The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar Review

Publisher Summary:

The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes—literally—when he is yanked “upstairs” and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.

Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as “the professor,” a weary idealist and descendent of the Chained who has spent her career striving for validation from her more senior colleagues, only to fall short at every turn.

Together, the boy and the woman will embark on a transformative journey to grasp the design of the chains that fetter them both—and are the key to breaking free.

E. Thorne's Review:

This was an incredible and quick read that I devoured in a single sitting. Samatar's Prose resonates with every fiber of my being, and has lingered long after turning the final page. With elements of Snowpiercer and early episodes of the Battlestar Galactica remake, the world-building largely relies on cultural knowledge to "fill in" contextual details. The story itself is about humanity, about people, and thus the ships themselves are set-dressings, the depth in the background. Your attention as a reader is drawn instead to the three elements of the novella's title, which become the three "acts" of the novella; but these are also three concepts necessary for both the reader and the characters within the text to fully integrate into themselves by combining three disparate elements in wholly new ways:

• The Practice: somewhere between meditation and communal growth
• The Horizon: the hope for the future
• The Chain: a literal chain holding the lowest caste down, but also the connecting threads between us all

Devoid of context these concepts carry little weight, but Samatar combines the three lyrically through an examination of three characters confronting these realties. As a boy must confront the differences between the life he was born to and the one thrust upon him, a professor must contend with the unseen elements of her society, and a Prophet seeks meaning in chaos. There is a clear caste system at play in this future world; the boy is born Chained, with the physical representation of his status maintained throughout his life and integrated into the spiritual beliefs of his fellows. Others are ankleted, fitted with individual anklets rather than heavy connected chains, and others still float above even this level of freedom, flitting between ships across the dark expanse of space. As the boy learns just how different life outside the Hold can be, so, too, does the audience examine the formation of this rigid system. This is the turning point of the novella, the realization that many social behaviors are not inherent:

So then the code that bound him was not given. It was designed. It was a chain forged in the dark of the Hold, through the years of life in the depths, a chain whose glint he now recognized in the custom of turning away.

Against this struggle sits the professor, whose attempts to aid the boy may cost her academic career. But, she wonders, is the point of academia when so many are left behind? It is her efforts which allow the boy to transcend the chains of his birth, but her reasons may not be as altruistic as necessary.

For a novella of a scant 122 pages, I've spent hours thinking about Samatar's implications and social commentary. As I work through my own higher education, dipping my feet into the ivory tower of medieval studies, I constantly engage with similar questions. How can I translate my academic training to something of value in the wider world? What can I, a queer and transgender scholar, do to improve the quality of life for people like me inside and outside higher education? Where are the limits of empathy when a job has to be done by someone? For even the professor, ankleted and powerful compared to the chained, is trapped within the strictures of her world. The boy's caste is transformed through a scholarship, but he leaves behind an entire world of people with no such transformative potential—the work done by the Chained is mandatory to continued survival. The impulse is to blame the system, to describe it as a failure, as we do when confronted by similar failures in our modern world. But, as in our current political construct, the system is functioning the way it was meant to, privileging its creators at the expense of the less fortunate.

Finally, there is the Prophet, another of the Chained whose focus on the practice informs the boy's world, as well as introducing a questionably fantastic element in the form of extreme personal connection. A chain may be a negative, trapping the chained to their lives in the Hold; but it also connects them to each other, forging intense inter-personal connections to make meaning out of their lives. Even the anklets are a form of connection, chains transformed to electricity, albeit devoid of the visual queue which exists for the lowest caste. The ankleted have lost much of their connection to each other, which the professor and the boy explore as the novella progresses.

I recommend The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain highly for anyone interested in questions of human connection and value.

This Reminds Me:

• Battlestar Galactica (2004)
  • Humanity searches for a new home, the fabled Thirteenth Colony
• Snowpiercer
  • Caste system for the survival of humanity
• Academia in opposition to Popular Culture
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
• Red Rising by Pierce Brown
  • Perhaps not in terms of prose style or character, but in the deep questioning of humanity's future, and the price we may pay to reach the stars