Ken MacLeod, ‘Beyond the Hallowed Sky’ (2021)

 

I enjoyed Ken MacLeod's Beyond the Hallowed Sky: a three-ply space opera/political thriller/first contact yarn. It’s the first Wordle-line in a trilogy, so the ending, though decently-enough landed, doesn’t tie the story into a nice little bow, and that fact perhaps dilutes the enjoyment a trifle. And there are some parts of the novel that don’t work so well: it’s overloaded with worldbuilding and tech-info in the first 50-pages, too much in too short a space I think, which makes the story a little hard to get into. And I suppose the problem with the three-ply approach is that readers are liable to enjoy one of the three elements more than the others, thereby unbalancing the whole. In my case I was less engaged by the “handsome young John Grant gadding about near-future utopian-socialist independent Scotland and stumbling into inventing FTL” story-strand. For one thing it turns out that pretty much everywhere else apart from Scotland already invented FTL fifty years previously, and that they’ve just all been keeping that fact secret, which is a little baffling. But perhaps the trilogy's remaining vols will make it clearer how all that’s supposed to go.

A little more engaging was story-strand 2: a starship (a repurposed nuclear submarine, in fact, as these vessels all are) has been shipping settlers from Earth to the extrasolar planet Apis, where we encounter a weird sentient crystalline lifeform. Apis appears to have been seeded with earthlike life many of millions of years before, such that the actual forms of life the settlers encounter have followed a different, achordate evolutionary path. This is all pretty diverting, although MacLeod has to plump it up with some running-around being-chased excitement to keep the storyline bubbling along. My favourite of the three strands was set on a floating settlement high above the surface of Venus, ‘Cloud City’. This story-strand concerns a blandly polite humanoid robot, Marcus Owen, sent to ‘Red Venus’ as a diplomat and spy (a fact he cheerfully concedes to anyone who asks) who also turns a nice line in boinking people, like Gigolo Joe from Spielberg’s A.I. There’s a mysterious ‘something’ down on the hellish surface of the planet, and Owen descends from the clouds to the Venusian ground in a super-armoured space-suit to investigate.

Although the novel takes a while to build its momentum, momentum is eventually achieved, and the final third is full of nicely-styled moments, cool ideas and narrative hooks. I will read vol 2, and indeed anticipate doing so with pleasure. That’s not exactly the ringing-est of blurbs to slap on the front cover, I appreciate. But there you go.

Hmm. That reference to Wordle, in my first paragraph, is going to date this post pretty catastrophically in the coming months, once the fad passes, isn’t it?

I know Ken, and it would be as unseemly for me to trash his novel as it would be compromised to overpraise it: it’s very good, he’s a master of contemporary SF, you should read it. His prose here, as ever, is clear and informative. You may (I tend to) prefer a more wrought, styled idiom but MacLeod’s approach is to lay the characters, material and ideas of his storytelling directly before the reader, which is a perfectly honourable way of proceeding. There’s a flat-stanley quality to many of the characters, but again, in Owen, MacLeod makes a virtue of necessity on that score, and it's both memorable and likeable the way the novel renders the robot’s convincing fakeness of subjectivity.

But this isn’t a review, so much as a notation of one thought I had, whilst reading. It has to do with story structure. So: you might write a novel and keep it focused on one p.o.v. the whole way through, but the danger there is that your reader will find this approach monotonous and tiresome. So you decide instead to dispose your narrative between two, three or perhaps even more storylines running concurrently. But how to combine them? Beyond the Hallowed Sky opts for: just plait them together, A B C A B C, one chapter at a time. It’s a common strategy, which perhaps speaks to its workability, but I find it (not just here, but wherever I encounter it) irksome, distracting, bitty and, as I say above, an invitation to skip the strands you’re less interested in to get to the ones you’re really enjoying.

‘Alright,’ I hear you say. ‘But what are the alternatives? I’m not sure. I think it’s right to say I’ve never written a novel that adopted the braiding strategy, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. My most recent novel (available from all good bookshops etc) deliberately disposes two quite different p.o.v sections into an overall amphibrach, a three-part shorter-A long-B shorter-A structure, for Dantean reasons. Otherwise I prefer the discrete Rothko-like blocks of text to the intimate braiding. I say ‘prefer’, in the sense that this seems to me a more aesthetically interesting and striking way of doing things, but my taste may well not be yours—and indeed, judging by reactions to my writing, it probably isn’t. So what’s a better way of doing it?