(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Humanity has, in many ways, got where it’s got because it’s refused to simply take the universe on the terms obviously presented to it.
No matter what the issue is or the challenge to be resolved, we have looked all kinds of supposedly set-in-stone realities of the world in which we live and asked ourselves “Yes, but what if?”
It’s admirably exciting idea that has seen us go ahead in leaps and bounds but it’s also brought its own set of problems, unfortunately made worse by the fact that we are our own worst enemy.
In Ken MacLeod’s Beyond the Hallowed Sky, the first instalment in his space operatic Lightspeed trilogy, we are given thrillingly front row seats to what happens when humanity comes up against opportunity and challenge all at once, at the same time as we are grappling with the tribal, limitingly territorial aspects of our nature.
The very things that have the power to elevate us, and which often realise their bounteous potential, are often hobbled in their visionary effectiveness by our capacity for infighting and power playing, our need to be among the ones in a position of authority, power grasped greedily in our hands.
It’s a mass of competing priorities and MacLeod brings their clashing glories and tribulations to a place of engagingly complex but emotionally accessible relatability in the largely Scotland-set Beyond the Hallowed Sky which amplifies how laudably we rush to glory and possibility while dragging our feet of lumbrous clay.
Squelches and squeals indicated that it was moving faster than some of the animals, and what would happen to the humans if they stuck around.
Sharianne ran. Hazeldene stared for a moment, then she ran too.
Set in the latter half of the 21st century when climate change has been arrested but not quite soon enough to avoid the coastal fringes of Scottish villages and towns from falling into waterlogged ruin, their substance rebuilt up on the hills surrounding their crumbling brick and steel, Beyond the Hallowed Sky begins with the most beguiling astounding of premises.
A brilliant scientist is amazed, and more than little troubled and intrigued, to be the recipient of a letter, ostensibly from a future-her that purports to set out everything needed to realise faster-than-light (FTL) travel.
It’s an exciting idea, but while the science is sound, for the most part, she’s ridiculed and pulled apart by the establishment and finds herself on the outer, not just within the scientific community, but within her own country, which is, in the strategically realigned world of the 2070s, is part of a greater Anglosphere block called the Alliance.
Competing with them for power, influence and technological advancement is the Union (essentially Europe, Scotland, Ireland) and the Coordinated States (China, Russia, allied vassal states), all of them locked in a race to become the first to take humanity to the stars.
The scientist, Lakshmi Nayak, knows she’s in the boxseat to make this dream come true, but frozen out by her peers and unable to make any kind of progress, she’s stuck spinning her wheels, unsure how her inspired ideas are ever going to see the light of day.
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
That is, until after an offer comes to her from the unlikeliest of sources and she finds herself at the centre of a clandestine race to secure humanity’s place among the stars where, in typical Homo Sapiens’ arrogance, it is assumed we will stand supreme.
Nice try humanity but what if we are not alone, and what if it turns out the universe is a good deal more ancient, in ways we have never conceived, and we might just be knocked down a peg or five hundred?
Of course, no one is thinking in those terms when a discovery on Venus indicates that the universe is a great deal more complex than we thought, and while the possibility of FTL is an alluring one for all kinds of reasons, it also comes, it turns out with all kinds of risks and dangers.
Nothing surprising there in one sense since very little in life that daring and exciting comes without strings of some sort, but it’s the nature of the Venusian discovery that has the capacity to make humanity’s politics-addled race to the stars suddenly seem way more loaded with as much threat as it does promise.
MacLeod weaves a magnificently enthralling tale of humanity’s propensity for greatness and its inclination for self-destruction, or at least, self-hobbling in Beyond the Hallowed Sky, a brilliantly-realised sci-fi masterpiece that brings together in enthralling fashion all the many facets of humanity and the way they both propel us and have the potential to keep us stuck in place, if not hurtling backwards.
‘Like building a starship across the water from the Alliance’s very own starship berth?’ said Nayak.
‘Exactly!’ said Morag.
Nayak shrugged and spread her hands. ‘Well, if your — if our best intelligence bods think it’ll work, who am I to disagree? I just hope they’re right.’
Grant stood up. ‘Let’s do this.’
For events so big and so impactful, what really sets Beyond the Hallowed Sky apart as something special is the fact that MacLeod manages an intimate sense of characterisation throughout the novel.
Everyone that is woven into this epically big but emotionally nuanced and thoughtful story from Nayak to John Grant, a man caught between scientific curiosity and political realities to a scientist named Hazeldene in the strangest of all research locations are given time to reveal themselves and to achieve three-dimensional, emotionally meaningful form before the story really gets going.
It’s the author’s ability to let the slow-burn narrative do its thing without rushing to action for action’s sake that imbues Beyond the Hallowed Sky with so much intensely good readability.
He manages to go big without losing the emotional and political intimacies at the heart of his story and it means that while Beyond the Hallowed Sky is always building to something enthrallingly epic, it never loses the humanity, both good and bad, enabling and limiting, at its page-turning heart.
This is sci-fi that has something to say, thrillingly enticing ways to say it and which comes with as much of an eye on rich and meaningful characterisation as it does narrative punctuation points, all of which make Beyond the Hallowed Sky a rare and wonderful treat – a novel that knows how good people can be and how much they can achieve but which also appreciates that all that promise and potential comes with limitations, both within and without and that while we must dream, and dream big, we also need to remember that the realisation of these dreams always comes with a price and we must be prepare to pay it.