Beyond the Burn Line, Paul J. McAuley (Gollancz 978-1-39960-371-3, £22.00, 455pp, hc) September 2022.
This tale opens with a clerk, a young fellow pursuing a promising career in anthropology and geology, until one day, his mentor, a jolly Fezziwigg-type scholar, dies. So sad. The mentor had been investigating reports of strange lights in the sky and reports of visitors and ogres, and even a strange report of a map showing a strange alien figure standing twice as tall as the other figures around it. The clerk, named Pilgrim Saltmire, resolves to carry on his mentor’s work and find the actual map and solid accounts of the lights in the sky. This puts him at odds not only with the establishment philosopher-scientists who regard such reports as old wives’ tales, but a rapidly growing and ever-more-dangerous cult that doesn’t welcome independent investigation of their inner secrets. Pilgrim becomes involved in a tussle that leads to an unintentional death, and the village elders see an opportunity to rid themselves of this troublesome kid, and sends him off to a redemption colony in that world’s equivalent of Tierra del Fuego.
The culture and technology of Pilgrim’s time somewhat resembles that of late Georgian or early Victorian England. Scientific inquiry is mainly in the realm of dilettantes, although said dillies take it all very seriously. Most are investigating, along with natural history and paleontology, such things as “The Bears,” a world-spanning civilization that was brutal and violent and enslaved Pilgrim’s people until about 800 years before, when a mysterious virus drove all the bears mad and they utterly destroyed each other and their civilization. Only a relatively few rogue bears survive in the wilderness, and are considered quite dangerous to careless hikers.
Then there was the matter of “the burn line.” That happened some 800,000 years ago, and the geological record showed massive fires all over the world, and craters that glowed mysteriously at night and which local wildlife avoided. One theory held that ogres ran the world in those days, and the cataclysm that caused “the burn line” wiped them out. Pilgrim’s people aren’t human. Clearly the bears weren’t. Care to hazard a guess about the ogres? Tall, pale and furless. You might know someone like that.
Then about 300 pages into the tale, we jump 80 years forward. The Visitors have arrived, and are remaking the world. Technology has jumped about 200 years in those 80 years, causing considerable dislocation and resistance. Pilgrim’s people, while not pacifists, were non-aggressive, and have never fought a war. So they find more practical and less self-destructive ways of coping with the Visitors. But individuals carry on Pilgrim’s quest to discover if some Visitors had arrived before when the Visitors formally showed up at the end of part I, and to continue to search for that map. We do learn along the way that humans, well on their way to self-immolation, performed the equivalent of David Brin’s ‘Uplift,” bringing sapience to, among other lifeforms, bears and Pilgrim’s people.
The story reminds me, not unpleasantly, of Walter M. Miller Jr’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz.” No monks in evidence (not much religion at all, actually) but the same spirit of inquiry in hopes of solving mysteries and gaining knowledge based on the same set of facts and tales that span technological and cultural ages. It’s also a brilliantly constructed world, and the native characters are like us, but with generally subtle and understated differences that make it clear they aren’t human. I won’t spoil it by saying what they are. Not critical to the plot, but more fun for you to figure it out.
This is a subtle, sophisticated, and understated tale, one worth the attention of any serious reader.