Fiction: Paul Park
This entry considers Paul Park, one of whose Starbridge novels I read many years ago and remembered as disturbing but gorgeously written. When my to-read shelf began to run low, I ordered several of his other books. My memory was correct, though in the end I wasn’t sure if there was anything underneath the hideous beauty. Park is a poet of cruelty; his work features a stunning variety of suffering deliberately inflicted on others in the name of truth or religion or natural order.
The Starbridge Chronicles: Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, and The Cult of Loving Kindness: The city-state of Charn exists on a planet that’s one of nine hells in its solar system; souls, according to the reigning theology, are reincarnated on planet after planet until, if they are good, they pass into Paradise. Most people are born doomed, except for the divine Starbridges, who rule with a detached cruelty. Seasons last for years, with famine in the long winters and political upheaval in the heated, fecund summers; the spring’s explosive sugar rain brings the shift from one to the other. I can’t do justice in this brief review to Park’s baroque creation - tattoos on every person’s hands elucidating their fates, some of which emerge from inside the body if they aren’t properly put on by priests; drugs that put questionable Starbridges to sleep for years until one wakes, literally bloodthirsty; “antinomials” who were free meat-eaters until they were destroyed and enslaved by the religious zealots of Charn, and forced to give up a philosophy of total selfishness that included a private language for each one; a bishop who turns into a tree; a low-class caste whose unworthiness is expressed in a law that forbids them to be kind or to use conceptual nouns like “love”; prisons big enough to hold millions of people imprisoned for the crimes of being born with the wrong destinies; the Cult of Loving Kindness, which destroys the reigning order in the name of truth and equality but also restores the Starbridges to power. The imagery keeps coming, an assault of dream- and nightmare-logic, until the season turns yet again - and, we must assume, new cruelties emerge.
Celestis: On a faraway planet that has recently lost contact with the rest of human civilization for reasons unclear to the inhabitants, the humans have converted a native race to human culture, including severe bodily modification to make the aliens look more human. Their human-like mental states are maintained with large doses of personalized drugs. The aliens were formerly slaves to a now nearly-exterminated race of demons; the demons built palaces out of their bones. But the demons exerted a mental influence that made the aliens comply willingly; one of the novel’s questions is whether the transformations worked by the humans are any more acceptable. The plot focuses on a new human arrival to the planet - the last before communications broke down - who falls in love, or lust, with an alien girl just as she’s kidnapped and denied her drugs, so that her thoughts begin to distort. She wanted the drugs when she was taking them, but in withdrawal, things look different. Meanwhile, the humans are struggling desperately to retain control of the alien population - the kidnappers are part of an alien group motivated by human concepts of self-determination and alien rage. Park’s descriptions of alien thought processes are as cold and creepy as his descriptions of human thought processes; neither have much to do with what I think of as morality. We are all aliens, I think the message is, and I want to be alien to the callous people he describes.
The Gospel of Corax: This novel, set at the beginning of the Common Era, is written from the POV of an escaped slave with substantial medical/magical knowledge. His path, which involves rather a lot of suffering - on his and others’ parts - intersects with that of a man whose story in some respects resembles that we know from the New Testament. The difference is that our narrator kind of hates this itenerant preacher, finds him physically and philosophically hideous, which makes sense in a world as full of hate, betrayal and despair as his. Even without aliens, Park creates a world of grotesques, airless and hopeless amidst great wonders.
Park has other works, but I think I’ve read enough to know that, while his vision is feverishly colorful, I’m not going to get any hint of a moral universe in it, and thus he’s not really the writer for me. If you want a whiff of the alien presented as obvious - if you want in on someone else’s elaborately illustrated and inexorable dreams - you might enjoy Park.
So, special offer: the first person who sends me a mailing address can have these books.
The Starbridge Chronicles: Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, and The Cult of Loving Kindness: The city-state of Charn exists on a planet that’s one of nine hells in its solar system; souls, according to the reigning theology, are reincarnated on planet after planet until, if they are good, they pass into Paradise. Most people are born doomed, except for the divine Starbridges, who rule with a detached cruelty. Seasons last for years, with famine in the long winters and political upheaval in the heated, fecund summers; the spring’s explosive sugar rain brings the shift from one to the other. I can’t do justice in this brief review to Park’s baroque creation - tattoos on every person’s hands elucidating their fates, some of which emerge from inside the body if they aren’t properly put on by priests; drugs that put questionable Starbridges to sleep for years until one wakes, literally bloodthirsty; “antinomials” who were free meat-eaters until they were destroyed and enslaved by the religious zealots of Charn, and forced to give up a philosophy of total selfishness that included a private language for each one; a bishop who turns into a tree; a low-class caste whose unworthiness is expressed in a law that forbids them to be kind or to use conceptual nouns like “love”; prisons big enough to hold millions of people imprisoned for the crimes of being born with the wrong destinies; the Cult of Loving Kindness, which destroys the reigning order in the name of truth and equality but also restores the Starbridges to power. The imagery keeps coming, an assault of dream- and nightmare-logic, until the season turns yet again - and, we must assume, new cruelties emerge.
Celestis: On a faraway planet that has recently lost contact with the rest of human civilization for reasons unclear to the inhabitants, the humans have converted a native race to human culture, including severe bodily modification to make the aliens look more human. Their human-like mental states are maintained with large doses of personalized drugs. The aliens were formerly slaves to a now nearly-exterminated race of demons; the demons built palaces out of their bones. But the demons exerted a mental influence that made the aliens comply willingly; one of the novel’s questions is whether the transformations worked by the humans are any more acceptable. The plot focuses on a new human arrival to the planet - the last before communications broke down - who falls in love, or lust, with an alien girl just as she’s kidnapped and denied her drugs, so that her thoughts begin to distort. She wanted the drugs when she was taking them, but in withdrawal, things look different. Meanwhile, the humans are struggling desperately to retain control of the alien population - the kidnappers are part of an alien group motivated by human concepts of self-determination and alien rage. Park’s descriptions of alien thought processes are as cold and creepy as his descriptions of human thought processes; neither have much to do with what I think of as morality. We are all aliens, I think the message is, and I want to be alien to the callous people he describes.
The Gospel of Corax: This novel, set at the beginning of the Common Era, is written from the POV of an escaped slave with substantial medical/magical knowledge. His path, which involves rather a lot of suffering - on his and others’ parts - intersects with that of a man whose story in some respects resembles that we know from the New Testament. The difference is that our narrator kind of hates this itenerant preacher, finds him physically and philosophically hideous, which makes sense in a world as full of hate, betrayal and despair as his. Even without aliens, Park creates a world of grotesques, airless and hopeless amidst great wonders.
Park has other works, but I think I’ve read enough to know that, while his vision is feverishly colorful, I’m not going to get any hint of a moral universe in it, and thus he’s not really the writer for me. If you want a whiff of the alien presented as obvious - if you want in on someone else’s elaborately illustrated and inexorable dreams - you might enjoy Park.
So, special offer: the first person who sends me a mailing address can have these books.