I originally read this book and wrote this review shortly after it was released a year ago, but I never got around to posting it. Now that the book has been nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo for best novella, I thought it’d be a good time to revisit it.
The university and its contradictions has been a theme of a few major works of sff recently. On the one hand, the university is a place of growth and learning. It’s a place where revolutionary new ideas for the betterment of humanity can be incubated and inculcated. It’s a place where young people growing into adulthood can find their place in the world and develop new ways of living together. It’s a place where you have access to a broad range of knowledge that will make you a better, more complete person who can make better, more compassionate and informed decisions for yourself and others in a democratic society. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe, as someone from a working-class background who used to teach at such an institution.
In reality, the university has never been this utopian monastic community existing outside of a society’s dominant values and structures. It is and has always been an instrument of power. See, for instance, Columbia University’s capitulations to fascism then and now. Today’s university is a real estate scheme, an investment fund, a corporate R&D lab supported by debt. It never was about personal or social growth. It’s always been a place where hegemony is reproduced, a place where the next generation of aristocrats is interpolated into their class, and more recently where future white-collar workers are trained in middle-class mores, a place where the society of control tightens its technological grip over us all. Students and teachers interested in doing so can still find personal enlightenment and political engagement in such an environment, but that’s not ultimately what it’s for.
This dichotomy of the university has played out in a number of recent sff novels that critique the university’s complicity in empire, the way it sucks up promising young people from the periphery and grinds them into the technocratic administrators of the values of the core. These novels look to open up the possibility of resistance to assimilation and subjugation, of actually using the master’s tools to dismantle his house.
It’s a theme dear to me from my own experience in academia, yet I find most of these books deeply unsatisfying. Either the themes weren’t adequately dramatized, the dullness of the writing itself detracted from the power of the themes, or the message was far too lacking in nuance or ambiguity to give readers anything to think about, grapple with, or take into their lives after they turned the last page of the book. Great concepts, lacking in execution, either because these writers didn’t trust their audiences or didn’t trust themselves.
Sofia Samatar’s new novella, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, is yet another sortie into this discussion of the role of the university in empire and the place of the other within it, explored through the points of view of both the student and the professor. The character known as “the boy” shows a talent for art and is taken out of slavery and put into the university to assuage the guilt of liberal administrators and create a “model minority,” which only perpetuates a bootstraps ideology (if he can work hard and overcome slavery, so can you!). The professor, known only as “the woman,” isn’t satisfied with these well-intentioned but ultimately meaningless (at best) or harmful (at worst) gestures and has to decide whether her emancipatory goals can even be accomplished from within the institution of the university.
It’s almost a cliché to say this about a great novella, but Samatar does more with 100 pages than most do with 500. The characters are economically but precisely drawn; while presented as archetypes—the boy, the woman, the jaded elder, the humble elder, the prophet—each character still sparkles with an inner life, little portraits that capture an essence in a glance.
Samatar’s style is the most noticeable aspect of any of her work. It does a lot of the heavy lifting of creating an immersive setting, the way all good sff prose should. There’s very little in the way of exposition or what would be traditionally called “worldbuilding.” After wrecking the climate, humanity has abandoned Earth for a fleet of ships that mine asteroids. This society is extremely, brutally, unequal.
She draws that society through the people who comprise it. These are people with conflicting loyalties, people who say one thing and do another, people who don’t see the effects of their actions. They’re people, not good, not bad, trying to work within and around a system built on human suffering, often failing to see beyond their own points of view. The novella’s psychedelic climax provides little in the way of answers, but it has stuck with me for months. There is a web, a net, sparks between bodies; chains are no longer restraints but the links between us, that bind us to each other and remind us of our shared humanity and the strength in solidarity.
For Augustine of Hippo, religio meant a re-binding or re-connection: re + legare. Religio denotes personal and social obligations: the chain that binds us together and links us to that which came before.
It’s hard to think about revolution without using spiritual language. Deleuze & Guattari talk about the numinous and the divine in their discussion of the Body without Organs in Anti-Oedipus. That’s because a revolutionary consciousness is not an individualized consciousness, not a river but a sea, a chain that ties us together rather than keeps us bound to a master.
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