Author:Adam Roberts
Adam Roberts’ work often has a big concept upfront: Snow (what the snow just keeps falling); By Light Alone (what if people could photosynthesise through their hair); Gradisil (what would orbital habitats be like if they organised as a country). So…this opens on a generation starship. Fantastic, Roberts’ take on this trope. Then they arrive at their destination pretty damn quickly, and there’s a Big Dumb Object waiting. Great, Roberts’ take on the inscrutable alien BDO. Hold that coffee. We’re winding back from the far future to around ten years from now.
The story-within-a-story takes place in a US where the worst 2020 predictions of the death of democracy, informal warfare, and gun-nuttery have progressed ten-fold. Which is in many ways a shame as the elements of Roberts’ post-Trump apocalypse feel less original than the first far future section of this novel. Weaponised neonicotinoids, iphones plugging directly into people, artificial intelligence, shadowy and paranoid government agencies, malware, VPNs…it’s a convincing mix of horrors, but not quite on the level of On (idea: what if gravity operated at 90 degrees).
This is not to say that the central section of Purgatory Mount is not a satisfying read. It is. The protagonists, chiefly 16-year old Ottie, are a likeable bunch and their struggles to survive as the US falls into civil war are told with an urgency that will have you racing through this book. It’s just that teenager-in-a-dystopia is a well-mined vein of fiction right now, and Roberts’ story is well-told without being as original as some of his other work mentioned earlier.
We return at the end to the far-future in the final section of the book – where he does connect his two stories – and Roberts’ concerns with revenge, guilt and atonement surface more explicitly. There are references to many belief systems including the Greek gods, medieval Catholicism, cargo cults,the singularity, and post-humanism. The abrupt gear-changes continue as the final resolution is more to do with arriving at a philosophic position than resolving or explaining the plot. Lots to enjoy, and even an postscript explaining some of his thinking, without this novel cohering into an entirely satisfactory whole.
Netgalley review copy provided.
Length of Read:Medium
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
Both his previous work, but also dystopia addicts who love Handmaids Tale, Station Eleven and so on…
One thing you’ve learned
Make sure your central story makes everyone forget about the framing device. Shakespeare got it right with The Taming of the Shrew.
I do look forward to being able to plug my iphone directly into my skull. No clarity given as to whether people on Android phones could use them similarly to replace their scrambled brains.
Me girlfriend looks like Purgatory Mount!
What am I supposed to do?
Better than Ferdinand Mount I suppose.
This is literally the greatest joke I have ever made. I’m feeding caviar to pigs here…
That certainly is, and I bow to your superior typing skills for getting there before my dyspraxic one finger prodding.
We do seem to pick the same books off Netgalley! I liked this one quite a lot. My feedback went like this:
This is a complex novel, that combines two very different stories which on casual inspection appear to have very little to do with each other. Or do they?
The title should clue you in that the novel takes some inspiration from Dante’s classic poem, but it also becomes clear early on that it is also in dialogue with classic SFF – there’s speculation about space elevators followed a few pages later by a namecheck for Arthur C Clarke, gullible misheard as Gully Foyle, and a frequent refrain of “the eagles are coming”. This idea of the past being inherent in the modern is also expressed in the preoccupation with original sin, memory and atonement that saturates the book. It’s also interesting that of the two story strands, the one set earlier in the timeline has a distinctly YA feel, while the later is slower, more philosophical and more adult (to use a poor but easy term). You could tease out something here about how we grow from youth to age, and come back once more to the idea that our past defines our now – without being too spoilery, the reason why characters in the later strand are in the positions they are is embedded in the earlier story.
I might be making it sound very dry here, but it’s worth noting that for all the philosophical musing of one strand and the convulsive violence and upheaval of the other, the novel is told with a lightness of touch and a delight in wordplay and puns that make it a very smooth read. There are frustrations – certain mysteries are left dangling – but overall this is very readable and very thought-provoking. Recommended.
We certainly do @kid-dynamite – so next up for me on netgalley is the new Becky Chambers, The Galaxy and the Ground Within, and a punt on Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley. You going to read/review either of these?
Already done both of them! If I remember right, you’re not crazy on Becky Chambers and I don’t think this will convert you – it’s much the same mixture as before. I liked it, but then I liked the earlier books. I liked Skyward Inn quite a lot, not least because it’s set in my native South West. It’s somewhere between Jeff Vandermeer’s weirdness and classic 70s British doomsday SF.