The Actual Star

(em português → sol2070.in/2023/09/Fic%C3%A7%C3%A3o-cient%C3%ADfica-como-sempre-quis )

"The Actual Star" (2022), by Monica Byrne, is the kind of book I'm always looking for in science fiction, but rarely find. It combines several of the topics that interest me most today: post-apocalyptic utopia, anarchism, psychedelics, climate emergency, regenerative technologies, cosmo-spiritual questions, etc.

The summary doesn't look like much: three interconnected stories set a thousand years apart - in 1012, 2012 and 3012 - that use Maya mythology to talk about reincarnation, collapse and regeneration. In fact, as soon as I read the synopsis, I wished distance, imagining something new age, with "age of Aquarius", Maya calendar, or "conspirituality". At the very least, it sounded like a hackneyed story, like that average movie "Cloud Atlas" (2012), by the Wachowski, or the great "The Fountain" (2006), by Darren Aronofsky.

But I saw a lot of effusive praise, even from people I admire like Kim Stanley Robinson and Cory Doctorow. I discovered that there's even an anarchist utopia and decided to give it a go. When I finished it, I got that feeling from the first paragraph; this is my kind of book.

The scifi setting is an extremely reduced, resilient and advanced civilization that has managed to overcome capitalism. While there are no governments, exploitation or hierarchies of power, a salvationist religion predominates, with its origins in 2012, dating back to the Maya.

The pace is uneven. There are page-turning sequences, and many that aren't so intense, describing scenarios, conversations, etc. But it's the kind of book that only reveals its full value at the end.

My worst expectations were shattered several times. I imagined that perhaps the story would glorify Maya culture, as is usually the case with new age tales. But no. There is an intense immersion, quite educational even, in an aspect considered repulsive, that of rituals with human sacrifice. It kind of blew my mind: there's a whole dimension to this that I was completely unaware of.

As the author has a background in science and the study of religions, I also feared that the story might be heading towards the commonplace of deconstructing religious myths. But wow... it's so much more than that!

The book is very current because it includes a planetary context of the "cli-fi" type (climate fiction). Nowadays, when I see an apocalyptic story that ignores this, inventing some other reason for the disastrous situation, I disregard it.

The futuristic part is not easy to follow. It involves perhaps hundreds of new words (the glossary at the end is essential). But the innovations in language are quite interesting. They accompany a gender evolution where everyone is intersex, at least physiologically, and reflect cultures from the global South that have come to dominate (decolonization is a central theme in the story), as well as fantastic technologies - for example, augmented reality in conjunction with endogenous doses of psilocybin, or extrasensory lobes.

There is also a lot of dialogue in Kriol, a dialect of Belize, in Central America, with similarities to English, which for English speakers is already very difficult to understand. For me, almost all of these sentences went unheard. But I was able to follow the story.

People were also offended by the intensely explicit descriptions of sex and mutilation. It really isn't for everyone's taste, but nothing that distracts too much from the plot.

Entropy A central element that I loved, and which has kept me thinking until now, was the discussion of entropy, the fact that every organized system faces a constant movement of degeneration. This is extrapolated to cosmological (e.g. the expansion of the universe into an icy void), spiritual (the mandatory separation from a primordial union) or social dimensions.

I was thinking a lot about a Hindu religious cosmology that is only indirectly referred to in the story. In this allegory, the creation of the universe was a game that the absolute divinity invented because she was bored. She would then forget that she is everything, omniscient and omnipresent, and let herself be fragmented into infinite particles and instants of limited consciousness. The extreme delight of this game would be the rich variety, instead of a static singularity, the dazzle of existence and self-discovery. Thus, existing is a game of divine pleasure. Each discovery or experience possesses a playful cosmic delight. (There's a whole book by the great Alan Watts ("The Book"), which is excellent, with a secular interpretation of this myth).

This cosmological allegory also appears a lot in reports of psychedelic journeys, even when the person doesn't know anything about Hinduism. There, they directly perceive and recognize every movement, including their own, as the cosmos, along with its meaning.

In the book, a character asks:

— How could anything know itself if it didn't separate?

This reference to the beauty that exists in separation, in entropy, is also something very significant in philosophical idealism, the idea that the nature of reality is mental, not material. There is the appearance that experiences and phenomena are separate from consciousness, but a thorough examination can reveal otherwise.

The book ends with the best final sentence I've ever read (no danger of spoilers):

— How had she ever forgotten?—that it was just as much pleasure to disperse as be whole.

Three societies at three moments in time: a Mayan kingdom in decline in 1012CE, modern day capitalist society at the rollover of the Mayan calendar's 'long count' cycle in 2012, and 'Laviaja', a post-climate-change wanderer society of 3012CE.

If you liked Cloud Atlas's cast of characters popping up in different ages, you'll like the braided structure of this novel. In each strand, a small cast of characters face abandonment, alienation, and the yearning to escape.

If Ursula Le Guin's 'Birthday of the World' left you yearning for more, you'll love Byrne's 1012CE strand, as teenage twin monarchs rise to power in a declining kingdom bathed in animal gods, bloody rituals, and sacred places.

If you ponder #PostColonialism, #CulturalAppropriation, or you've ever been a privileged white tourist on a guided tour to an ancient place, there's something in the 2012CE strand for you. It follows the sordid misadventures of a misfit teenager on a quest to find spirituality and her place in the world.

If you wish Le Guin had leaned into the possibilities of anarchy more in The Dispossessed, or you shared the yearning for another world you found in #OctaviaButler's Earthseed, you'll love this novel's 3012CE strand. Like @[email protected]'s Walkaway, this novel projects utopia risen from dystopia. Global warming has come out in the wash. All our current problems are solved. Everyone just wanders the earth, going where they want, doing what they want. But new religion gives rise to new heretics.

If you were irresistibly drawn to the excruciating claustrophobic dread of The Tombs of Atuan (or even the arachnophobic nightmare of the Peruvian temple in Indiana Jones' iconic debut), you'll cower exquisitely before one of the novel's eternal protagonists: the sacred cave of Actun Tunichil Muknal.

But the millennia spanned also affords a long perspective for exploring the arc of humanity; family and social norms, the distinctions that generate prejudice, and even an interesting take on privacy and surveillance. I liked this a lot, and think it will stand a second reading.

This novel alternates between three connected timelines, each separated by 1000 years from the next, each on the cusp of social (and environmental) change.

The future timeline is set in a utopian (though by no means perfect) global nomadic society, organised around principles of mutual aid. It's refreshing to see a vision of how humankind might adapt positively to the challenges facing us, even as some of the fault lines in that vision are exposed over the course of the story.

The other timelines are just as vividly drawn, and feel researched and sensitively written. All three are deftly woven into the greater whole, and I found reading the chapters in blocks (one for each timeline) helped me appreciate the connections being drawn across all three.

This will definitely be going onto my to-reread pile, as I'm sure there's a whole lot that I've missed on my first pass through.

Things to be aware of: this book is pretty bloody in some places, and horny as hell in others.