Untold generations after abandoning a dying Earth, humanity now endures in a fleet of vast ships. In one ship’s Hold, where chained menial laborers live out their sunless days, a boy with a talent for drawing catches the eye of the upper decks. Fitted with an electronic anklet instead of a crude chain, the boy is sent up to university. There, along with a likewise-ankeleted professor, he learns more about the realities of their world and, drawing on the Practice he learned in the Hold, comes to challenge them.
It’s becoming something of a refrain for me—I keep thinking the generation ship story is dead, or ought to be, and then along comes another amazing one. In The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar has given us a wonderful bit of science fiction that rewards close reading—lyric and mythic, but also densely realized. Compassionate, engaging, and slyly funny, the novella is also a resounding parable on oppression, the thin fiction of the middle class, and the ties that do—or at least could—unite us.
I’m continually impressed by Samatar’s command of atmosphere—a painter’s skill at capturing light, an unusually rewarding attention to scent and touch, and a generative sense for how mood suffuses space. Though not as sprawling as The White Mosque or her astonishing Olondrian novels—it’s fascinating to see Samatar’s abilities at long and short forms, which have previously felt almost distinct to me, so perfectly balanced here—The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain is infused with that quality. Moving from the Hold to the upper levels, the boy feels the difference in the walls, in the air; in other scenes the blue anklets add “a subtle, silvery tone to the atmosphere” and the professor can feel the “ease and elasticity” in a room of colleagues and students. It’s worth noting that Samatar, with Kate Zambreno, has recently published a book on this elusive technique (Tone), and its use here goes a long way towards humanizing and realizing a science-fictional setting that otherwise might feel sterile, abstract, or rote.
This is a mature, subtle work, and it’s also fascinating how it seems to be distilling and engaging with YA tropes. The basic outline matches up: the dystopian world, the youthful challenger, the caste system. It’s particularly interesting how The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain deals with names. Only the upper class get proper names, our main characters remaining simply “the boy” and “the woman,” and the judicious use of capitalized words—“the Hold,” “the Practice”—reinforces the feeling of a simplified story. But it is also a complex one, with layers of satire, humor, and a deep and thoughtful ethics. Science fiction readers will find fruitful parallels here with Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, and, in its moral clarity, a resonance with Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness. The novella’s thematic concerns recommend it to anyone interested in prison abolition, workers’ rights, and perhaps even Christian socialism—with its nuanced and foundational consideration for the humanity of the suffering, its clear-eyed critique of the designed brutality of class structure, and its conception of salvation in community, this had me reaching for Richard Rorty’s “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes,” on reading the New Testament alongside The Communist Manifesto.
While the boy’s story begins in the Hold, with its obvious parallels to slavery and the carceral system, most of the novella’s action takes place in and around the university, a setting particularly rich for tragicomic social commentary. The woman’s point of view often feels like an insider’s lament for academia, brimming with unavoidable humor and cynic despair, from the pitch-perfect academic language to the tape on her computer’s power cord. On the one hand, we see how the irreverent rituals of academic study, with its tawdry connections to office-and-budget politics, can sap the vitality of living traditions even in trying to name them. On the other, more ambivalently and more enraging, we see how the instincts for justice and righteousness are diverted into side channels and backwaters, the better to keep the superstructure’s pilings safe. It does matter what we call our departments and our theories, but there’s this moment where the woman realizes that she has devoted years and unquantifiable energy to that, rather than to material succor for those literally in chains, hungry, in the cold. It’s a stunning indictment of misprioritization; it’s uncomfortable, and badly needed, and it still doesn’t invalidate the woman’s studies—what we shape in the air, in our imagination, can become reality.
In its “Weightless” characters—the upper class, who have neither chains nor anklets—The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain also offers a devastating critique of liberal hypocrisy. It’s fantastically understated—I was constantly circling back to sentences that work perfectly well for surface-level plot and description, but are lined with razor satire. When the boy talks with Dr. Angela—one of the good ones; she surely thinks so—she’s keen to share with him what she knows about him, what she understands. And the boy understands her unspoken desire as an order:
“Dr. Angela’s particular demand was for an easy camaraderie and warmth. She liked him to agree with her, to laugh, and to shake his head incredulously, as if astonished by how much she knew about him, so he obeyed while she told him things about himself. He thought of it as feeding her. And her face swelled and brightened, as if she were actually eating.”
While the boy intuits these power differentials, with their shades of racial politics and other forms of condescending “equality,” the woman—the professor—has cultivated a protective blindness towards them. So it’s on us, the readers, to wince as her advisor, Dr. Gil, takes and warps her ideas, subtly reinforcing power structures both interpersonally and theoretically. It’s only when Gil’s mask slips in the last act that she, and we, can really see the truth about these powerful “allies”—that the rage of the privileged at being inconvenienced outweighs any concern they might otherwise voice for the dignity, even for the lives, of the lower classes. Published only days before Columbia University and other academic institutions—supposed bastions of liberal diversity—called in the cops on peacefully protesting students and faculty, the novella’s condemnation of hollow tokenism and authoritarian violence lands all the harder now.
The world The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain builds in the oral traditions of the chained is compelling—deep dreams, traces of the Book of Revelation, a dignity and a sense of care that has survived generations of oppression. There’s a faint echo of “Dem Bones” here: the childhood rhyme, the prophetic vision. And I think, if one listens closely, there’s also strains of “Workers of the World Unite.” We have nothing to lose but our chains. As good as Samatar is at evoking material conditions—the literal fetters of the Hold, the structural barriers of the university—the titular Horizon is a reminder to think beyond them, to think more broadly, even when we’re physically or socially constrained.
Yet part of the novella’s genius is that it reminds us that our commonality also lies in those shared chains: in our shared precarity, our scars from the same machine. The chains of the Hold and the blue anklets of the university are also, it turns out, a source of strength, and the semi-mystic Practice is not an attempt to transcend or escape the body so much as to anchor oneself in it, as a step towards looking outward. This story ends on a note of triumph—a carefully timed moment that renders an otherwise realistic work almost fable-like in its potency—but it wants more for its characters than to rise, to succeed, to merely become the next guards or the next masters. In a genre crowded with solitary Chosen Ones and technobabble solutions that only prop up the status quo, The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain closes with a vision of radical and radicalizing solidarity.
FICTION
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
by Sofia Samatar
Tordotcom
Published April 16th, 2024
