Icehenge

My introduction to it

Normal obsessions will resume shortly around here - I’m just back from a great workshop at the Santa Fe Institute (on how science fiction writers and scientists/social scientists use thought experiments) , and off to a very different one in Bologna.

And speaking of science fiction and social scientists, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge is being re-issued by Tor Essentials today, with a introductory essay by me. The full essay is below - it’s an extended argument for why you ought buy it, and read it, with no spoilers (but a few indirect hints). Jointly authored stuff aside, this is what I’m most happy to have written in the last few years (I still can’t quite believe that this happened, and that a book exists in the world with both Stan’s name and mine (appropriately, in much smaller writing) on the cover.

Icehenge and the Science-Fictional Imagination*

Icehenge is a three part work about a failed Martian revolution and its long aftermath. If you’ve already read Robinson’s Mars trilogy, that will sound misleadingly familiar. Icehenge isn’t just a different novel. It’s a different kind of novel. The Mars series is a political romance, describing how solidarity, enmity, meetings, disagreements, conflicts and temporary resolutions can build a shared world. They’re warm books about a chilly planet. Icehenge is a novel about the gaps and misunderstandings that isolate our personal worlds from each other. We cannot bridge those gaps, however desperately we try, but we cannot stop trying either.

Icehenge is unashamedly a work of science fiction. It pays deep, consistent attention to the hard cold realities of the universe that we live in. Robinson’s lucid descriptions of the wastes of Pluto and the frigid Martian highlands leave the reader certain that these are real places, irreducibly different from Earth. When Icehenge’s characters temporarily lose themselves in their own imaginings, they risk being severely, even fatally reminded of the harshness of their environment. Emma Weil’s brief comparison of spaceships’ closed ecosystems with those of entire worlds plants a seed from which much of the argument of Aurora and The Ministry for the Future will grow, decades later.

Icehenge is just as unashamedly a modernist novel, applying the techniques that were developed in the early twentieth century to present character in new ways. Hjalmar Nederland’s narrative is both the literal and moral center of the book, and is dense with allusions to Durrell, Cavafy, and Eliot. Marcel Proust is definitely there, and he matters. All these are woven into a study of the rich interior world of an outwardly unappealing man. Nederland is emotionally obtuse, self-obsessed, and compromised by his relationship with a member of the authoritarian Committee that rules Mars. Yet his plight is just as freighted with anguish as that of a more sympathetic character.

Robinson admires the Anglo-Irish novelist Joyce Cary, and Nederland’s querulously passionate voice owes a great deal to Tom Wilcher, the narrator of Cary’s To Be a Pilgrim. But Robinson, as a science fiction writer, can do things that are denied to a realist writer like Cary. He can not only shape character so that it imperfectly reflects a given society, but create new societies and imagined scientific discoveries, so that the world imperfectly reflects the characters. Such tools can be misused by bad writers to generate trite moral lessons about the cold equations of an uncaring cosmos.  But when they are used well – creating complex tensions between the cosmos and the characters - they open up possibilities.

Reading Icehenge, you need to hold in your head both the physical world’s fundamental indifference to human imaginings, and the mind’s inward cliffs of fall. The novel occupies that thin habitable zone where the irresistible gravitation of the outer universe stirs turbulence into the frozen seas within us. Outer and inner spaces echo each other. Mapping the interference patterns is what gives the novel its power.

Nederland begins his story with these words: “Memory is the weak link.” He is three hundred and ten years old, but he cannot remember most of his life. The Mars trilogy too talks about vastly extended life at the cost of forgetting. There, according to the critic Fredric Jameson, it allows Robinson to use the same characters to show how people may be the agents of history over centuries, as they argue out the political possibilities of utopia. In Icehenge, Robinson instead uses this notion to explore our alienation from our pasts and our futures.

Nederland, like everyone else in his long lived society, repeatedly becomes a stranger to himself and others. As a child, he was one of the few survivors of a vicious military assault by the authoritarian Committee. He cannot recollect this, or his parents, or his early life at all. Brief epiphanies occasionally flare to irradiate the empty space of his past. Afterwards, he can merely remember what it was like to remember. He has no intimate connection to his past selves, nor to his former spouses, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

The monument that gives Icehenge its title  – a great circle of rectangular blocks of ice, each separated from each – represents both this isolation and the reaction against it. Icehenge has been built by human spacefarers in the perpetual night of Pluto’s north pole. Two Sanskrit terms are inscribed on one of the ice blocks, both of which mean “to push farther away.” Emma Weil’s narrative, which begins the book, suggests that mutineers built Icehenge as they fled the solar system right before the Martian revolution, hoping they could survive the long passage between stars. The circle testifies to the human desire to build “something to leave a mark on the world, something to show we were here at all.” Pushing outwards – lighting out for the notionally survivable territories of interstellar space – is one half of the movement. The other is pushing back, into the vast regions of emptiness that lie within us.

Physical and psychic exploration are entwined in Nederland’s profession of archeology. We can’t help reading our own stories into the things that we recover. As Nederland puts it, “perhaps we undertake the solution of mysteries as a sort of training, so that we can attempt with some hope of success the deciphering of our selves.” When he discovers Emma Weil’s written narrative in a half-buried car, he sees it as the key to unlocking a different possible self. His future mirrors his past, a dreary eternal recurrence of amnesia and empty homogenous time. Both reflect the Committee’s efforts to smooth away the possibilities of history to preclude any likelihood of future disruption. The artifacts that he discovers suggest an utterly different past, one in which “all the Martians revolted together, and broke spontaneously toward utopia.” As he reads Weil’s diaries, he feels that he reads her mind, and her hope and her anger too. They become part of him, offering an apparent path to redemption, in which Nederland remakes Mars’ history to help remake its future.

Nederland’s tragedy – as it unfolds indirectly in the third part of the book – remakes the early twentieth century history of Hjalmar Holand and the Kensington Runestone (read about this – but only after you have finished Icehenge). It’s also a story of mutual incomprehension. The narrator of the third part is Edmond Doya, Nederland’s estranged great-grandson, who becomes obsessed with undoing his work. Just as Hjalmar Nederland mistakes Emma Weil, Edmond Doya mistakes Hjalmar Nederland. As in Gene Wolfe’s masterpiece, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, the three parts of the novel are joined with deliberate imperfection by the misprisions of their narrators. As one friend who has read the book has told me, Doya’s indirect war on Nederland, conducted via detective work and politely barbed scholarly essays, aptly captures the professional jealousies of archeologists. Yet like Wilcher’s voice, it is transformed by its journey into science fiction, becoming a synecdoche for the contradictions and resonances between the facts of the physical universe, and the private cosmoses we hold within our breasts. The stakes are high because Nederland has invested his work with all the meaning of his life, while Doya has devoted his life to escaping Nederland’s shadow. Nederland will lose his life, in every sense that matters, if Doya wins, while Doya is frustrated that Nederland isn’t dead already.

This certainty – the brute and certain knowledge that we will all somehow die - connects the outer universe to the inner. It is perhaps the most fundamental theme of Icehenge. The outer darkness of the space between stars seems to us like an echo of the knowledge of our own inevitable end.  At different moments, all three narrators read that foreknowledge into the cosmos that surrounds them. Just before a crucial turning point on Pluto, Doya sees himself and his companion from the universal perspective, two antlike figures on the axis of rotation of a ball of ice. When he moves, the sun disappears behind one of Icehenge’s stones, so that he feels the “ancient fear – eclipse, sun death.”

We are spun around by gravity, but we spin our own worlds too. Inside each of us is hidden a pocket cosmos. Forgetfulness too is a kind of universal death. When Doya confronts a woman who may know more about the building of Icehenge than she admits, she denies her involvement. No matter the historical facts, she is right. Anything that might have been seen or done was seen or done by a past self, who is now alien to her. Doya himself writes his account for the stranger who will bear his name five centuries from now, sending forward an inadequate record of who he once was. He too will soon be dust, even if his body lives and breathes.

What makes Icehenge a great work of science fiction is how rigorously and ruthlessly it works through the implications of a physical cosmos that simply does not care about us; what Iain Banks once described as the “faint, not even ironic hiss” of the universal zero. What makes Icehenge into a great novel is its understanding of the resulting human anguish, and of how we try to deal with it. There aren’t many books that answer both these challenges. You’re about to read one of them. Go read it.

* There is a joke/Easter egg in the title, which at least one reader of this newsletter should get, and other references scattered throughout.