Review: The Folded Sky, by Elizabeth Bear
| Series: |
White Space #3 |
| Publisher: |
Saga Press |
| Copyright: |
June 2025 |
| ISBN: |
1-6680-7812-0 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
483 |
The Folded Sky is a far-future space opera and a fairly direct
sequel to Ancestral Night, but with a
different protagonist. You do not need to have a vivid memory of the
previous book to read this one. It is somewhere around Elizabeth Bear's
31st (!) novel, depending on how one counts and what one includes.
Sunyata Song is an archinformist, which is sort of an archaeologist, sort
of a librarian, and sort of a historian. She recovers, decodes, and
organizes information so that it can be preserved and made usefully
available. As the book opens, she is, after an exceedingly long white
space journey in an actively hostile ship with a (to Sunya at least) an
atavistically off-putting crew, reaching her goal: a vast artifact that I
won't describe further to avoid any spoilers for Ancestral Night.
She is eager to get to work, an eagerness that is both heightened and made
more anxious by the discovery that her academic rival and abusive ex has
arrived before her. The pirate attack doesn't help, nor (at least at
first) does the surprise appearance of her wife and kids.
The opening of this book is a lot of infodumping mixed with nearly
stream-of-consciousness emotional dumping. The style shift in this series
continues to surprise me; previously, Elizabeth Bear books avoided reader
hand-holding to the point of bafflement if you weren't paying close
attention. Not here. The Folded Sky takes the shift perhaps too
far, and I almost stalled out at the start of this book when Sunya's
near-constant self-conscious litany and analysis of fears and concerns
started feeling like whining.
The book picks up considerably after the attempted murder.
About a third of the way through, The Folded Sky feels like it's
settling into a recognizable subgenre of murder mystery except set in the
far future with fascinating technology and aliens. There has been an
attempted murder on a closed station besieged by pirates. There is a law
enforcement officer present, but they don't have a lot of investigative
experience. For various reasons, Sunya decides to start poking around
while being conscious she has no idea what she's doing. The bumbling
detective is a common trope, so I thought that was where the story was
headed.
It is, sort of. There is a mystery and Sunya is involved in solving it.
But that's only a small fraction of what's going on, and by the end of the
book the plot has shifted firmly back to the genre of space opera, with a
side note of family... drama is the wrong word. Whatever one would call a
story about raising a rebellious teenager while trying very hard to not
turn conflicts into actual drama.
I am fascinated by the characterization of this book. Sunya is something
of an emotional mess, but Bear doesn't use that fact in the ways that I
would normally expect. Similar to Ancestral Night, I finished this
book thinking that The Folded Sky is primarily an examination of
rightminding, but a more subtle one than the previous novel.
Rightminding is a central technology of the White Space series, and I
suspect its intended thematic core. Humans in this civilization are
equipped with near-universal implants that allow conscious manipulation of
one's neurotransmitters and thus emotional state, either by the wearer or
by a helpful nearby AI. The fox, the implant used to accomplish this,
comes with some other features such as sensory recordings and the ability
to load ayatanas (James White–style
personality recordings to provide some bit of necessary expertise), but
rightminding is its primary and most frequently-used function. It is the
critical technology that allowed humans to break out of cycles of endless
war and join the other peaceful inhabitants of the galaxy in a shared
civilization.
The name is (intentionally, I assume) Orwellian because Bear knows that
many readers, particularly those from the US who have been steeped in
simplistic libertarian ideas, will find the idea profoundly creepy. (This
was a major plot point in Grail.) This
book is not the argument for the technology, though; Bear dealt with that
in Ancestral Night. This book is a look at its practical messiness
for a person who needs a lot of psychological support.
Sunya is anxious, prone to catastrophizing, hates surprises, has some
PTSD-style symptoms around space habitats due to earlier trauma, and is
also dealing with the unwelcome reappearance of her ex-girlfriend who
stole her work. Her first-person narration tends towards insecurity and
anxiety spirals, and in another book this might signal an unreliable
narrator. In this book, though, there are no dramatic emotional
revelations or backstory twists the way there were in Ancestral
Night, and the resolution of her troubled relationship with her daughter
only partly hinges on plot developments. Instead, Sunya muddles through,
with a lot of self-analysis, help from her fox, and a great deal of
support from her wife.
This makes it sounds like the emotional mess at the start of the book is
left unresolved at the end, but that's not true at all. The muddling
through works! Sunya keeps doing things that I thought were foreshadowing
some catastrophe, but she knows herself better than the reader does. Bear
largely avoids the sudden ruptures that are normally used to resolve
emotional problems in fiction. Instead, Sunya spends a lot of time and
energy working on her thinking and her relationships while trying to be
ethical and useful, and those efforts slowly bear fruit.
I'm worried this makes the book sound boring; rest assured that it isn't.
This emotional subplot is only an undercurrent in the novel, and the main
plot has enough weird science, alien aliens, and space opera drama to
satisfy my page-turning desires.
I'm focusing on the emotional arc in this review because I find it so
unusual and so oddly compelling, particularly in retrospect. This is not
how one normally does emotional development in a novel. Sunya's fox and
rightminding aren't even the focus except when the pirates express their
typical libertarian disgust for the idea. Rightminding is an entirely
normal part of Sunya's life that she relies on. It doesn't solve all of
her problems, but it gives her a foundation from which to tackle them in
the slow and frustrating and inconsistent way that is required outside of
novels, via a long series of small decisions to be the person she wants to
be.
I think The Folded Sky will be more hit and miss for readers than the
other books of this series. Sunya was, for me at least, a much harder
character to like early in the book, and it takes quite a while for the
plot to get going. But this is one of those books that I've not stopped
thinking about since I finished it. I think it makes a fascinating pair
with Ancestral Night. The first book makes the philosophical
argument for rightminding, and this book shows the practical reality with
all of its messiness. The Synarche has some significant flaws (including
the status of AIs, which is another interesting subplot), but it's a
workable system.
It feels rare to read a science fiction novel that shows this level of
messiness without pairing it with an argument for radical change, and as
frustrating as it was to read in places, I am intrigued by the overall
effect. Sometimes acknowledging problems and working on them within an
existing framework works.
Followed by a book tentatively titled Shipwreck Star that does not
yet have a release date.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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