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A review by oleksandr
Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts
5.0
This is a strange SF novel by British writer [a:Adam Roberts|23023|Adam Roberts|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222988832p2/23023.jpg]. I read it as a part of monthly reading for May 2022 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group. This book is nominated for the British SF Association Award in 2022, the author has already won the award three times, but the last two – in 2016 and 2021 for his non-fiction related to SFF genre.
The story starts as an ordinary far-future hard SF (e.g. no faster-than-light travel) and depicts a space-ship Forward and its ‘team’, five meta-humans named after Greek gods. Here readers meet with ‘breaking a fourth wall’ – in order for us, readers to understand the team we are given Greek gods’ names: their fellow crew members called them Pan. To be clear (and at the risk of mere pedantry), the name ‘Pan’ was not the one they actually used. The name they actually used referenced a figure from a different culture-text altogether, one whose mere composition is hundreds of years in the future as I write this. Pan is an approximation, although a reasonable one. They were a figure gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word) and given responsibility over beasts, birds and plants, but who pursued that responsibility with a zeal that tipped them over into, as the others saw it, eccentricity.
So, it not only references Greek gods for our understanding but also assumes that we are SF readers – the reference to [a:Arthur C. Clarke|7779|Arthur C. Clarke|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1357191481p2/7779.jpg]’s law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Forward has 5 persons as its crew, but also an AI called hal (reference to [b:2001: A Space Odyssey|70535|2001 A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1)|Arthur C. Clarke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1432468943l/70535._SY75_.jpg|208362] HAL-9000 I guess) and a varied biome, including pygs, which are part of crew’s diet, even despite they aren’t pig but pygmies. The ship travels to investigate a strange artifact – a mountain-like pillar on a conical base, rising 142 km above the surface of the planet, far above the atmosphere and into space. Presumably, therefore, the artifact represented an alien space elevator, or at least the remnants of one, the tech so high that even these future humans cannot replicate it. Because the structure is reminiscent of Dante’s the mountain of Purgatory, hence the name.
Then our story shifts from the crew of gods to pygs, more precisely a man/pyg named B and his life on the ship, his veneration of gods, his daily living and problems. Moreover, not only pygs are sentient enough to talk, but cows and even chickens, even if the later while talkative and very stupid. So it seems we, the readers, get ourself another generation ship story, not a new rope, after all, [a:Robert A. Heinlein|205|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1192826560p2/205.jpg] published [b:Orphans in the Sky|25132638|Orphans in the Sky|Robert A. Heinlein|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|1021849] in 1963…
Wrong! The story’s setting shifts again, this time much more dramatically – there is a near future (the 2030s) in The United States of Amnesia, where the US is on the brink of civil war and there is a group of five teenagers, who have an own version of internet with something extremely important hidden there. So, we follow the story of one of the teens, a girl Ottoline Barragão, who is from a Christian family, keeps bees and salvages copper wire for their internet. As a person, who can access to the thing hidden inside, she is captured by one of the factions, formally of the federal government. As an additional important issue in this world there are a lot of people damaged by memory-destroying neonicotinoids, initially used as pesticides and later as bio-weapon. if unassisted such people are like patients with Alzheimer’s, but these one have at least a partial solution – they are (brain?) linked to their iPhones, which work like an external memory.
This is a very unusual story, with the ‘space’ part in line with classic SF and the US of Amnesia part closer to techno-thriller like [a:Cory Doctorow|12581|Cory Doctorow|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1595482071p2/12581.jpg]’s [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SY75_.jpg|939584]. The mix is partially explained at the end, but it isn’t supplied on a platter, one has to think it over. And it is great when fiction makes one think! Recommended.
The story starts as an ordinary far-future hard SF (e.g. no faster-than-light travel) and depicts a space-ship Forward and its ‘team’, five meta-humans named after Greek gods. Here readers meet with ‘breaking a fourth wall’ – in order for us, readers to understand the team we are given Greek gods’ names: their fellow crew members called them Pan. To be clear (and at the risk of mere pedantry), the name ‘Pan’ was not the one they actually used. The name they actually used referenced a figure from a different culture-text altogether, one whose mere composition is hundreds of years in the future as I write this. Pan is an approximation, although a reasonable one. They were a figure gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word) and given responsibility over beasts, birds and plants, but who pursued that responsibility with a zeal that tipped them over into, as the others saw it, eccentricity.
So, it not only references Greek gods for our understanding but also assumes that we are SF readers – the reference to [a:Arthur C. Clarke|7779|Arthur C. Clarke|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1357191481p2/7779.jpg]’s law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Forward has 5 persons as its crew, but also an AI called hal (reference to [b:2001: A Space Odyssey|70535|2001 A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1)|Arthur C. Clarke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1432468943l/70535._SY75_.jpg|208362] HAL-9000 I guess) and a varied biome, including pygs, which are part of crew’s diet, even despite they aren’t pig but pygmies. The ship travels to investigate a strange artifact – a mountain-like pillar on a conical base, rising 142 km above the surface of the planet, far above the atmosphere and into space. Presumably, therefore, the artifact represented an alien space elevator, or at least the remnants of one, the tech so high that even these future humans cannot replicate it. Because the structure is reminiscent of Dante’s the mountain of Purgatory, hence the name.
Then our story shifts from the crew of gods to pygs, more precisely a man/pyg named B and his life on the ship, his veneration of gods, his daily living and problems. Moreover, not only pygs are sentient enough to talk, but cows and even chickens, even if the later while talkative and very stupid. So it seems we, the readers, get ourself another generation ship story, not a new rope, after all, [a:Robert A. Heinlein|205|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1192826560p2/205.jpg] published [b:Orphans in the Sky|25132638|Orphans in the Sky|Robert A. Heinlein|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|1021849] in 1963…
Wrong! The story’s setting shifts again, this time much more dramatically – there is a near future (the 2030s) in The United States of Amnesia, where the US is on the brink of civil war and there is a group of five teenagers, who have an own version of internet with something extremely important hidden there. So, we follow the story of one of the teens, a girl Ottoline Barragão, who is from a Christian family, keeps bees and salvages copper wire for their internet. As a person, who can access to the thing hidden inside, she is captured by one of the factions, formally of the federal government. As an additional important issue in this world there are a lot of people damaged by memory-destroying neonicotinoids, initially used as pesticides and later as bio-weapon. if unassisted such people are like patients with Alzheimer’s, but these one have at least a partial solution – they are (brain?) linked to their iPhones, which work like an external memory.
This is a very unusual story, with the ‘space’ part in line with classic SF and the US of Amnesia part closer to techno-thriller like [a:Cory Doctorow|12581|Cory Doctorow|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1595482071p2/12581.jpg]’s [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SY75_.jpg|939584]. The mix is partially explained at the end, but it isn’t supplied on a platter, one has to think it over. And it is great when fiction makes one think! Recommended.