"The Island" novella: an analysis
Main themes:
Death: Sunday refers to the cryochambers as crypts or coffins. The main action is whether to kill the dyson sphere. Sunday bargains death for death with the chimp. Implication that the chimp might have killed Kai and Connie.
Religion: Main character is named Sunday. She refers to the island as a god.
Motherhood or parenting: Sunday is a bad mother -
Triads: Sunday/chimp/Dixon. Sunday/Kai/Connie.
Unreliable POV: Who can see whom? The unlikeliness of seeing the island. The chimp can no longer watch Sunday as she sleeps in the crypt. Contrast her watching Dixon as he sleeps in communication with the chimp.
Communication:
Notice that we hear the POV of Sunday and, by proxy, of the chimp, but less so Dixon.
WE are being addressed, the far distant children of Sunday.
The Island reminds me of the excellent “The Eyes of God” in some ways, but it reaches for more. It’s pretty dense in terms of layers of meaning, packed closely, but with interesting use of blank space and single-sentence paragraphs, sort of like a big poem. This sh*t deserves the Hugo.
There are three main themes running simultaneously in The Island:
Family and Motherhood
Seeing Poorly
Religion
Family and Motherhood
In chapter 1, the story opens introducing the Family theme - the protagonist is talking to the descendents for whom she and her intergalactic road crew are constructing wormhole gates in space. Since she addresses them as “you,” she is also talking to us, and she is guilting and chiding us.
The imagery invokes a traditional female caregiver indirectly, at first, without telling the reader initially that the protagonist is female or naming her. She mentions that she “thread(s) each needle” and keeps their feet from getting dirty. If you listen to the tone, you hear the stereotype of the Mother’s lament: I did it all for you, and (paragraph 2) “Is it really too much to ask that you talk to us now and then?” sounds like, “You never write! You never call!” She also complains that her distant offspring don’t appreciate her, and have refused to talk to her for so long she has given up trying. The protagonist, named in later chapters as “Sunday,” notes that her descendants are sometimes unrecognizable as human and she can’t feel connection to them.
Paragraphs 8 and 9 directly specify them as her children:
“You wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for us. And - and you’re our children. Whatever you’ve become, you were once like this, like me. I believed in you once.”
The protagonist ends the chapter with this self-pitying question, “Why have you forsaken us?” This briefly introduces the Religion theme, being a twist on Psalm 22 and Matthew 27:46, which are King David and Jesus on the cross, respectively.
The only characters onstage in this story, other than the Dyson sphere, are Sunday, the chimp, and the son, and they are a “family” if a very dysfunctional one. The mother can’t treat the son politely. She excoriates, berates, sucker-punches, and finally seduces her son. Mom Sunday and Dad chimp have been at war with each other for years; Mother has evicted Dad from her sleeping quarters as best she can, and while she at one point tenderly watches Son sleep, she is happy contemplating that she has prevented Dad chimp from watching her sleep, as he originally did. She compares their relationship to an old married “multiplet” who have resigned themselves to hating each other but being interdependent.
A nice touch is that, as happens when married people are locked in combat, the kids are recruited as tokens in the power struggle. Sunday is jealous that the son is connected to the chimp AI as he sleeps, and is really annoyed that the Son isn’t against the AI. “Doesn’t he know he has to pick a side?” She withholds affection until he “burns out his link” to the chimp, gets the influence of the Dad chimp out of his head. All this makes sure we don’t think Sunday is a nice warm person, but it explicates the mechanisms of angry family dysfunction beautifully and uses them as a foundation for the other action.
Seeing Poorly
Chapter 2 opens continuing the theme of Family by giving Sunday an actual son Dixon as opposed to just a descendent, then segueways into the Seeing Poorly theme.
“…I open my eyes to a familiar face I have never seen before. …His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter on the left than on the right. His ears are too big. He looks almost natural.
I haven’t spoken in millennia. My voice comes out in a whisper, ‘Who are you?’ Not that I’m supposed to ask, I know …
’I’m yours,’ he says, and just like that I’m a mother.”
The son is the only person whose physical appearance is described for us. What does that do? It allows Sunday to start their relationship off, bad mother that she is, by finding him defective, literally prima facia. But mostly it reinforces as important the moment when she wakes to a strangely familiar face, and has an initial confusion about what she’s seeing. How she sees his visage is important enough for extended description a few paragraphs later, in fact, and her seconds of confusion foreshadow the remainder of the story, which asks, “What exactly am I looking at through Sunday’s eyes?”
The main plot is the Dyson sphere - what is it, what does it want, what do we do about it - and it is an exercise in seeing poorly. As a reader, I felt as if I were squinting at the action the whole time. At first they don’t see the sphere, then they see it blinking, rearrange the vons to get a better look, can’t see it again, Sunday changes the scale on the view in the tac tank to see it again, then the sphere sends a different message, part of which you can’t see because it is not in front of the disc of the star.
Metaphorically, Sunday sees what she wants to see in Dixon (larva, lover, pet?), then in the Dyson sphere, and in the end, realizes she had no idea what she was looking at- not a god, not a being removed from the mundane pressures of evolution, but another dysfunctional family in alien form. "Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some- family squabble." Even then, we aren’t sure, because her eyes have fooled her (and us, by proxy) so often, what exactly she did see. Did the sphere live? Was there really a competing island in the sphere that they helped assassinate? After all, we never saw it, just the blinking. She can’t know, and we can’t either. Even the chimp is visually impaired - she and her coworkers blinded it years ago.
Here’s another form of vision subverted that falls directly from her sleeping beauty awakening: she never says anywhere in the novelette Dixon looks like his father Kai, and she looks up who the father is rather than guessing from Dixon’s appearance. Although she never puts this into words, this is because Dixon looks like her. She was looking at a version of her own face, but failed to recognize it for a moment. Like the Dyson sphere (Dixon, Dyson, the names are similar) she looked at something with parallels to her, but failed to see it clearly.
Notice that her first words to her son are, “Who are you?” This makes the reader stop a moment to think about who Dixon is. He looks familiar because he is a flawed reflection of her, reinforcing the unity of the triad of players in this story - Sunday, Dixon and the chimp. In this case, he doesn’t replay, “I’m your son,” but “I’m yours,” as in, “I belong to you,” and of course your own reflection does belong to you. It is you, and the reflection does what you make it do. In line with the Family theme, the chimp and Sunday are Dixon’s father and mother, since the chimp has been mentoring and acting as a father figure for him, but the three are also discordant parts of one being - they have different agendas but are physically inside one soma - Eriophora - and, although warring, are interdependent, like the parts of the human mind.
Notice that going outside the soma is death - the “hammering sunlight” and the lethality of “the sleeting blueshift,” but the mind can look out from its soma and steer the body a little, a bit, if it really needs to, if the parts of the mind can agree to act. I enjoyed this image, and especially enjoyed that one of the artists who painted the Eriophora portrays her, if you look closely, as a disembodied torso. I’m not sure it was intentional, but it would be a natural reaction to the story.
There is another layer seeing gone awry to Sunday’s question, “Who are you?” if you know what the author himself looks like. You don’t need this information to understand the themes, but it’s interesting.
The description of Dixon is the author’s own face, reversed, with his flatter right cheek now as Dixon’s left. He is the mirror-image of the author. Both Sunday and the author are the storytellers, so in a sense Dixon is what both the protagonist and the author see when looking in a mirror. (It recalls to me the self-awareness test for animals - when they look in the mirror, if they are self-aware/conscious, they see themselves in the mirror.) This extra layer of meaning makes it much more explicit that Dixon acts as a mirror, and that Dixon and Sunday are part of a unitary being, even if only figuratively. Sunday and Dixon are part of one being in the story, but also they are part of the author’s being, because he created them and they live in his own warring mind. It’s a clever device.
Religion
Like much of Peter Watt’s work, The Island contains meditation on the failure of religion, particularly Christianity. The comment here is that people want to see God in the physical world more than they want to see purely physical process of which the world consists, and when the physical fails to live up to what people want from the divine, they are disappointed.
Sunday as a name suggests Christianity, since Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, and she is the believer in this story.
Her hierarchy of who is worthwhile and who isn’t is based on their intellect - for instance, her thought in talking to Dixon at one point is, “My son is an idiot.” When he then says something clever and useful a second later, she thinks, “Okay, my son is an idiot savant.” Her impression of him is negative, so she can’t admit that he’s intelligent. Here is another example: she hates the control the chimp has over her life, so she says the meanest thing she can think to say about someone, that he’s stupid, that he was “built stupid.” Of course, the chimp greatly exceeds her computational powers, and isn’t stupid, per se, just of limited imagination, but again, since intellect is the measure of worth, she can’t grant him that.
So when encountering something beautiful and interesting, she sees the Dyson sphere as a vast intellect; she assumes that most of its substance is brain power, as part of Seeing Poorly, but she attributes religious significance to it - calls it an angel and a god. Then it turns out not to have all the pleasant aspects she imputed to it, and she demotes her god to mortal being.
END
a woman interestingly named Sunday Ahzmundin, “eternity’s warrior,” and religion
HYPERLINK "http://muslim-canada.org/sufi/nizamud.htm" http://muslim-canada.org/sufi/nizamud.htm
Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia (d. 1325 A.D.) represents in many ways the pinnacle of the Chishti Order of the Sufis. Hazrat Baba Farid, his spiritual guide, said to him on appointing him as his successor: "Be like a big tree, so that Allah's creation, the human beings in their vast multitudes, may find rest and solace under your shadow." This partly explains why he admitted so many (according to some, including Barani, too many) men into the Chishti order as his disciples. Another reason has been clearly formulated in this way: "History, nonetheless, bears out the wisdom of his open-ended policy . . . To far-flung areas of Uttar Pradesh, Rajastan, Gujarat, Bihar, Bengal and the Deccan, Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia sent able disciples well versed in the Chishti practices, yet sensitive to the needs of the local populace."
With regard to the Sufi path, Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia taught the following: "For a dervish, three things are necessary. They all begin with an 'ain' (an Arabic letter), i.e., Ishq (love), Aql (intelligence) and Ilm (knowledge). Let us discuss these three qualities one by one.
Sufism is, in its essence, the way of love. Love is considered to be a spiritual alchemy by
Death: Sunday refers to the cryochambers as crypts or coffins. The main action is whether to kill the dyson sphere. Sunday bargains death for death with the chimp. Implication that the chimp might have killed Kai and Connie.
Religion: Main character is named Sunday. She refers to the island as a god.
Motherhood or parenting: Sunday is a bad mother -
Triads: Sunday/chimp/Dixon. Sunday/Kai/Connie.
Unreliable POV: Who can see whom? The unlikeliness of seeing the island. The chimp can no longer watch Sunday as she sleeps in the crypt. Contrast her watching Dixon as he sleeps in communication with the chimp.
Communication:
Notice that we hear the POV of Sunday and, by proxy, of the chimp, but less so Dixon.
WE are being addressed, the far distant children of Sunday.
The Island reminds me of the excellent “The Eyes of God” in some ways, but it reaches for more. It’s pretty dense in terms of layers of meaning, packed closely, but with interesting use of blank space and single-sentence paragraphs, sort of like a big poem. This sh*t deserves the Hugo.
There are three main themes running simultaneously in The Island:
Family and Motherhood
Seeing Poorly
Religion
Family and Motherhood
In chapter 1, the story opens introducing the Family theme - the protagonist is talking to the descendents for whom she and her intergalactic road crew are constructing wormhole gates in space. Since she addresses them as “you,” she is also talking to us, and she is guilting and chiding us.
The imagery invokes a traditional female caregiver indirectly, at first, without telling the reader initially that the protagonist is female or naming her. She mentions that she “thread(s) each needle” and keeps their feet from getting dirty. If you listen to the tone, you hear the stereotype of the Mother’s lament: I did it all for you, and (paragraph 2) “Is it really too much to ask that you talk to us now and then?” sounds like, “You never write! You never call!” She also complains that her distant offspring don’t appreciate her, and have refused to talk to her for so long she has given up trying. The protagonist, named in later chapters as “Sunday,” notes that her descendants are sometimes unrecognizable as human and she can’t feel connection to them.
Paragraphs 8 and 9 directly specify them as her children:
“You wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for us. And - and you’re our children. Whatever you’ve become, you were once like this, like me. I believed in you once.”
The protagonist ends the chapter with this self-pitying question, “Why have you forsaken us?” This briefly introduces the Religion theme, being a twist on Psalm 22 and Matthew 27:46, which are King David and Jesus on the cross, respectively.
The only characters onstage in this story, other than the Dyson sphere, are Sunday, the chimp, and the son, and they are a “family” if a very dysfunctional one. The mother can’t treat the son politely. She excoriates, berates, sucker-punches, and finally seduces her son. Mom Sunday and Dad chimp have been at war with each other for years; Mother has evicted Dad from her sleeping quarters as best she can, and while she at one point tenderly watches Son sleep, she is happy contemplating that she has prevented Dad chimp from watching her sleep, as he originally did. She compares their relationship to an old married “multiplet” who have resigned themselves to hating each other but being interdependent.
A nice touch is that, as happens when married people are locked in combat, the kids are recruited as tokens in the power struggle. Sunday is jealous that the son is connected to the chimp AI as he sleeps, and is really annoyed that the Son isn’t against the AI. “Doesn’t he know he has to pick a side?” She withholds affection until he “burns out his link” to the chimp, gets the influence of the Dad chimp out of his head. All this makes sure we don’t think Sunday is a nice warm person, but it explicates the mechanisms of angry family dysfunction beautifully and uses them as a foundation for the other action.
Seeing Poorly
Chapter 2 opens continuing the theme of Family by giving Sunday an actual son Dixon as opposed to just a descendent, then segueways into the Seeing Poorly theme.
“…I open my eyes to a familiar face I have never seen before. …His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter on the left than on the right. His ears are too big. He looks almost natural.
I haven’t spoken in millennia. My voice comes out in a whisper, ‘Who are you?’ Not that I’m supposed to ask, I know …
’I’m yours,’ he says, and just like that I’m a mother.”
The son is the only person whose physical appearance is described for us. What does that do? It allows Sunday to start their relationship off, bad mother that she is, by finding him defective, literally prima facia. But mostly it reinforces as important the moment when she wakes to a strangely familiar face, and has an initial confusion about what she’s seeing. How she sees his visage is important enough for extended description a few paragraphs later, in fact, and her seconds of confusion foreshadow the remainder of the story, which asks, “What exactly am I looking at through Sunday’s eyes?”
The main plot is the Dyson sphere - what is it, what does it want, what do we do about it - and it is an exercise in seeing poorly. As a reader, I felt as if I were squinting at the action the whole time. At first they don’t see the sphere, then they see it blinking, rearrange the vons to get a better look, can’t see it again, Sunday changes the scale on the view in the tac tank to see it again, then the sphere sends a different message, part of which you can’t see because it is not in front of the disc of the star.
Metaphorically, Sunday sees what she wants to see in Dixon (larva, lover, pet?), then in the Dyson sphere, and in the end, realizes she had no idea what she was looking at- not a god, not a being removed from the mundane pressures of evolution, but another dysfunctional family in alien form. "Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some- family squabble." Even then, we aren’t sure, because her eyes have fooled her (and us, by proxy) so often, what exactly she did see. Did the sphere live? Was there really a competing island in the sphere that they helped assassinate? After all, we never saw it, just the blinking. She can’t know, and we can’t either. Even the chimp is visually impaired - she and her coworkers blinded it years ago.
Here’s another form of vision subverted that falls directly from her sleeping beauty awakening: she never says anywhere in the novelette Dixon looks like his father Kai, and she looks up who the father is rather than guessing from Dixon’s appearance. Although she never puts this into words, this is because Dixon looks like her. She was looking at a version of her own face, but failed to recognize it for a moment. Like the Dyson sphere (Dixon, Dyson, the names are similar) she looked at something with parallels to her, but failed to see it clearly.
Notice that her first words to her son are, “Who are you?” This makes the reader stop a moment to think about who Dixon is. He looks familiar because he is a flawed reflection of her, reinforcing the unity of the triad of players in this story - Sunday, Dixon and the chimp. In this case, he doesn’t replay, “I’m your son,” but “I’m yours,” as in, “I belong to you,” and of course your own reflection does belong to you. It is you, and the reflection does what you make it do. In line with the Family theme, the chimp and Sunday are Dixon’s father and mother, since the chimp has been mentoring and acting as a father figure for him, but the three are also discordant parts of one being - they have different agendas but are physically inside one soma - Eriophora - and, although warring, are interdependent, like the parts of the human mind.
Notice that going outside the soma is death - the “hammering sunlight” and the lethality of “the sleeting blueshift,” but the mind can look out from its soma and steer the body a little, a bit, if it really needs to, if the parts of the mind can agree to act. I enjoyed this image, and especially enjoyed that one of the artists who painted the Eriophora portrays her, if you look closely, as a disembodied torso. I’m not sure it was intentional, but it would be a natural reaction to the story.
There is another layer seeing gone awry to Sunday’s question, “Who are you?” if you know what the author himself looks like. You don’t need this information to understand the themes, but it’s interesting.
The description of Dixon is the author’s own face, reversed, with his flatter right cheek now as Dixon’s left. He is the mirror-image of the author. Both Sunday and the author are the storytellers, so in a sense Dixon is what both the protagonist and the author see when looking in a mirror. (It recalls to me the self-awareness test for animals - when they look in the mirror, if they are self-aware/conscious, they see themselves in the mirror.) This extra layer of meaning makes it much more explicit that Dixon acts as a mirror, and that Dixon and Sunday are part of a unitary being, even if only figuratively. Sunday and Dixon are part of one being in the story, but also they are part of the author’s being, because he created them and they live in his own warring mind. It’s a clever device.
Religion
Like much of Peter Watt’s work, The Island contains meditation on the failure of religion, particularly Christianity. The comment here is that people want to see God in the physical world more than they want to see purely physical process of which the world consists, and when the physical fails to live up to what people want from the divine, they are disappointed.
Sunday as a name suggests Christianity, since Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, and she is the believer in this story.
Her hierarchy of who is worthwhile and who isn’t is based on their intellect - for instance, her thought in talking to Dixon at one point is, “My son is an idiot.” When he then says something clever and useful a second later, she thinks, “Okay, my son is an idiot savant.” Her impression of him is negative, so she can’t admit that he’s intelligent. Here is another example: she hates the control the chimp has over her life, so she says the meanest thing she can think to say about someone, that he’s stupid, that he was “built stupid.” Of course, the chimp greatly exceeds her computational powers, and isn’t stupid, per se, just of limited imagination, but again, since intellect is the measure of worth, she can’t grant him that.
So when encountering something beautiful and interesting, she sees the Dyson sphere as a vast intellect; she assumes that most of its substance is brain power, as part of Seeing Poorly, but she attributes religious significance to it - calls it an angel and a god. Then it turns out not to have all the pleasant aspects she imputed to it, and she demotes her god to mortal being.
END
a woman interestingly named Sunday Ahzmundin, “eternity’s warrior,” and religion
HYPERLINK "http://muslim-canada.org/sufi/nizamud.htm" http://muslim-canada.org/sufi/nizamud.htm
Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia (d. 1325 A.D.) represents in many ways the pinnacle of the Chishti Order of the Sufis. Hazrat Baba Farid, his spiritual guide, said to him on appointing him as his successor: "Be like a big tree, so that Allah's creation, the human beings in their vast multitudes, may find rest and solace under your shadow." This partly explains why he admitted so many (according to some, including Barani, too many) men into the Chishti order as his disciples. Another reason has been clearly formulated in this way: "History, nonetheless, bears out the wisdom of his open-ended policy . . . To far-flung areas of Uttar Pradesh, Rajastan, Gujarat, Bihar, Bengal and the Deccan, Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia sent able disciples well versed in the Chishti practices, yet sensitive to the needs of the local populace."
With regard to the Sufi path, Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia taught the following: "For a dervish, three things are necessary. They all begin with an 'ain' (an Arabic letter), i.e., Ishq (love), Aql (intelligence) and Ilm (knowledge). Let us discuss these three qualities one by one.
Sufism is, in its essence, the way of love. Love is considered to be a spiritual alchemy by