Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star / An Excerpt

Monica Byrne

Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star

An Excerpt

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

A reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate…

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, available from Harper Voyager. Byrne spins a multigenerational saga spanning two thousand years, from the collapse of the ancient Maya to a far-future utopia on the brink of civil war.

The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents —telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.

Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion and racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.

TZOYNA

3 Batz’ 14 Pop, Long Count 10.9.5.7.11

 

9 December, 1012

Ket fell backward in her trance, away from her own slumped body, and hit a clump of soil at an awkward angle, against her neck; the clump crumbled and gave way, her heels vaulted over her head, and she somersaulted through the earth. She scraped for a hold but couldn’t find any, only more soil that burst in her hand. She couldn’t scream because she couldn’t get her breath. The light was fading, covered up by collapsing earth, and a big whip spider was leaping from clump to clump in her wake, following her progress with a bright yellow eye. Every time her body rolled to a stop, the soil strained and burst, and she was tumbling backward again. She stopped trying to find handholds. She drew in her limbs and let herself fall.

She hit open space. She opened her eyes.

She was falling into a red city in a green valley.

She alighted in the main plaza, marked by a perfect grid of ceiba trees. It was twilight here.

She recognized the city as her own. There were her brother Ajul and sister Ixul, her mother and father, and their ancestors before them, all the way back to the Hero Twins, dim tall figures whose faces were obscured. They were all standing in the grid, aligned with the trees, and drawing their hands across their chests and pointing to the sky, but the motion was halting and inexact, as if they were trying to remember it. They wore masks, as if playing roles in an entertainment: the farmer, the priest, the dwarf, the scribe, the merchant, the warrior, the daykeeper, the lackey, the refugee, the king.

The plaza cracked open and she fell through.

The whip spider leapt after her, the hunt afoot again.

She hadn’t wanted to leave that place. She’d wanted to watch the dance and maybe try it herself. But she had no control over anything. This earth wasn’t soft soil, it was hard and broken rocks, stabbing her in the back as she tumbled. She drew in her arms and legs again, miserable. She shouldn’t have let blood so young. She wasn’t ready for this.

She hit open space. She opened her eyes.

She was falling into a red city on a green hilltop. Again, she alighted on the plaza in twilight.

It was still her city, but now it sat on an acropolis so high above the earth that she could see the mountains moving in the mists below, like herds of deer. In this plaza, the stars were nearer and brighter, and the trees were lower and fatter, shedding blood-red leaves in a circle around each trunk. A grey road began at the edge of the plaza and departed into an eternity that lapped the edges of the acropolis. Ixul and Ajul were standing at either side of the road like sentinels, rigid, holding matching spears.

She started toward them, wanting to be with them. A black jaguar appeared on the road.

Ket froze.

But the twins didn’t seem to notice the jaguar. Instead, they leveled their spears at each other, as if to attack.

Ket took a step forward.

They began to circle each other.

Stop, she tried to yell, but her voice got stuck in her throat. She started to run toward them, but then the jaguar charged her and scooped her up like a little doll so that she flipped head over heels to land on its back, and as the plaza collapsed and the jaguar leapt down, she saw the twins shoot up into the sky like a pair of hawks.

She held tight to the jaguar’s neck. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. But judging by the lurches and jolts, the jaguar was leaping from ledge to ledge, deeper into the earth. Then she heard the sound of rushing water. The jaguar slid into a channel that twisted and dropped and gathered speed. Spray splashed her face. Was she in the underworld now? Or still in her own city, in the Tzoynas beneath her Tzoyna; or in the city that had existed before any Tzoyna, far older, before the humans, with no name, when there was only stone and stars?

There was a moment of sickening free fall, and then a powerful splash.

Ket held on tight to the jaguar’s neck, gripping her own wrist.

They began to swim downward. The water was warm, and Ket found she could breathe.

A glow appeared below them. The light was the same color as the light on the plaza—pink-orange, shimmering like the lip of a seashell. She began to be able to see. She made out the jaguar’s huge paws sweeping, one and then the other, as if it were crawling down the column of water. The water tasted like cacao. She relaxed. She felt that even though she was not in control, she was safe. She wanted to remember all these things: the ancestors, the red leaves, the green mountain, the grey road, the cacao water. She wanted to hold on to them and understand their meanings.

She was amazed to realize that, in one hand, she still held her obsidian blade. How had she not dropped it, so many years ago, with her brother on the ball court? How had it survived all this tumbling and sliding and swimming? She held it up to the seed of light that was growing beneath her, and as if delighted to see itself in a mirror, the blade began to turn so fast that its four spokes blurred into a circle that began to glow, and now she could see that this blade was not just shaped like a star, but was a real star, an actual star, which both signified all things and was itself all things.

 

Excerpted from The Actual Star, copyright 2021 by Monica Byrne.

TOR

 

When History Echoes / Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star

 

When History Echoes: Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

Tobias Carroll

Fri Oct 1, 2021 9:00am

Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star is one of two big novels released this year structured around parallel narratives in three distinct time periods. (The other is Matt Bell’s Appleseed.) Byrne herself is no stranger to parallel plotlines set at different points in history; her previous novel, 2014’s The Girl in the Road, also made use of this device, albeit a little closer together, temporally speaking. The Actual Star, like Appleseed and Alan Garner’s Red Shift, offers plenty of time between its respective strands. These are books about the ways that one day’s urgent events can become ancient history from someone else’s perspective. It’s not hard to see what draws certain writers to this.

In The Actual Star, this sense of parallel timelines makes use of an especially grand scale; a thousand years separates each of the three timeframes. They’re set in 1012, 2012, and 3012 CE, respectively; a constant motif in the novel is seeing how the events described in one part are faithfully (or not) remembered a millennium later. Complicating this somewhat is another recurring motif: that of a trio of characters who recur in each of the timeframes. Reincarnation is taken as a fact of life by the planetwide culture of the 3012 sections—though this is handled subtly, closer to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas than Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt.

Each of the three segments could stand on its own relatively well as a short novel; even so, the way these plotlines converge makes each one stronger. There’s a point at the end of A.S. Byatt’s Possession—a book about the study of history—in which Byatt reveals just what has been left out of the historical record that her novel focuses on, and The Actual Star at times feels like a sprawling meditation on that, along with a host of other topics.

In 1012, twins Ixul and Ajul, and their sister Ket, deal with the challenges of power and the twins’ pending rule over a Maya kingdom in what is now Belize. The dynamic between the three siblings is established quickly: The twins are enmeshed in a clandestine relationship, while Ket’s interests tend towards the more mystical. A thousand years after that, a young woman named Leah makes plans to leave her home in Minnesota to travel to Belize, where her father lived, and to explore Actun Tunichil Muknal, a sacred cave with a deep historical meaning. And a thousand years after that, in a world transformed by climate change—the novel’s prologue notes that “the last of the world’s ice is gone”—a philosophical debate between Niloux and Tanaaj, dueling political thinkers, threatens to upend society.

This is an epic, visceral novel—and one in which several characters engage in self-cutting. It’s also an eminently philosophical one, in which the question of the nature of Xibalba is at the heart of these three parallel narratives. As a whole, then, it’s a book about human transcendence, and whether or not that should be taken as a matter of faith or as a more metaphorical (and achievable) goal.

If that sounds like I’m being vague, I am; part of the pleasure of reading this book is in seeing just where the different timelines link up. In the first chapter in which the reader encounters Niloux, for instance, we’ll learn that Leah is regarded as a saint at that moment in history, so figuring out how her travels through Belize will result in canonization centuries later becomes an ongoing source of suspense throughout the book. But there are other, less overt, moments in this vein as well; re-reading passages to write this review, it became more clear the extent to which Byrne lays the groundwork early on for some of these connections, and some of the larger plot twists to come.

And while the historical and present-day (well, present day minus nine years) segments are wholly compelling, it’s Byrne’s future society that stands out as a massive achievement. Laviaja, described in a glossary in the back of the novel as a “global system of nomadic, subsidiaries, anarchist self-organization,” is fascinating both for the extent to which it’s described, as well as for its rather unique place in science fiction: It’s a society set in the aftermath of a massive, even apocalyptic event that seems like somewhere you’d want to live.

Admittedly, it’s also fundamentally different from our own society in a number of ways, from societal units to body modification, some of which come up over the course of the novel and some of which turn up in the glossary. And while this society feels thoroughly lived-in, it also doesn’t feel perfect—you can see why some people would chafe at their society’s prohibition on large traveling groups, for instance. And, more broadly, Byrne puts this into a larger context, making all three of this novel’s time periods feel as though they’re set in lived-in societies, with all of the flaws that that implies.

The Actual Star is not a book that engages in much hand-holding. Most of its readers will find themselves immersed in two cultures very different from the one with which they’re most familiar. But this novel bristles with ambition, asks unfamiliar questions, and has one of the most effective examples of worldbuilding you’re likely to see on a page this year. It meticulously shapes its own territory, and draws a new map of what the genre can do— while rooting that in its characters’ own investigations into the world.

TOR

The best science fiction and fantasy of 2021. 
Illustration: Maïté Franchi

 

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

A locked-room mystery, interstellar office politics, a masterful space opera and more

Adam Roberts
Friday 3 December 2021

Far from the Light of Heaven
by Tade Thompson (Orbit)
Space is vast but spaceships are by nature claustrophobic: Thompson plays cannily on that contrast. Passengers aboard the starship Ragtime are in suspended animation on their way to the distant planet Bloodroot, but 30 people have been murdered in their sleep. Thompson’s tale is cleverly plotted and tensely told as the investigating captain must work against her own crew, bio-contagion, violent robots and a demonic AI to uncover the murderer’s identity. The book does more than the description “locked-room mystery in space” suggests: not only wrong-footing the reader as its mystery unfolds, but creating a series of believable, compelling worlds with some genuinely alien aliens.

The Actual Star
by Monica Byrne (Voyager)
This ambitious, inviting novel ranges from the declining Mayan civilisation in the year 1012, via a storyline set in 2012 in Belize, to the year 3012, when humanity lives in “a global system of nomadic, anarchist self-organisation”. By “inviting” I mean that it offers itself to readers as a way of thinking how to move beyond what the novel calls the “four great evils: capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism”. Whether or not you agree that those are the four great evils, you will be swept into Byrne’s meticulously worked world-building by her compelling storytelling and rich prose. This is a book about the profound interrelations of past and present – the Mayan sections are marvels of vividly rendered research – and the hi-tech, mystical, sex-positive, post-climate-collapse diversitopia of its imagined future is simply extraordinary.

Cwen
by Alice Albinia (Serpent’s Tail)
Although in the last few decades there has been an almost pathological obsession with dystopia, utopian writing is a much older mode. Not that there’s any wishful thinking about Alice Albinia’s feminist community, set on an archipelago “somewhere off the east coast of England”. When the de facto leader leaves for the uninhabited island of Cwen, named for its presiding goddess, what she has achieved on the archipelago is picked apart. Albinia engages throughout with the difficulties of trying to work for something better than what we have: the inertias and frictions of our world, its resistance to emancipation. She combines this with a wonderful vision of Britain’s deep history of myth and matriarchy.

The Employees
by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (Lolli Editions)
The Six-Thousand interstellar spaceship is a workspace; this short novel’s characters are workers. “You’d probably say it was a small world,” one of the characters says, “but not if you have to clean it.” The arrival on board of a number of strange alien objects galvanises a jumble of mundane and transcendent memories and provocations: intensities of taste and touch, of smell and consciousness. The book owes something to the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (or to the film Andrei Tarkovsky made of it, Stalker), though its alien artefacts are more compelling, and the ship more recognisably a place of office politics and corporate-speak. Coolly but artfully written, The Employees is a remarkable piece of work.

Shards of Earth
by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)
Since 2015’s breakthrough Children of Time, in which humans encounter a species of sympathetically rendered, sentient spider, Tchaikovsky has consolidated his position as the finest purveyor of high-quality space opera around. His new series, The Final Architecture, kicks off with this masterly example: space battles, cosmic mystery, alien superstructures, a ragtag crew of humans and aliens piloting a battered but trusty ship. Earth has been transformed into a vast “flower” and destroyed in the process: the war with the mysterious Architects is not as over as people think. The story treads some familiar ground, but does so with an expert touch, and the whole is deft and clever, expansive and readable, all informed by Tchaikovsky’s superbly baroque imaginative fecundity.

THE GUARDIAN