prix transmuting into the twenty-second halfway through its description., to the downright catastrophic, in which we are told at one point that Mira was born in Sheffield, but later, the emotional bombshell at the heart of the book depends on the fact that she wasn't born in the UK at all. I also found the timeline distractingly hard to pin down, partly because as a glam-rock messiah clearly based on Bowie and Mercury, Decibel Jones' heyday should really have been in the early '70s and although Valente soon specifies the late 2010s the cognitive dissonance made me misinterpret that as the date of the alien invasion. My bad, I guess. For all that, I loved this book more than any of the other Hugo nominees this year.
Becky Chambers' first novel, The Long Way to A Small Angry Planet, was a break-out hit for self-publishing. Fans loved it for its character-centred storytelling, its relatively optimistic vision of a future society with no hint of any kind of sex-based prejudice, and perhaps because it is a rare example, these days, of a novel featuring interstellar spaceships which is not primarily about war. Detractors (few but vocal) found it a small step from Chamber's earlier Farscape fan fiction, complaining about its lightweight and episodic plotting, stereotypical and not very unhuman aliens, and merely workmanlike prose. If Chambers had been the hack writer they supposed, she would have continued the story of the good ship Wayfarer; but in fact her next novel, the Hugo-nominated A Closed and Common Orbit, revolves around two minor characters from the first, one of whom appeared only in the final pages. This book came in for intense criticism from the 2017 Shadow Clarke Jury, which IMHO was largely unfair and often applied more to Long Way than to ACACO, which featured a much more focused plot with a powerful emotional payoff, and did real SF work in imagining the perspective of its AI co-protagonist.
Her third novel, once again, has a passing connection to the first. One of the viewpoint characters. Tessa, is the sister of the Wayfarer's captain, Ashby, and near the start receives a message from him letting her know that he survived the events of Long Way; that's the last we hear of any members of the old crew. Record of a Spaceborn Few is set on the Exodus Fleet, one of the central planks of Chamber's world-building. The backstory is that the fleet was constructed by the last survivors of Earth, escaping in the nick of time as ecological and climate catastrophes render the planet uninhabitable. This is a scientifically illiterate and grotesquely irresponsible premise, but I'll write about that some other time; for the moment let's go with it. Originally, the 32 "homesteader" ships carried the majority of surviving humanity (apparently a few million) out of the Solar system with no particular destination in mind, leaving behind a sparse population in colonies on Mars and the outer planets. Centuries on, post-contact with the Galactic Commons, the fleet orbits an unwanted star, retrofitted with GC tech including artificial gravity and faster-than-light drives. A steady stream of Exodans emigrate for a life in the wider GC, or to start new colonies.
If anyone still thinks Chambers lacks ambition as a writer, Record should put doubts to rest. She is attempting something remarkable here, and in the process has taken all the rules about commercial writing that I suppose they teach at Clarion and elsewhere and torn them into tiny little pieces and blown them away on the wind. The book has been widely criticised as plotless and indeed it makes Long Way look positively byzantine. I was well past the half-way mark when I realised that essentially nothing had happened yet. OK, in the prologue the homesteader Oxomoco is wrecked just off-screen, an accident than kills tens of thousands. But attentive Chambers fans already know about this, since the accident is mentioned as recent past history in Long Way. I would not have finished this book if I hadn't been reading it for the award, and that would have been a big mistake.
The novel consists of brief slice-of-life chapters following five viewpoint characters, who interact only tangentially with each other. Interleaved are blogposts by a sixth character, Ghuh'loloan Mok Chupt, a member of the semi-aquatic Harmagian species on an ethnographic research trip to the Exodus Fleet; in many ways these are the most interesting sections. Unlike the characters in the earlier novels, most of whom are extroverts, outliers in their society and uprooted from their past, the Exodan characters here are introverts, at home, doing what they're expected to do by their society: Tessa is a mother stressing about her kids and her cranky dad; Kip, a teenager kicking at his constraints; and two who are very specific to Exodan society: Eyas is a caretaker, responsible for recycling the dead: in a closed ecosystem, an essential and honoured task, but one that can make social interaction awkward. Isabel is an archivist, responsible not only for maintaining and writing the records in a society which takes care to remember every Exodan since the start of the voyage, but also for leading the ceremonies that welcome each new child and memorialise each death. In this atheist society, she is the nearest thing to a priest. The last human character, Sawyer, is the odd one out: although his distant ancestors were Exodans he was born on a planet in the GC, and finding himself at a loose end, comes to the fleet to make a new home. Since he is also an introvert and arrives knowing no-one, he doesn't make much of a fist of it. What I'm trying to say here is that as well as lacking plot, the characters don't really grab you in the way Chambers fans might have expected.
So what is she up to? The clue is in the title, and the titles of each section of the novel, taken from Exodan ritual:
"From the beginning | We have wandered | To this day, we wander still | But for all our travels | We are not lost | We fly with courage | And will undying"
The focus is first-person plural: this is a novel about a society, not individuals. As in a traditional utopia, Ghuh'lolan and Sawyer arrive and explore a world as strange to them as it is to us. The Exodans left behind on Earth the old nations, religions, customs, and languages. Just as importantly as building their ships, they built a new society designed to sustain itself indefinitely in resourceless interstellar space. In many ways it is idealistic: egalitarian, compassionate, untroubled by any outcast group who could be scapegoated when things go wrong. Chambers is unashamed to use Ghuh'lolan as an excuse to infodump extensively: ship architecture, the economy (universal right to necessities, supplemented by barter), emigration, history, agriculture—there's a sentence that could have been lifted from Edward Bellamy or William Morris:
Farmers made themselves busy in the walkways between, some harvesting, some testing the soil, some planting new seedlings.
Ghuh'lolan also ruminates extensively on the similarities and differences between humans, harmagians, and the other aliens in the GC. Perhaps this is pushback against the charge that Chambers' aliens are just American liberals in masks. Chambers certainly loves to explore different reproductive strategies, and none of her aliens can quite get their head around long-term mammalian nurturing, but it's true that such differences don't affect
inter-species empathy nearly enough to be plausible.
To Ghuh'lolan and, in many ways, to us, the Exodans are impoverished. Make do and mend, or at least recycle, is their creed. Their food is nutritious but monotonous and only just enough: Kip is scandalised by a foreign drama in which characters leave food on their plates. This is a utopia under stress, and a major theme is the impact of a richer, rougher, more diverse, and vastly larger society on an isolated, traditional community. A lot of the novel shows us their many weaknesses: they were saved by the charity of the Galactic Commons, and largely live thanks to rescripts from relatives working in the wider world. In return they treat aliens with suspicion and sometimes prejudice or obsequiousness. Sawyer is treated officially as a native, but he has no idea how to live on the fleet and in practice is seen as a foreigner. We gradually see how appallingly isolated he is, a man with no family or friends and hardly even an acquaintance. His ignorance, and Exodan carelessness, especially from the low-lifes he falls in with, eventually produce the one real event of the novel. It's a low point, and recounted without affect, but afterwards, as the ripples spread out, the novel finally grabbed me. We start to see the inner strength of Exodan society. Lessons are learned, long-postponed decisions are made. Tessa's family join the exodus from the Exodus Fleet, helping to pioneer a new colony world...but they remain Exodans through and through. Kip makes it to a planet at the heart of the Galactic Commons, and has his eyes opened:
To say ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’ was the same as saying ‘I got up today’.
Near the start of the book, Isabel leads a naming-day ceremony for a new baby. We read it as ethnographers, at once soaking up the backstory recited in the ritual, and a little bored by the ponderous ceremony. At the end, years after the main events, another baby is named, and Isabel recites the exact same words. But now we hear them as the Exodans do. We see that in the face of everything, the Fleet survives. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cheer. It's a remarkable trick that Chambers has pulled off.
"History," says Gibbon "is indeed little more than the record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." So this blog will sometimes be about history. But since the crimes, follies, and misfortunes had been going on for a long time before anyone thought of recording them, it will also be about prehistory. And since they will go on happening for quite a while yet, it will also be about science fiction. And, you know, anything else that interests me, if I get around to it.
Blogs are so old school these days they are practically extinct, but there is no way I'm getting a facebook account and I'm too old for instagram. Not everyone I'm writing for is dead yet, so here we are.
Enjoy!
