The Actual Star
Mar. 27th, 2022 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Actual Star, Monica Byrne. This book was fascinating and had a ton going on but before I say anything else about it I want to throw out a significant content note for self-injury, child harm, ritual mutilation and sacrifice, animal mauling, eye trauma, claustrophobia, and threat of drowning. Squeamishness is very personal so ymmv but I felt like there were some scenes that were kind of a lot. (But please feel free to ask for more specifics if you're trying to figure out whether you want to try this one.)
So, okay. This is literary science fiction consisting of three interwoven stories - one set in 1012 Belize about a pair of Mayan royal twins and their little sister, one set in 2012 about a tourist girl from Minnesota and two Belizean tour guides, and one set in 3012 about two people with opposing visions for their culture. It's about travel, and tourism, and Place. How religions develop, and the role of chance in history, and the question of individual choice and control vs environmental and subconscious factors. Byrne is very interested in a question I also find interesting, whether civilizational collapse from climate change has to be a regression or whether it could be a kind of progress, or could enable progress. Byrne in interviews has talked about Dispossessed but I think it's also very much talking to/with Always Coming Home. I would also recommend it to people who liked Years of Rice and Salt, or some of the recent explorations of, uh, utopia-aspiring futures in the at-least-semiautomated gay space communism direction (Record of a Spaceborn Few, The Unraveling). Or people who liked Byrne's first book, The Girl in the Road (which I wrote about here)! Byrne is looking to be the Helene Wecker kind of author who produces something brilliant and meticulous every 7-8 years and I will definitely hope we get another new book in 2028ish.
A bunch more detail about various things behind a spoiler cut, but one more note first, which is that at certain points there's a bunch of dialogue in Belizean Kriol, which made certain chapters very slow going. It's totally readable by sounding it out, but for me that was more like deliberate decoding than automatic literacy, and thus work. (Ugh, work.) There's also some scattered Spanish but my Spanish, while very limited, is good enough that I could more or less "just keep reading" those parts instead of hitting the decoding wall. I'm sure there are reasons Byrne did this and why she did so much of it but to me it was a little too much. On the other hand there was definitely a point where I was like "dang is the whole rest of the book going to be like this" and it wasn't, that was the peak of it, so, uh, take heart?
And now all the rest of my random thoughts behind this cut.
So! This book was highly relevant to my ongoing interest in sfnal monocultures and fantasies of a way of life. One of the things I found really interesting about this book was that instead of just describing the culture and handwaving how it came to be (there's maybe an implication of some deliberate design in Spaceborn Few; Le Guin imagines a spontaneous landscape-directed evolution in ACH), Byrne outlines a whole historical progression for the next 1000 years. In very general terms! But you can see how certain elements come together and develop! Although with huge amounts of space for the reader to think/question/wonder about, which I thought was really well done. Like, ok, one of my suspension-of-disbelief sticking points about this monoculture was the extinction of other languages and cultures (if I had to make one single bet about the world in 3012 it would be that there will still be some people speaking more-or-less Chinese in more-or-less some part of China, just based on extrapolation from the past couple millennia). But, a, the burn-down of the population all the way to pre-agricultural/10000 BC levels has obviously involved a lot of really bad things happening to a whole heck of a lot of people, and b, the few thousand sedentix are a convenient place to mentally stash some last few surviving Chinese communities (or Jewish/Aboriginal Australian/North Sentinelese/whoever you think has high cultural stability). I also really like Byrne's awareness that history is still happening, that there are rifts and disagreements even within the monoculture, and that 3012 is (or could be) as much a transitional point as 1012 or 2012. (I'm only partway into Four Lost Cities and who knows when I'll make it to Dawn of Everything but I am interested in the question of "how much history" there is in different points in history, like, *is* there way more cultural stability in preagricultural cultures, or indigenous cultures not experiencing incursion from outsiders, I just don't know.) Rosenbaum does something similar with his outlined history in Unraveling (although the timeline is a lot longer/more drawn out). (And both are about cultures making plays for stability - both Byrne and Rosenbaum identify accumulation as a threat to stability and posit cultures reaching towards homeostasis through anti-accumulation. (And universal surveillance...))
Which kind of brings me to my next point, which is that I wish Byrne had spent a little more time on the question of "big projects". For something that was supposed to be an important motivation for the whole 3012 schism, Niloux's reluctance to talk about her dream of space exploration/a mission to Venus meant that it wasn't all that present in the text. There was a little talk about this in 1012 - the importance of stelae - but almost nothing in 2012. And, like, I think that's one of the really big questions Byrne's Laviaja is posing! Do humans have to give up big projects - large scale long-term collaboratory works - to live in a sustainable, just, and equitable society, and if so is it worth it! Laviaja isn't doing a lot of science, that we see, they don't seem to have orchestras, they maybe just perform the one play (which is a passion play rather than a theatrical work). There's a mention of the cliffs around the cave becoming a canvas for artists and sculptors but it's hard to imagine how much sculpting you could be doing if you have to move on in nine days. Artifacts and ruins seem to be valued for their connections to past cultures and there are a few new monuments celebrating the past - the two Arcas de las Gemelas - but not a lot of, like, positive creation of anything that would be the iconic lasting additions to the landscape of the Laviajans themselves.
(I really like a challenging utopia. I read some reviews for Actual Star that were like, this society is horrible, in this way or the other way, and, like, argh, it's interesting because it's difficult?? Of course the non-formation of all long-term relationship bonds, familial and otherwise, seems scary! Because we derive a huge amount of meaning from them, and so it's interesting to say, what if there were a people who didn't, and that also more or less worked for them, except sometimes when it didn't? That's what makes it speculative! Of course it's transgressive to imagine total gender and sexual liberation extending to total racial and ethnic liberation, until all culture is costume and specifically a fancy-dress costume for dressing for dinner. (Ok, and there are apparently a whole bunch of tutorials, so you, like, have to do your culture homework and pass your culture road test or whatever, and switch at the right time of the year, so, a little bit of gatekeeping. Sounds like less than trying to affirm your gender in 2012 though.) So much in this book is playing with what seems "natural" or "unthinkable" depending on cultural context!)
(But I don't mean to brush off the culture-as-costume thing as *just* there to be transgressive - I think Byrne is answering the problem of Le Guin's "re-indigenization" in ACH, in which the Kesh have come to be At Home in the Valley, with the solution that no one is Home, everyone is equally indigenous because everyone is equally traveling. Although they do preserve the idea of birthplace in their naming, and of course it turns out to be significant that the twins were born in Cayo in all three timelines.)
(I also thought the suggestion of top/bottom/both/neither as the new fundamental sexual orientations was interesting... I have somehow ended up back in a fandom that has a sizeable contingent that is Very Concerned about who penetrates whom and whether that's fundamental to the characters, so I was kind of amused by "actually in a thousand years we won't have moms or spouses but we'll still have bottoms".)
It occurs to me that the review I'd really like to read of this book would be the review by somebody Maya. It felt like a very Catholic book in how it conceptualizes religion and religious practice, sort of in the way that Unraveling felt like a Jewish book in certain ways. I mean, that's an outsider's perspective, I am neither Catholic nor Jewish, but I have some family proximity to both. But anyways I think it also wants to feel Maya, but I have no proximity to that at all, and no clue.
Okay! Final questions! Character stuff rather than worldbuilding stuff! I was frustrated with the end of the book! I wanted to know whether Messe would wake up and whether Tanaaj and Niloux would continue having lives in 3012! Byrne tries to claim that it's just as satisfying to not know as to get a conventional "ending" to the story - "just as much pleasure to disperse as be whole" but I wasn't really sold on it. The way the twins' personalities and motivations echoed in the three different time periods was really well done, but, for me, them finding Xibalba was less satisfying than both X and J getting to survive the cave for once would have been. Also, I think it's hilarious that Byrne said in an interview that her "reincarnated characters' names each contain an X, a J, and an E", like, what a gorgeous piece of authorial trolling, here's the extremely identifiable X and J and by the way the third one has literally the most common letter in both English and Spanish, good luck! And is Messe even Leah? On the one hand, Ket-Leah-Messe, KLM, is a satisfying progression, and what could be more on the nose than having your messiah-saint reborn as someone literally named Messe. On the other hand I think basically everyone else also has an E, and maybe you could make an interesting case for Emelle or Sembaruthi or Ying Yue. (And I assume that's why they have to keep calling the goddess Bloodmaiden rather than Xquic, to get the E...) Also do we think anyone else is reincarnating with them? I kept trying to see if I could get anyone else to line up, but I never found anything I really liked. Although Tatichwut wanting to bring back pilgrims and becoming the Crystal Maiden, top tourism billing, was so perfect and hilarious that I didn't want him to also be one of the guides or tourist-shop dudes.
So, okay. This is literary science fiction consisting of three interwoven stories - one set in 1012 Belize about a pair of Mayan royal twins and their little sister, one set in 2012 about a tourist girl from Minnesota and two Belizean tour guides, and one set in 3012 about two people with opposing visions for their culture. It's about travel, and tourism, and Place. How religions develop, and the role of chance in history, and the question of individual choice and control vs environmental and subconscious factors. Byrne is very interested in a question I also find interesting, whether civilizational collapse from climate change has to be a regression or whether it could be a kind of progress, or could enable progress. Byrne in interviews has talked about Dispossessed but I think it's also very much talking to/with Always Coming Home. I would also recommend it to people who liked Years of Rice and Salt, or some of the recent explorations of, uh, utopia-aspiring futures in the at-least-semiautomated gay space communism direction (Record of a Spaceborn Few, The Unraveling). Or people who liked Byrne's first book, The Girl in the Road (which I wrote about here)! Byrne is looking to be the Helene Wecker kind of author who produces something brilliant and meticulous every 7-8 years and I will definitely hope we get another new book in 2028ish.
A bunch more detail about various things behind a spoiler cut, but one more note first, which is that at certain points there's a bunch of dialogue in Belizean Kriol, which made certain chapters very slow going. It's totally readable by sounding it out, but for me that was more like deliberate decoding than automatic literacy, and thus work. (Ugh, work.) There's also some scattered Spanish but my Spanish, while very limited, is good enough that I could more or less "just keep reading" those parts instead of hitting the decoding wall. I'm sure there are reasons Byrne did this and why she did so much of it but to me it was a little too much. On the other hand there was definitely a point where I was like "dang is the whole rest of the book going to be like this" and it wasn't, that was the peak of it, so, uh, take heart?
And now all the rest of my random thoughts behind this cut.
So! This book was highly relevant to my ongoing interest in sfnal monocultures and fantasies of a way of life. One of the things I found really interesting about this book was that instead of just describing the culture and handwaving how it came to be (there's maybe an implication of some deliberate design in Spaceborn Few; Le Guin imagines a spontaneous landscape-directed evolution in ACH), Byrne outlines a whole historical progression for the next 1000 years. In very general terms! But you can see how certain elements come together and develop! Although with huge amounts of space for the reader to think/question/wonder about, which I thought was really well done. Like, ok, one of my suspension-of-disbelief sticking points about this monoculture was the extinction of other languages and cultures (if I had to make one single bet about the world in 3012 it would be that there will still be some people speaking more-or-less Chinese in more-or-less some part of China, just based on extrapolation from the past couple millennia). But, a, the burn-down of the population all the way to pre-agricultural/10000 BC levels has obviously involved a lot of really bad things happening to a whole heck of a lot of people, and b, the few thousand sedentix are a convenient place to mentally stash some last few surviving Chinese communities (or Jewish/Aboriginal Australian/North Sentinelese/whoever you think has high cultural stability). I also really like Byrne's awareness that history is still happening, that there are rifts and disagreements even within the monoculture, and that 3012 is (or could be) as much a transitional point as 1012 or 2012. (I'm only partway into Four Lost Cities and who knows when I'll make it to Dawn of Everything but I am interested in the question of "how much history" there is in different points in history, like, *is* there way more cultural stability in preagricultural cultures, or indigenous cultures not experiencing incursion from outsiders, I just don't know.) Rosenbaum does something similar with his outlined history in Unraveling (although the timeline is a lot longer/more drawn out). (And both are about cultures making plays for stability - both Byrne and Rosenbaum identify accumulation as a threat to stability and posit cultures reaching towards homeostasis through anti-accumulation. (And universal surveillance...))
Which kind of brings me to my next point, which is that I wish Byrne had spent a little more time on the question of "big projects". For something that was supposed to be an important motivation for the whole 3012 schism, Niloux's reluctance to talk about her dream of space exploration/a mission to Venus meant that it wasn't all that present in the text. There was a little talk about this in 1012 - the importance of stelae - but almost nothing in 2012. And, like, I think that's one of the really big questions Byrne's Laviaja is posing! Do humans have to give up big projects - large scale long-term collaboratory works - to live in a sustainable, just, and equitable society, and if so is it worth it! Laviaja isn't doing a lot of science, that we see, they don't seem to have orchestras, they maybe just perform the one play (which is a passion play rather than a theatrical work). There's a mention of the cliffs around the cave becoming a canvas for artists and sculptors but it's hard to imagine how much sculpting you could be doing if you have to move on in nine days. Artifacts and ruins seem to be valued for their connections to past cultures and there are a few new monuments celebrating the past - the two Arcas de las Gemelas - but not a lot of, like, positive creation of anything that would be the iconic lasting additions to the landscape of the Laviajans themselves.
(I really like a challenging utopia. I read some reviews for Actual Star that were like, this society is horrible, in this way or the other way, and, like, argh, it's interesting because it's difficult?? Of course the non-formation of all long-term relationship bonds, familial and otherwise, seems scary! Because we derive a huge amount of meaning from them, and so it's interesting to say, what if there were a people who didn't, and that also more or less worked for them, except sometimes when it didn't? That's what makes it speculative! Of course it's transgressive to imagine total gender and sexual liberation extending to total racial and ethnic liberation, until all culture is costume and specifically a fancy-dress costume for dressing for dinner. (Ok, and there are apparently a whole bunch of tutorials, so you, like, have to do your culture homework and pass your culture road test or whatever, and switch at the right time of the year, so, a little bit of gatekeeping. Sounds like less than trying to affirm your gender in 2012 though.) So much in this book is playing with what seems "natural" or "unthinkable" depending on cultural context!)
(But I don't mean to brush off the culture-as-costume thing as *just* there to be transgressive - I think Byrne is answering the problem of Le Guin's "re-indigenization" in ACH, in which the Kesh have come to be At Home in the Valley, with the solution that no one is Home, everyone is equally indigenous because everyone is equally traveling. Although they do preserve the idea of birthplace in their naming, and of course it turns out to be significant that the twins were born in Cayo in all three timelines.)
(I also thought the suggestion of top/bottom/both/neither as the new fundamental sexual orientations was interesting... I have somehow ended up back in a fandom that has a sizeable contingent that is Very Concerned about who penetrates whom and whether that's fundamental to the characters, so I was kind of amused by "actually in a thousand years we won't have moms or spouses but we'll still have bottoms".)
It occurs to me that the review I'd really like to read of this book would be the review by somebody Maya. It felt like a very Catholic book in how it conceptualizes religion and religious practice, sort of in the way that Unraveling felt like a Jewish book in certain ways. I mean, that's an outsider's perspective, I am neither Catholic nor Jewish, but I have some family proximity to both. But anyways I think it also wants to feel Maya, but I have no proximity to that at all, and no clue.
Okay! Final questions! Character stuff rather than worldbuilding stuff! I was frustrated with the end of the book! I wanted to know whether Messe would wake up and whether Tanaaj and Niloux would continue having lives in 3012! Byrne tries to claim that it's just as satisfying to not know as to get a conventional "ending" to the story - "just as much pleasure to disperse as be whole" but I wasn't really sold on it. The way the twins' personalities and motivations echoed in the three different time periods was really well done, but, for me, them finding Xibalba was less satisfying than both X and J getting to survive the cave for once would have been. Also, I think it's hilarious that Byrne said in an interview that her "reincarnated characters' names each contain an X, a J, and an E", like, what a gorgeous piece of authorial trolling, here's the extremely identifiable X and J and by the way the third one has literally the most common letter in both English and Spanish, good luck! And is Messe even Leah? On the one hand, Ket-Leah-Messe, KLM, is a satisfying progression, and what could be more on the nose than having your messiah-saint reborn as someone literally named Messe. On the other hand I think basically everyone else also has an E, and maybe you could make an interesting case for Emelle or Sembaruthi or Ying Yue. (And I assume that's why they have to keep calling the goddess Bloodmaiden rather than Xquic, to get the E...) Also do we think anyone else is reincarnating with them? I kept trying to see if I could get anyone else to line up, but I never found anything I really liked. Although Tatichwut wanting to bring back pilgrims and becoming the Crystal Maiden, top tourism billing, was so perfect and hilarious that I didn't want him to also be one of the guides or tourist-shop dudes.
