Tag Archives: Metaphysical Science Fiction

Seven Surrenders

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Seven Surrenders [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Ada Palmer, book 2 of the Terra Ignota series.

Palmer Seven Surrenders

In Ada Palmer’s “Author’s Note and Acknowledgments” appended to Seven Surrenders she mentions such earlier science fiction writers as Alfred Bester, Jo Walton, Gene Wolfe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Voltaire, Yevgeney Zamiatin, and Yoshiyuki Tomino, among others. She does not include Frank Herbert, but the book that I was most reminded of in my reading of this second of four books in the Terra Ignota series was Dune Messiah, in the ways it expanded on the inventive world-building of its predecessor volume and in the incredible pitch of political and personal intrigue. The scale of Terra Ignota is smaller than the vast interstellar empire of Herbert’s Arrakis, but a global terrestrial society of the 25th century seems big enough for serious work.

In the midst of the story, Palmer uses a metafictional device to reflect on the ambitions of science fiction: “Apollo didn’t really think the war over Mars in two hundred and fifty years would be fought with giant robots, it was just the only way they could describe a war that would be meaningful, conscionable, with space for human dignity” (249-50). I wonder which aspects of Palmer’s own sometimes extravagantly-imagined future she finds least likely, but it is clearly not a prognostication. It is an engaging, immersive way to describe in high relief the tensions and vulnerabilities provoked by secularism, feminism, humanism, and other species of thought that have emerged from the Enlightenment with consequences yet to be determined in our present world. It also seems to be trying to sound the humanity that we share with Hellenic antiquity, in order to understand what of us can be maintained and/or transformed in centuries to come.

The four books of the series are evidently divided into two pairs, and this second completes the opening arc concerning the “Days of Transformation” that bring to its end an existing world order. While curiosity does drive the reader toward “the Crisis still unfolding” in the next two books, this one (unlike the first) offers some sense of a plot climaxed and concluded.

Venus Plus X

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Venus Plus X [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Theodore Sturgeon.

Sturgeon Venus Plus X

In his introduction to The Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley wrote: “Observe for yourselves the decay of the sense of sin, the growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct with a tendency to become bisexual or epicene, the childlike confidence in progress combined with nightmare fear of catastrophe, against which we are yet half unwilling to take precautions.” 

These are precisely the observations that undergird Sturgeon’s prescient 1960 novel Venus Plus X, about human gender, religion, and social control. The protagonist Charlie Johns is transported into a strange time in which the not-quite-any-longer-homo sapiens seem to have realized the Law of Thelema on the level of an entire society. One of its advocates explains its religion thus:

“We worship the future, not the past. We worship what is to come, not what has been. We aspire to the consequences of our own acts. We keep before us the image of what is malleable and growing–of that which we have the power to improve. We worship that power within ourselves, and the sense of responsibility which lives with it. A child is all of these things.” 

In common with Sturgeon’s work generally, this book has an awareness of the tragic aspects of human interaction, and an assertion of the redemptive power of love. Parallel to the exotic utopian scenario, he presents vignettes from the life of an American middle class family, highlighting the relevance of the issues addressed by Charlie Johns’ adventures in the strange country of Ledom. The deft prose style makes the reading an easy pleasure throughout, despite the extensive descriptions and lean plot. One substantial “sermon” is compensated by an equally substantial plot twist.

While this book is not about homosexuality (although some thickheaded reviewers have understood it thus), it is certainly a timely read when the issue of gay marriage is an object of political contention. And it should be abidingly provocative to those of us who have affirmed our entrance into the Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child.