#sofia samatar

... The monster itself is a revelation. Balthasar Hubmaier was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. His wife, a stone around her neck, was drowned in the Danube.

My month in reading is going to be mostly dominated by a couple of thousand page tomes, so to keep my sanity I’m breaking them up with whichever of this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Novella my library has handy. Practice, Horizon and Chain was the first one on the list, and besides that nomination I went it literally entirely blind as to its context and contents. Having finished it, it was...not awful. It would, I think, have been better served as a short story than a novella – the added page count mostly gave time for the plot to strain and buckle and the prose to wear out its welcome and go from poetic to overwrought. It was short enough to not entirely overstay its welcome, but the thing felt more like something that would get written as part of an MFA than one of the year’s best pieces of science fiction.

The story is a bit of space age mythology, centring around a boy living in the Hold at the centre of a gargantuan spaceship – one of a whole fleet the journeys from asteroid to another, pulling likely rocks in to their core for the toiling masses to chip away at and process into useful materials for those living in the ship’s more luxurious upper layers. Noted by a doctor changing the size of the chain he would otherwise spend his entire life shackled to for his artistic talents, he’s plucked from the Hold to a new life as a scholarship student at a university, his chain replaced with an anklet that arks him as a provisionally accepted member of polite society. The professor organizing the program – the daughter of the scholarship’s great success story before it was suspended generations ago, now a junior humanities professor in her own right – does everything she can to socialize him and help him make the most of his new life, at least until she has it rubbed in her face how her life outside the hold is just as precarious and conditional as his.

So this is a very academic novella. All the scenes that take place outside the university feel surreal and dreamlike, it is only when the campus that anything feels real enough to actually bite. Which, to be fair, they absolutely do – when it’s trying, the book does very good satire regarding the deeply precarious lives of international students whose acceptance in the first world (and, often, whole lives) is entirely conditional on the good will of the university around them. Similarly with the uselessness of much campus activism, the hierarchy and oppression that is politely unacknowledged right up until the knives come out, the humiliation of one’s presence being justified in terms of the benefit it provides everyone else around them – the exaggeration of chains and anklets and the instantly visible caste system is really quite effective (the author’s incredibly obvious chip on the should about the humanities vs. STEM is rather eyeroll-inducing, but entirely forgivable). Which is why I say that if this had just been a short story, it very likely would have been an excellent one.

As is, the story begins decomposing into something more like a tone poem as soon as the plot properly kicks into gear. Every character aside from the Child and the Professor are rote archetypes, their actions transparently motivated by the need to move things along just so and make the point the author wants to as clearly as they can. The story flips over into a sort of magical realism, the power of love and the (implicit and primordial) solidarity of the oppressed revealing itself as a magical force of all-surpassing power in a way that feels both saccharin and like it’s dodging the actual thematic conflict the story was incredibly explicit about raising.

Now, raising thematic conflicts you don’t know how to resolve is a proud tradition – it’s half the appeal of writing a Novel Of Ideas instead of a manifesto – but still. The book is very, very clear about wrestling with the question about whether it is possible for a university to be a place of both training and transformation – whether an institution created to drill in technical competence and socialization into an expected professional culture can also be a place for moral development and personal or political awakening. Which is a nicely meaty question, and one that I imagine is of no small personal interest to professed radical academics. But after raising it – and dramatizing the conflict and the hypocrisy of the academy really quite wonderfully – it’s just, totally punted. Left behind and replaced with platitudes of solidarity and connection. Again, this is something where it feels like the length of the story counts against it – there’s enough word count there that you feel like there should be some actual meaningful resolution here.

The prose is trying very, very hard to be poetic and literary. Sometimes successfully – it’s beautiful at points! - but more often distractingly. The symbolism and imagery is at times so overwrought it risks drowning the actual characters and events, and is not nearly so affecting as to justify it. As with the rest of it, this becomes worse the further along into the book you get.

click for better quality & to see the full image. sometimes they get cut off weirdly!