Celestial Matters
by Richard Garfinkle
What a good idea for a novella. Adopt all the conventions of "hard" science fiction—the venturesome scientist who is nearly always right but becomingly doubts himself, the guys who want to misuse science or don't understand it, the outside menace that has to be fought while the hero puts his misguided friends right, the digressive and explanatory narrative mode, the supportive girl—but choose a system of knowledge different from our Newtonian/Einsteinian/Roddenberrian system.
Here the key character is Aias, a historian turned physicist; the girl, a Cherokee named Yellow Hare; the outside menace, Middlers; the dullards, the military junta that rules Aias' country. The system of knowledge is Aristotle's physics brought forward a few centuries.
The exposition covers some basic facts about the Aristotelian universe: An object in motion remains in motion as long as a force impels it. The Sun, Moon, stars and planets move on spheres centered on the Earth. Lunar matter doesn't fall down because it belongs in the sky. The Sun is on fire. Life arises spontaneously in decaying matter. The history of the Hellenic empire gets a rather briefer treatment, just enough to establish that since Aristotle enough time has passed for scientists and engineers to advance their knowledge to the level needed for the story (they can spontaneously generate cattle now). You could get dizzy from all these affronts to "Western" scientific knowledge, but you won't, because Garfinkle introduces them gently and makes them integral to what is happening to Aias.
Wait, a Cherokee? Right, or anyway that's what I make of the word Xeroki; Greek doesn't have a native letter for CH. (A quibble here, though: Cherokee doesn't use that sound either. The people call themselves Tsilagi, and Greek speakers are perfectly able to handle that initial TS sound. Well, I said it was a quibble.) The empire has spread across the ocean, and why not? Anyway, she's a Spartan by oath and training.
The empire has long been warring with the Middlers—the Middle Kingdom, China—where a totally different kind of non-Western science holds. So Aias flies his ship to the Sun, and so forth. I said it was a good idea for a novella, but the work is an entire novel, and in my view the concept doesn't support the scope of it. Somewhere around Chapter Lambda you get saturated with what begin to seem like cute tricks rather than insights into science in fiction. How many ways will the tethered bag of Sunfire jerk the Lunar-matter ship around and break pieces off it before the intrepid crew gets home?
Garfinkle did better than most anyone else would have with this demanding material. Still, the book doesn't hold up. Too bad.
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Celestial Matters