Nod Ghosh
A New Eden: Betaverse Trilogy (Book 1) by Menilik Henry Dyer (Podium, 2023), 298pp, $29; Taken by Alex Stone (Vanguard Press, 2023), 616pp, $50
Controlling and influencing others’ minds provides the premise for many a good story. Possession, brainwashing and telepathy often appear in literary pages or on screen. Science fiction additionally explores the technical manipulation of consciousness. These concepts entertain and terrify in equal measure. A New Eden and Taken feature different forms of mind invasion. These books will make you question what sentience, cognition and identity mean, human or otherwise.
Excerpts of Christchurch author Menilik Dyer’s A New Eden have appeared in a serialised chapter-a-week format on Royal Road, an online forum popular with role-playing game and science-fiction communities, garnering much interest. The story involves faster-than-light travel and terraforming—good fodder for space-based science fiction. But there’s more happening, much more.
A New Eden’s success with online readers may have been enhanced by the timing of its release. Its themes involve topics regularly covered in the media regarding recent scientific discoveries and speculations about the origins of life. Spectral signatures from a planet over a hundred light years away suggest the presence of plankton-like organisms. Embryos synthesised from stem cells show how primordial cells might self-assemble. These discoveries make the potential for life on the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ planets the protagonists discover far more plausible.
The protagonists, Trillion, Atlas, Icarus and Angelique, must escape from a Martian settlement. The Sol planetary system’s dominant Fermion party are blocking the search for distant habitable territory. The party’s ideological principles drive them to destroy anyone hoping to find new habitats. The travellers upload their consciousness to software that operates a corresponding simulant as they travel vast distances over long periods. We assume their physical bodies are cryopreserved, with the Noah’s Arc of embryos carried on board to seed new worlds with earth-like life. The characters are complex. They include ‘Ships’—artificial intelligence entities customised for each escaping character in their individual spacecraft. The Ships manipulate time perception for the benefit of each simulant, a particularly appealing feature.
It’s gratifying to discover a writer of Dyer’s generation paying homage to space sci-fi from a bygone era. In naming Trillion and with subtle use of the number 42, the author evokes Douglas Adams’s Trillian and other elements from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dyer mentions Halo games and ringworlds, which appear to reference Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s The Ballad of Halo Jones from the 2000AD comics of the 1980s. The story also reflects aspects of The Matrix and Alien movie franchises.
One could take the characters (and their flaws) at face value, as they make errors, but there’s an implication the narrators are unreliable. Clues include their blasé attitude towards wanton destruction and deus ex machina battle scenes. The simulants consume food and drink, or is that too a simulation? Perhaps the Fermions are more adept than they seem at keeping humanity confined to the ‘metaverse’—an artificial environment where people upload their consciousness with the promise of immortality while remaining confined to earth.
The next part of the trilogy, A New God, will reveal whether the foreshadowing heralds ominous outcomes. Readers are promised that they will also discover what happens to the elusive fourth protagonist, Angelique.
Waiheke Island author Alex Stone’s Taken is a stand-alone novel, though this mammoth-sized tome could easily have been split into a series of three. At over 600 pages, Taken is unexpectedly long for a debut novel. It claims to be the first novel ever written in first-person elephant, a fact that is likely difficult to verify. Whether it is the prototype or not, the story will delight and haunt readers.
The premise is that four narrating elephants want to be listened to. They inhabit different eras and locations, but each needs to have their voice heard. Three enter the thoughts of Hannibal Solo, an African elephant living in a retreat in Kentucky in the present day. Hannibal has his own story too. His drama is interwoven with other characters’ tales, including a human called Cat, who researches elephant subsonic communication. There’s Caroll, another African elephant rescued from a traumatic life. She is recalcitrant, with a penchant for amalgamating expletives with cloud formations: ‘Cirro-fucking-stratus’. We never discover why, but this only adds to Caroll’s mystique as she acclimatises to her new surroundings and becomes more likable.
Hannibal’s interlopers want their voices heard, and what wonderful voices they are. Biligiri, an Indian elephant involved in a nineteenth-century military excursion to Africa, enters the story with this opening line: ‘Goats, we don’t talk to, them being so decidedly inferior to us.’ His narrating style is ornate, reflecting his pomposity, though this, along with his circumlocution, diminishes as the story progresses.
Biligiri’s story includes a part-fictionalised account of the British expedition to Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) in 1868, allegedly to liberate hostages held by Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros. The story incorporates historical figures such as New Zealander Captain Tristram Charles Speedy (1836–1911). There is a representative from the British Museum in the group, and the operation is followed by overt looting, suggesting liberating hostages may not have been the only incentive for the attack. Pulmulla is an Indian elephant recruited to work in the forests of the Congo with three others in 1879. We discover the hardships they face—they are subject to cruelty spurred by mad ambition. Tant-Meisie is an Indian elephant touring Southern Africa with a circus in the 1950s. She speaks of the pain of solitude but later accepts she’s part of a human family.
As the novel progresses, there is a softening. For example, the voices Hannibal hears initially disturb him, but his attitude changes until he cares for his mind-invaders. There are other transformations. The protagonists initially view certain characters with indifference but grow to love them.
Stone gives much thought to language. There is a reference to a silent language used by Tant-Meisie’s mahout to communicate with her. The elephants’ names are intriguing and confer musicality to the page, even though we are told the monikers that humans use are not the creatures’ true names.
The author’s original use of language is demonstrated not only by the characters’ distinctive voices but also by his creative wordplay. The beautiful conversation Pulmulla’s group has with a sea mammal when they are forced to swim illustrates Stone’s innovative skills. The creature asks, ‘Concurdrahlah boenjuntallry. Weompun weompun rolloforshing?’ These sounds demonstrate Stone’s inventive approach to the noise of language. If the words have hidden meanings, I haven’t discovered them. I prefer to think the author doesn’t shy away from using words that don’t appear in any human language or have yet to be invented. The character Captain Speedy is equally inventive when describing the emperor: ‘a man irreachable (is that a word, for if it is not, then by my oath I’ll invent it right here)’.
Poetic writing brings energy to the mundane. When Biligiri speaks of dust in the air, he notes, ‘the dust … enveloping us like the softest cloth, a sari of new circumstance’. Queen Victoria is also referred to in a surprising way, as when it’s stated her ‘picture is bandied about almost pornographically’.
On meeting Cat’s daughter Debbie, Hannibal Solo muses: ‘I can also scent the child: she smells of cinnamon and high-jinks and laughter to come.’ The elephants’ observations are often enlivened with figurative language, occasionally bordering on synaesthetic. Hannibal perceives Cat’s scent as resembling ‘sour persimmons (very unlike her in normal circumstances)’ as he turns remorseful about how he has behaved towards her.
When Biligiri refers to the chimes of Big Ben, he notes: ‘The British officers remind us … this sound marks … the resolute progress of civilisation, and pre-eminence of … empire.’ Here, as in other places, an implicit irony mocks the supercilious tone adopted by those speaking of the old colonial order.
Although it isn’t always clear what ‘rules’ determine how different species communicate, there are some moving interactions between creatures. For example, Biligiri has an in-depth conversation with Demelza, a philosophical pigeon, which evokes Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Pulmulla narrates: ‘Our knowledge of history is incomplete … a natural consequence of it living still and re-writing itself as it breathes. Constant reinvention is our experience of how human history works.’ This statement confirms an important concept in this saga, which fictionalises some real events. Hannibal Solo muses about Cat’s family folklore regarding how she was conceived and asks, ‘How many retellings turn a tale into fiction?’ Both demonstrate the fragility of truth.
Taken tells us about Emperor Tewodros’s reign and the sad life of his son, who was rescued or appropriated by people outside his community. We learn about travelling circuses in the 1950s and elephant physiology, including the copious amount of pachyderm pus produced when draining an abscess.
Unless the reader is well-versed in relevant history, some background reading is warranted. An episode involving a voyage to Australia in the seventeenth century might otherwise prove hard to follow. Reading more about a character called Willem de Vlamingh clarifies the section concerned. For the most part, this is not a book for readers who wish to be spoon-fed history without investing any effort. The author provides 20 pages of references for those compelled to learn more.
The book features illustrations and raises the question of which came first. Did Stone find relevant images to illustrate the stories, or was there a degree of ekphrasis, drawing on the illustrations? And does Taken need to be so long? It is an ambitious project covering many topics. The New Zealand land wars may have warranted a book in their own right. However, the former New Zealand resident Captain Speedy finds parallels between what has happened in his former home and events witnessed in Africa.
The novel expands on one of the author’s award-winning short stories, and Stone incorporates two other existing short fiction pieces into the text. Although these enlighten the reader about an event that occurred during the 1904 Olympics and the aforementioned Willem de Vlamingh, perhaps these pieces would be better served by their own independent novels.
Stone’s writing can be verbose, with liberal use of adverbs compared with authors who have had adverb verbosity tutored out of them at writing school. But then again, how can the reader object to appropriate adverbs, as in the sentence: ‘He puffs furiously on his pipe’? This is used to describe a character who exudes the scent of ‘bittersweet lifelong disappointment’. How could such a character suck his pipe but in a furious way?
Bulky writing comes with obstacles. Long texts are unwieldy. Continuity errors creep in. These ought to have been addressed by Vanguard Press’s copy-editors, along with the untied loose ends, the odd typographical error and stray apostrophe. But none of this detracts from the fact that this book is a gem. Perhaps we need the ‘dough’ of dense storytelling to fully appreciate the highlights in Stone’s writing, which appear like morsels of delicious fruit.
In conclusion, various threads in the narrative offer a critique on animal abuse, colonialism and imperialism—including the acquisition of artifacts by those who see this as their inalienable right. Perhaps it essentially is a book about taking something one shouldn’t. Perhaps the central theme in Dyer’s book is similar, where those in authority harness and control the spirit and will of others.
NOD GHOSH is the Ōtautahi Christchurch-based author of the short-fiction works The Crazed Wind (2018), Filthy Sucre (2020), Toy Train (2021), Love, Lemons and Illicit Sex (2023), all published by Truth Serum Press; as well as Throw A Seven (2023) from Reflex Press and The Two-Tailed Snake (2023) from Fairlight Books.
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