/lit/ - Literature

>>22250160
The Artifice of Eternity - Aaron H. Arm (2023)

The Artifice of Eternity is a technically proficient book about human nature, society, family, and religion. After solving many critical problems on Earth, the world's wealthiest and most influential man decides that problem of humanity is intractable and personally selects four thousand, including himself, to begin an intentionally planned civilization with the ideal culture on another planet.

What I expected from this book was a science fiction novel primarily about settling a new planet with the hope of it being a utopia and that it didn't work out as they thought it would. Instead I got a Christian allegory of ambiguous meaning. I greatly enjoyed East of Eden, which was a biblical retelling, but this isn't that. The book's description says it's called Project Exodus and the planet is Eden, but even given that I underestimated how religiously oriented it would be. That's strange because the organizers of the project intentionally excluded the religious. Maybe that's why they were oblivious to the bible verses intrusively added into their dialogue. The verses were relevant and explanatory for the events of the story, but surely there could've been a better way. I was baffled when one character asked the other to meet them at Numbers xx:xx and it wasn't commented upon, though if the character had, I would think they would've declined the meeting.

The book's title and the name of the spaceship, Byzantium, are from the W.B. Yeats poem, Sailing to Byzantium. That's not the only similarity to Dan Simmon's Endymion. There were other science fiction novels that came to mind, but they were either ones that I didn't enjoy or that I think were failed attempts to do as they had. There are others references as well that I thought were a bit too blatant for their content, or as some would say, on-the-nose. I couldn't help but roll my eyes about the Erinyes, and a few others.

There's a major plot point that's been done in the Hyperion Cantos, Dune, Revelation Space, and several other series. It was both an inevitable conclusion for the story and entirely out of place. What I mean by that is that I felt like I was reading two different narratives. One was a family saga about life on a newly settled planet for ideological reasons and how everyone adjusted to the difficulties resulting from that. I would've enjoyed this more if that's all it was about. The other was a metaphysical, religious, and political allegory about how humanity is fallen and cannot escape themselves. The story puts forth that there was only one possible way to return to Eden. All others would be left behind. I found these two ideals being together to be both incongruent and underdeveloped in how they were presented. Worse yet, I found the latter to be nonsensical.

Rating: 2.5/5

I received this DRC from Cosmic Egg Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, through NetGalley