I wasn't sure what I'd think of this book when I saw that it was a Hugo nominee this year. I'm not a huge fan of military science fiction (I don't even like Heinlein's Starship Troopers), but having read Hurley's bizarre/cool novel The Stars Are Legion, I was interested to see what she'd come up with.
I probably would've loved this if it hadn't been military science fiction, but I really appreciate what Hurley was trying to do, even if I feel like I'd need to read it three more times while keeping a detailed chart to fully understand the details. There are also--in a nod to the novel's conversation with many others, particularly Heinlein and Haldeman--some interesting little philosophical nuggets scattered in the rough of standard military SF acronym-spewing space marines in gritty combat. While this feels like a novel that I appreciated and really liked, I can't quite say I loved it.
The novel starts off with all the tropes you'd expect from military science fiction, albeit of an especially bleak and dystopian variety. In a shitty future where massive corporations rule everything, including armies, our main character Dietz is part of a force sent to fight Martian colonists or whoever the corporation tells them to fight. They travel by being turned into light (something like beaming in Star Trek, but in the long range version in other books like Carolyn Ives Gilman's Dark Orbit). But every time Dietz travels this way, strange things happen.
The novel clearly owes a lot to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, as most military SF does, but it's also continuing the conversation in the direction taken in the famous answer to Starship Troopers: Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Hurley is working with a lot of other influences and conversations (it's fun to spot them, so I won't spoil them, but longtime SF readers will notice a lot). Literary genres are basically conversations among authors and readers, so it's nice to see this brought to the front a little bit (but without postmodern excess).
The other novel thing about this novel is its structure, which is about as cool as it is difficult to explain. Every time Dietz travels as light, something strange happens to the sense of time. It starts to look like Dietz is not just jumping in space, but in time as well. It's confusing, but it does almost comes together at the end. Almost. Like I said, I'd need to read this a few more times while making elaborate charts to really understand all the details. But Hurley is a good enough author that I trust she has all the details figured out, and that's good enough for me.
The downside is that all of this requires a lot of patience from the reader. I probably didn't really start to piece things together until almost halfway through. Up until then it was a somewhat discombobulated series of grimdark combat scenes with seemingly-interchangeable secondary characters. I feel like it would all make more sense a second time through. To be honest, the first time was a bit rough.
What about those philosophical bits I mentioned? There's a lot there, often between all the fighting and grimdarkness, from ruminations on the nature of time, perception and reality, social movements, militarism, freedom and determinism... even some quantum physics.
I rather liked the bit on social movements for change, but that doesn't really happen toward the end, so I'd rather not give any philosophical spoilers other than to say that Ursula Le Guin's speech from the 2014 Medal of Freedom award is alluded to, which automatically makes it awesome and a welcome turn of events from some of the bleakness of the novel.
But let's talk about how that connects with the metaphysical business about time and other universes (trust me, it's there!). People, especially on the progressive side of the political spectrum, like to talk about how things don't have to be this way. We can change society if we want to.
There are two distinct ways to understand this that are often conflated. Let's call them the political and the metaphysical. Politically, this means that we can enact laws, have revolutions, forge solidarity, or whatever to change the type of society we live in. It sounds hard, but it has happened a lot in history. The society we have now is the result of specific decisions and events in the past, which means that decisions and events can change things again in the present or future.
Metaphysically, things get trickier in a different way. The events of the past have made the society we have now, but could things have been different? Politically, it seems that the answer is obviously yes. But metaphysically, at least if anything like determinism is true, the causal history of the universe led things to be exactly as they are. Given those causes, these effects happened. End of story.
Or is it? Could one set of causes have led to different effects? To wave the SF writer's favorite quantum wand of the many worlds interpretation, maybe there are actually different worlds where different things happened. Maybe there's a world where Germany and Japan won WWII or where I had a sandwich instead of a burrito for lunch.
But do you need the metaphysical picture of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics to make sense of the political picture that things could have been different and can be different in the future?
Hurley's novel doesn't exactly answer this question, but it seems to explore the answer, "No," in using the metaphysical story (with a dose of quantum physics) to tell a story about how a better society is possible, even if not in this world, in some other world.
I'm fine with this, but I personally think it's perfectly coherent to say that metaphysically things had to be this way, but politically they didn't. For example, given the history European colonialism and racism, the history of disease in the Americas, the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment in Europe, the development of transportation and agricultural technologies, the madness of a British monarch, the help of the French, the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of many Native Americans, the immigration of certain types of Protestants with a certain type of work ethic, and many, many more factors, the United States had to be the way it is today. There's no going back in any metaphysical sense. Here we are.
But can we do some other? Conservatives' error, I think, is to mistake metaphysical inevitability for political goodness, to say that the way things are must be good because they're somehow supposed to be this way, as ordained by God or nature or "Great Men" or whatever. Think about typical defenses of capitalism or inequality as "natural" and thus "good" or at least morally excusable because inevitable.
But I think we could do something else. I hope we do. There's no particular political or moral reason our country has to be the way it is, even if there are plenty of metaphysical causes for that (a feature of English and many other languages tricks us here: "reason" can mean either "cause" or "justification").
And if, politically speaking, there's no particular reason/justification for things being the way they are, we may have reason/justification for changing them to work better for everyone. And once we see this (in ways that Hurley and Le Guin say better than I can), all that's left is to figure out the logistics. Once we form a political goal freed from the prisons of "it has to be this way," we can start steering the metaphysical reasons/causes from where they've been to where we want them to be.
I think something like this picture works whether you agree with Hurley's take on this or the one I've just given, but I thank Hurley for helping me think about these important issues more clearly--and with a bit of science fictional fun as well!
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