Gobsmacked: On Karl Schroeder's The Sunless Countries
I'm crap at writing reviews. I would rather let others do my expositional dirty work; I find myself lacking the will to explain. So go read this (which is what led me to the novel) and then come back. Sounds like fun, huh? It's been a while since I was so enchanted with a world-builder, perhaps not since Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden. The action of all the Virga novels (this is the fourth) takes place in what another reviewer calls a "Boschian landscape,"
an enormous, air-filled fullerene balloon in the Vegan star system containing worldlets of varying size that center around the "sun of suns," Candesce....a world where where you can have what amounts to a space battle using Newtonian physics.
Space without a vacuum, space with atmosphere, where gravity is an artifact. Schroeder's novel is preoccupied with the tension between accident (trace, error, byproduct) and intention (artificing? making? tool-wielding ape on board!) in the meaning of artifact. Artifacts are both wondrous and menacing in this world; while its spinning cylinder towns bleed light and objects into the surrounding blackness, its cultural and historical memory is more and more obviously constructed, and worryingly unconstrained by fact.
One of the more wondrous features of the Virgan ecosystem is the Midden: a sargasso sea of the detritus of human life. Items no longer useful or useful but lost, items subject to errors of gesture and footing in the artificial gravity of the towns, float off into the void and return to their lives as natural objects, in a process Schroeder elsewhere calls rewilding (see this really interesting short talk he gave last year on the subject). In one of the novel's more intriguing reversals, this aggregation will later be returned to use by a nonsentient intelligence from beyond Virga's boundaries (called The Emissary, IIRC), which (who?) uses the Midden as the building blocks, as it were, for incorporation, much like China Mieville's "Familiar," in which an orphaned witch's familiar cobbles together a body from trash. I assume Schroeder's next novel in the series will explore this entity in greater detail, but for now, I'll make do with its appearances in the sunless countries, which incite just the right mix of gobsmacking terror and wonderment in the citizenry (and me). (And Kate.)
Which brings me to the other means by which artifact can be menacing in this novel: the political plot centers on the Eternist takeover of cultural institutions (the press, education, etc.) and consequent hectoring, intimidation, and, in one case, assassination of dissenters. Our heroine is one such, a daughter of the scavenger class, now an underpaid, overworked, and passed-over adjunct faculty member in the history department. Here she is conferencing with a student disgruntled by his lousy grade:
"It's true, in't it?"
"Well, in point of fact, it's not true. The records show-"
"But I asked ten people and they all said it was true." He gave her a sly smile. "And truth's owned by the people now, in't it? That's what they say."
She shook her head. "Either something happened or it didn't. You-"
"-But how do you know? You gotta go with the majority. That's democracy, right?"
He was challenging her! Leal just sat there for a second, gaping at him, then handed back the paper.
"Every man's entitled to his own opinion," she said. "But not his own facts."
The rocketeer scowled. "So I guess I should wait until after the referendum to hand this in."
Leal smiled as sweetly as she could at him. "No. That won't change anything."
"It'll change how I get marked."
"But not what's true."
"I don't care 'bout that."
"Clearly."
The prime event of the Eternist takeover is the passage of a law that would require all "matters of fact not immediately determinable by simple observation or experiment," any "contentious matter of truth" to be decided upon by public opinion. Here the doctoring of history takes a literalist turn, in true Orwellian fashion, such that even your trash is edited:
QUESTION 5: IF YOU VOTED YES TO QUESTION 4, should newspaper recycling be brought under the jurisdiction of the National Referendum Division; and, should all popular press outlets be required to include true/false tick boxes beside all new statements of fact in news items?
The buildup of crowd-sourced information, however heavily mediated by the Eternists, produces its own version of trash monster, a culture of fear and misinformation that ill prepares its citizens for novel situations, such as the invitation from The Emissary, an invitation to alliance against a greater enemy.
One of Schroeder's critics finds the Eternists too broadly drawn, the takeover plot clichéd, and "the obvious analogies outside the book...too easy and a bit distracting." I disagree with all but the last; I found the portrait of Eternism uncannily visceral, they live on the page with the terrifying verismilitude of Glenn Beck's attack on "social justice" (I *wish* it were fictional!). That is to say, being distracted by the urgency of the parallels drawn between our world and Leal's only added to my enjoyment and appreciation. This is one of those novels I'll be recommending to my nephew as he moves through adolescence, as counterforce to the influence his family's Eternism Mormonism will have on him.
Five jillion stars.
an enormous, air-filled fullerene balloon in the Vegan star system containing worldlets of varying size that center around the "sun of suns," Candesce....a world where where you can have what amounts to a space battle using Newtonian physics.
Space without a vacuum, space with atmosphere, where gravity is an artifact. Schroeder's novel is preoccupied with the tension between accident (trace, error, byproduct) and intention (artificing? making? tool-wielding ape on board!) in the meaning of artifact. Artifacts are both wondrous and menacing in this world; while its spinning cylinder towns bleed light and objects into the surrounding blackness, its cultural and historical memory is more and more obviously constructed, and worryingly unconstrained by fact.
One of the more wondrous features of the Virgan ecosystem is the Midden: a sargasso sea of the detritus of human life. Items no longer useful or useful but lost, items subject to errors of gesture and footing in the artificial gravity of the towns, float off into the void and return to their lives as natural objects, in a process Schroeder elsewhere calls rewilding (see this really interesting short talk he gave last year on the subject). In one of the novel's more intriguing reversals, this aggregation will later be returned to use by a nonsentient intelligence from beyond Virga's boundaries (called The Emissary, IIRC), which (who?) uses the Midden as the building blocks, as it were, for incorporation, much like China Mieville's "Familiar," in which an orphaned witch's familiar cobbles together a body from trash. I assume Schroeder's next novel in the series will explore this entity in greater detail, but for now, I'll make do with its appearances in the sunless countries, which incite just the right mix of gobsmacking terror and wonderment in the citizenry (and me). (And Kate.)
Which brings me to the other means by which artifact can be menacing in this novel: the political plot centers on the Eternist takeover of cultural institutions (the press, education, etc.) and consequent hectoring, intimidation, and, in one case, assassination of dissenters. Our heroine is one such, a daughter of the scavenger class, now an underpaid, overworked, and passed-over adjunct faculty member in the history department. Here she is conferencing with a student disgruntled by his lousy grade:
"It's true, in't it?"
"Well, in point of fact, it's not true. The records show-"
"But I asked ten people and they all said it was true." He gave her a sly smile. "And truth's owned by the people now, in't it? That's what they say."
She shook her head. "Either something happened or it didn't. You-"
"-But how do you know? You gotta go with the majority. That's democracy, right?"
He was challenging her! Leal just sat there for a second, gaping at him, then handed back the paper.
"Every man's entitled to his own opinion," she said. "But not his own facts."
The rocketeer scowled. "So I guess I should wait until after the referendum to hand this in."
Leal smiled as sweetly as she could at him. "No. That won't change anything."
"It'll change how I get marked."
"But not what's true."
"I don't care 'bout that."
"Clearly."
The prime event of the Eternist takeover is the passage of a law that would require all "matters of fact not immediately determinable by simple observation or experiment," any "contentious matter of truth" to be decided upon by public opinion. Here the doctoring of history takes a literalist turn, in true Orwellian fashion, such that even your trash is edited:
QUESTION 5: IF YOU VOTED YES TO QUESTION 4, should newspaper recycling be brought under the jurisdiction of the National Referendum Division; and, should all popular press outlets be required to include true/false tick boxes beside all new statements of fact in news items?
The buildup of crowd-sourced information, however heavily mediated by the Eternists, produces its own version of trash monster, a culture of fear and misinformation that ill prepares its citizens for novel situations, such as the invitation from The Emissary, an invitation to alliance against a greater enemy.
One of Schroeder's critics finds the Eternists too broadly drawn, the takeover plot clichéd, and "the obvious analogies outside the book...too easy and a bit distracting." I disagree with all but the last; I found the portrait of Eternism uncannily visceral, they live on the page with the terrifying verismilitude of Glenn Beck's attack on "social justice" (I *wish* it were fictional!). That is to say, being distracted by the urgency of the parallels drawn between our world and Leal's only added to my enjoyment and appreciation. This is one of those novels I'll be recommending to my nephew as he moves through adolescence, as counterforce to the influence his family's Eternism Mormonism will have on him.
Five jillion stars.