Book Review | Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

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There is Thorn, a shaman himself. He lives to pass down his wisdom and his stories -- to teach those who would follow in his footsteps.

There is Heather, the healer who, in many ways, holds the clan together.

There is Elga, an outsider and the bringer of change.

And then there is Loon, the next shaman, who is determined to find his own path. But in a world so treacherous, that journey is never simple — and where it may lead is never certain.

Shaman is a powerful, thrilling and heart-breaking story of one young man's journey into adulthood — and an awe-inspiring vision of how we lived thirty thousand years ago.

***

What a difference a moment makes.

I speak, albeit obliquely, of a single, solitary sequence at the very outset of Kim Stanley Robinson's last novel; a prologue so powerful, a passage so painstakingly picturesque, that I would have recommended 2312 right there and then, solely on the basis of its first few pages.

Some months later, I named 2312 my favourite reading experience of the year because there was, fortuitously, much more to it than a brilliant beginning. But even if the rest of the book had been utter rubbish... even if its characters had left me cold and its narrative had meandered meaninglessly... even if its themes and ideas had been realised with a heavy hand... even then, the lonely, lovely — no, glorious moment with which it opens would have lent the remainder incredible resonance.

Though they are few and far between, I fear, it's moments like these — moments that take us out of ourselves and deposit us elsewhere and elsewhen, in startling worlds and circumstances none among us can hope to know in our natural lives — it's moments like these that remind me why I fell under the spell of speculative fiction in the first place.

Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel comes complete with several such set-pieces, so complete and pristine that they inspire a sense of wonder similar to that suggested by very best SF... yet Shaman it isn't science fiction in any sense. It takes place many millennia ago rather than many millennia hence, in the last years of the Pleistocene period — during what's commonly called the ice age — when Neanderthal man shared the slippery surface of the unblemished earth with our own ancient ancestors: a setting as affecting and astonishing in its way as the dizzying desolation of deep space.

The blue of the sky throbbed with different blues, each more blue than the next. The clouds in the blue were scalloped and articulated like driftwood, and crawled around in themselves like otters at play. [Loon] could see everything at once. His spirit kept tugging at the top of his head, lifting him so that he had to concentrate to keep his balance. The problem made him laugh. The world was so great, so beautiful. Something like a lion: it would kill you if it could, but in the meantime it was so very, very beautiful. He would have cried at how beautiful it was, but he was laughing too much, he was too happy at being there walking in it. (p.50)

So muses Loon, Shaman's central character, during the wander Robinson's breathtaking new book begins with: a walkabout of sorts which paves the way for one of the moments I mentioned earlier. But this time, our sense of wonder does not come courtesy a suicidal sunwalker's decision to live as the killing light of said star spills across Mercury's ancient face, as in 2312. This time, a horse is all Robinson requires to make the magic happen.

That said, the sequences share a sunrise:

The god animal was lit by the sun almost from below. Long black head, so etched and fine. The land's witness to the end of his wander, pawing once, then nodding and lifting. Throwing his great head side to side, his black eyes observing Loon across the gulf of air between them. Black mane short and upright, black body rounded and strong. 

Then without warning the horse tossed his long head up at the sky, off toward the sun, and this movement popped in Loon's eye and bulged out across the space between them, scoring his eyes such that he could close them and see it again; Loon's eyes spilled over, the tears ran down his face, his throat clamped down and his chest went tight and quivered. (pp.61-62)

A beautiful thing, truly, and a testament to the sensory strengths of Robinson's particular prose and mode of storytelling. What would be unremarkable in the hands of most other authors is instilled instead with a sweep of soaring emotion. There's no more to this here horse than meets the eye, yet to Loon — and indeed to readers who have hardly begun to grasp the hardships ahead of him — it represents a beginning, and an end as well. After all, he is "walking into a new world, a new kind of existence," where he will have to "face something, learn something, accomplish something. Change into something else: a sorcerer, a man in the world." (p.20) Thus this moment — and marked so marvellously! — means everything to him, and to be sure, it touches us too.

Loon's inaugural wander is one of the most memorable sections of Shaman, certainly, but there's plenty of Robinson's new novel left to recommend yet. What follows is an affectionate account of Loon's life as part of the Wolf pack, and though it goes on a little long without incident — they hunt, they gather, they starve; they live, they dance, they die — beyond this there is a breathtaking trip into the wintry wilderness, a festival during which Loon learns about love, and a rite of passage into the bare flesh of Mother Earth herself which culminates in a last gasp of absolute darkness.

On the whole, I suppose the story's on the slight side, but what narrative drive Shaman perhaps lacks, at least in part, the author more than makes up for with his masterful handling of its central character, whose coming of age from boy to man and from man to shaman the novel cumulatively chronicles. This is in addition to Robinson's carefully layered characterisation of the others Loon looks to, like Heather and Elga and Click, whom I loved. To a one, they are wonderfully done.

If Shaman is about any single thing, it's about legacies lost and left. Of particular significance, then, is Thorn, the long-suffering so-and-so in charge of painting the caves and preserving the memories of the tribe he tends. When the time is right, he plans to pass the proverbial torch to Loon. But Loon has a lot left to learn, and precious little interest in Thorn's wisdom, be it worldly or otherwise, so as that latter tries to make an impression on his indifferent apprentice, he can seem a bit of a mad old man.

We had a bad shaman.

This is what Thorn would say whenever he was doing something bad himself. Object to whatever it was and he would pull up his long gray braids to show the mangled red nubbings surrounding his earholes. His shaman had stuck bone needles through the flesh of his boys' ears and then ripped them out sideways, to help them remember things. Thorn when he wanted the same result would flick Loon hard on the ear and then point at the side of his own head, with a titled look that said, You think you have it bad? (p.3)

As vindictive as Thorn sometimes seems, it is through him, I think, and his budding relationship with Loon, that we arrive, at the last, at the heart of the matter, for it is he who asks the question Shaman answers: what do we leave behind, and why?

Though rather more modest in its scope and conventional in its concepts than Kim Stanley Robinson's staggering space operas, Shaman tells an ambitious, absorbing and satisfyingly self-contained tale on its own terms. At once delightful and devastating, it transports us to a moment in time, reverently preserved and impeccably portrayed... and if that moment is off in the other direction than this author tends to take us, then know that he is as adept a guide to the distant past as he has ever been the far-flung future.

***

Shaman
by Kim Stanley Robinson

UK & US Publication: September 2013, Orbit

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

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The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.

The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.

***

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away - or so it feels, at least - I read Red Mars. I was at an age and a stage that demanded I discover those things that I'd love for the rest of my life: not the perfunctory pleasures I'd inherited from my parents, nor the playthings of my peers, but passions of my own devising. Thus, I invested in an alarming amount of classic sf and fantasy. Decades if not centuries of masterworks were mine in one fell swoop, and amongst them, the most celebrated of all Kim Stanley Robinson's novels.

I adored it, of course. Then as now. I'd never read such a meticulous and convincing future history, and Mars, though far-fetched yet, was not such an unknown quantity as to overstretch my limited imagination. By that same token, a lot of Red Mars went right over my head - not least the fact that it was book one of three - so it's been an occasional aspiration of mine to re-read it ever since, in quick succession with its acclaimed sequels, Blue Mars and Green Mars.

Alas, as is often the way with aspirations, it hasn't happened yet... though I have returned to Robinson's work in the succeeding years. Galileo's Dream was not for me, I fear, but I had a terrific time with the best of collection Night Shade Books put out in late 2010, such that I've been eagerly anticipating 2312 for, ahem, many a moon.

It does not disappoint.

"Really you have no idea. It's like nothing you've ever seen. You may think you are inured, that nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. [...] The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that." (pp.3-4)

Three centuries on from the present day, everything has changed. Everything, that is, except Earth. Humanity has taken to the stars; spacers have radically overhauled the solar system; millions of people have been born and raised on Venus and Mars and Mercury, meanwhile countless thousands of terraformed asteroids - which is to say terraria - are now home to Earth's surviving flora and fauna. Longevity treatments have raised life expectancy amongst those who can afford the intervention into the high hundreds, and gender, in the future, is a thing of the past.

Advances along these lines are made every day - exponential progress is the name of the game - yet humanity's pitiable point of origin is in dire crisis, as ever.

"It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. They had immensely powerful terraforming techniques off-planet, but here they usually couldn't be applied. No slamming comets into it, for instance." (p.90)

For obvious reasons.

In short, "Earth was a mess, a sad place. And yet still the center of the story. It had to be dealt with, as Alex had always said, or nothing done in space was real." (ibid) Alex, incidentally, is the self-styled Lion of Mercury, a scientist and a significant political figure whose sudden death - supposedly from natural causes - sets off 2312. In the bravura prologue - a short but stunning sunwalk that serves to set the surreal scene ideally, as well as one's expectations - Robinson introduces us to Alex's daughter, Swan Er Hong, as she navigates her planet's scorched surface in an attempt to get to grips with the unbearable grief she feels. Some distance away from the relative safety of Terminator, Mercury's sole city - an awesome industrial colony that circles the world a scant step ahead of the world's own orbit, and thus the sun, which burns hot enough here that it might melt a person (indeed a place) - Swan considers suicide, for a second, or seems to.

Her impetuousness will be the death of her, one suspects. If not now then not long from. She's a spacer, born and raised, and though she's more than a century old, as often as not she behaves like an entitled child. Swan huffs and sulks, pouts and shouts. Not unrelatedly, she's an artist. An aesthetic activist in full-fledged rebellion against the abstract of the establishment. To which end she's eaten aliens, and had bird-brains installed in her head - as you do - as well as a snarky quantum computer called Pauline whom readers of Red Mars may well recognise.

In terms of her character arc through 2312, however, the single biggest obstacle opposite Swan - at least when we meet - is that she has no sense of purpose, or of place. But Alex's death gives her a glimpse of these things, tantalising if not yet terrifying: Alex's last request is that Swan personally ferry some encoded information to those who need to know it. Thus, our odd duck comes into contact with Alex's cultish cadre, who (as it happens) have been working to disrupt the dithering establishment on Earth themselves. Almost as if it were meant to be, Swan finds herself falling in with one of her dearly departed's closest confidantes: Fitz Wahram, out of Titan. He is "a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos - toad, newt, frog - even the very words were ugly. [...] Once she had seen a toad in an amazonia, sitting at the edge of a pond, its warty wet skin all bronze and gold. She had liked the look of it." (p.15)

So it is that the scene is set for revolution, and perhaps a strange strain of romance.

Thereafter, 2312 gets quite complicated quite quickly:

"By the early twenty-fourth century there was too much going on to be either seen or understood. Assiduous attempts by contemporary historians to achieve an agreed-upon paradigm foundered, and we are no different now, looking back at them. It's hard even to assemble enough data to make a guess. There were thousands of city-states out there pinballing around, each with its presence in the data cloud or absence from same, and all of them adding up to—what? To the same mishmash history has been all along, but now elaborated, mathmaticized, effloresced—in the word of the time, balkanized." (p.78)

To paraphrase our occasional, omniscient narrator: to simplify history would be to distort Robinson's reality, and this award-winning author does not dilute. It is, therefore, a bold-type testament to his unflinching grasp of the narrative art that one understands as much of the plot, and indeed its byzantine backdrop, as one should, or is supposed to. Wisely, I think, Robinson draws a hard line between the involved scientific speculation readers have come to expect from his work and the actual unfolding of the tale he's here to tell; that of - at long last - the end of the world as we know it, if not the apocalypse proper.

To wit, Robinson builds his single sprawling setting, and gestures toward the million (give or take) meticulously researched ideas underpinning it, in excerpts, as in in the extract above. In extracts - of which there are eighteen - in addition to fifteen lengthy lists, a miscellany of individually titled segments, ten strong, on top of a prologue, an epilogue, and forty-odd actual chapters. 2312 is a big book punctuated, and so forth made manageable, by lots of itty bits. Asides, mostly: postcards from the far-distant future, or the diary entries of an unfathomable AI.

This tension in the structure of 2312, between the little and the large, reflects the relationship between the planet-cracking happenings and the seemingly insignificant events that Robinson is interested in for the bulk of the book. The reader is routinely shuttled between stunning set-pieces, like the sunwalk with which the whole thing begins, or the destruction of Terminator - Swan's sweet home if she has one - and quiet, composed, character-oriented moments, such as the prolonged underground walkabout our scattershot protagonist shares with Wahram, or the stop-overs she takes on various terraria.

You will come to look upon all these moments equally. In astonishment, in awe, at both the small, and the immense. Such is Robinson's success in terms of the sense-of-wonder 2312 evokes, like a sky full of stars exploding one after the other, over and over again.

Given all its ideas, not to speak of the myriad intricacies of each of these, I dare say 2312 is a substantially more accessible novel than it has any right to be. The author's decision to delineate his science from his fiction pays dividends in that respect, as it allows each scene to breathe, and more often than not to blossom. Furthermore, Robinson presents many of most complex concepts with a winning amount of whimsy. As recipes, among other things. For a successful revolution, for instance, Swan's qube would have us

"Take large masses of injustice, resentment, and frustration. Put them in a weak or failing hegemon. Stir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order." (p.334)

There's fun in 2312, then. Fun, and unbelievable wonder; love, profundity and a lot of legitimately gripping drama. Also some startling ideas. I had not dared to dream that Kim Stanley Robinson could even equal Red Mars, but in time, 2312 could take the cake. That and biscuit-based relativity aside, it's a magnificent sweet treat in its own right. Robinson is as intelligent and compelling as ever he has been - at least in my experience - but herein he has tempered his the science of his fiction smartly, if not sensitively. The result, simply put, is stunning.

Never mind the usual genre divisions: 2312 is easily one of the year's best books, period.

***

2312
by Kim Stanley Robinson

UK & US Publication: May 2012, Orbit

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Recommended and Related Reading

Quoth the Scotsman | Kim Stanley Robinson on Seizing the Day

This week, instead of catching up on all the reviews I've abandoned in the to-do queue, or playing Mass Effect 3, say - which we'll talk more about shortly - I've been reading 2312, the forthcoming space opera from that setter of standard, Kim Stanley Robinson of Red Mars renown.

As I said on Twitter after the first night I spent with 2312: it's been incredible, obviously.

And it's continued as awesome. I haven't been able to set aside as much time as I might like to devote to it this week - with everyone's exams either here or nearly, the tutoring has gotten all serious all of a sudden - but those moments I have had to spend with 2312 have basically, if you forgive me the hyperbole, blown me away.

I should have a full review of 2312 ready for public consumption well ahead of the book's publication in late May, but for the very moment, I wanted to share at least this little snippet with you. It's excerpted from from an early chapter, so never fear: there are no spoilers in sight. All you need know is that Wahram - one of our impetuous protagonist's co-conspirators - is considering how to keep things interesting in the midst of a long interplanetary voyage:

"Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair.

"Wahram was very aware of this, having lived the process many times; so he paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular moment in his life. So often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set o habits. There was some searching to be done, in other words, some testing of different possibilities. That was the interregnum, in fact, the naked moment before the next exfoliation of habits, the time when one wandered doing things randomly. The time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world. 

"They came a bit too often for his taste. Most of the terraria offering passenger transport around the solar system were extremely fast, but even so, trips often took weeks. This was simply too much time to be banging around aimlessly; doing that one could easily slide into a funk or some other kind of mental hibernation. In the settlements around Saturn this sort of thing had sometimes been developed into entire sciences and art forms. But any such hebephrenia was dangerous for Wahram, as he had found out long ago by painful experience. Too often in his past, meaninglessness had gnawed at the edges of things. He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror -- terror that no new meaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost.

"Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram's desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and a project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. It came to this: shipboard life was still life. All days had to be seized." (pp.50-51)

I bet you can imagine why this passage spoke to me so. If not, consider the epic holiday I just had, and the soul-crushing feeling that often accompanies coming home. I only wish I'd read these words a week or so sooner.

2312 is magnificent, incidentally. Already one of the year's best in my book, and I'm still not quite finished... a situation I aim to remedy this evening.

Seize the day yourselves on May 24th!