Show Your Working

[mtvessel]

Jun 2020
Dark Eden - Chris Beckett – Corvus, 2012 (kindle edition)
* * *
I always think of Beckett as the social worker science fiction writer. All his previous stories have had an earth-based setting, albeit transformed by alien invasion, religious conflict or whatever, which allowed him to embed his characters' actions in a recognisable social matrix, giving them emotional weight. The pure science fictional location of this one, a planet alone in space without a neighbouring sun, perhaps explains why this lost colony story felt relatively thin to me, despite the interesting embedded critique of heroic saviour narratives. Though the similarities to a book that I really disliked didn't help.

The setting, though, is quite something. Eden is a planet in permanent darkness. Despite this, it has life - a luminescent ecosystem based on lantern trees that pump heat up from its (presumably) molten interior, with starflowers, woollybucks, six-armed monkeys, flutterbyes and more. And also humans - survivors of a colonisation mission gone wrong, who were told by their progenitors to wait by the landing area while they fetched help from Earth and who have been there for generations. The story is told mostly through the eyes of two of them: John Redlantern, a restless youth with dreams who chafes at the restrictions imposed by the elders, and Tina Spiketree, his more practically-minded friend. When John does something unforgivable and incurs the elders' wrath, Tina and other members of the community must decide whom to support.

In the absence of high-tech support equipment and readily available raw materials, the humans have devolved into a basic society consisting of Families, with the events of their arrival and the names of the original colonists preserved only in oral re-tellings at regular "Any Virsrys". Yes, language has devolved too - speech is basic and direct, with words repeated to give emphasis ("I was surprised surprised") and major misspellings ("landing veekle"), tropes that soon becomes annoying on frequent repetition. For me this was very reminiscent of Ridley Walker, though at least here the text is readable. Unfortunately, as with that book, the debasement of language has the effect of distancing the characters from the reader; the childish language is reflected in their personalities, making them somewhat immature and unlikeable. This is a pity, because for the most part, the depiction of the community is splendidly done - its organisation, politics and day-to-day activities are plausible, and the many characters are memorable. The loss of knowledge is perhaps a little overdone - I can't help thinking that the progenitors would have tried a bit harder to preserve the skills of writing, mathematics and technical knowledge in their offspring, given their obvious importance.

The other thing I would have liked more of was insight into the ecology of Eden. It's such as interesting idea to have life on a planet without a sun, but I struggled to understand how it could possibly have evolved. Presumably Eden was originally a normal planet that got kicked out of its orbit which means that there is a solar system nearby. I'd also like to know just how the lantern trees work. It's reasonable enough that the answers to these questions are not in the text given the state of knowledge of the colonists, but presumably Beckett has worked these details out and it's a shame that he couldn't find a way to show his working.