Inverted World

This was a nice interlude between books 5 and 6 of the Dark Tower. I came to it through the Verge bookclub after discovering their discussion of Foucault's Pendulum in a podcast.

I enjoyed the concepts of this novel, but I found the end quite dissatisfying because it didn't tie up the main loose end of the disparate ageing. I can't go into more without spoiling it. The characters were rather thin, but in a sense this added to the idea that the City was the main character and it kept the book short, which appealed to me after the long Dark Tower books. It reminded me a little of another book that I read in book-club mode, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman: thin characters and time distortion. Looking back at my review of that, I gave it two stars. So this fared a little better.

This was probably a good book by 70s standards; it's still not a bad scifi and I did read it to the end (and the Grand Idea is captivating, though it had been redone several times since then); but for the modern reader, 50 years later, it also feels terribly slow, too straightforward and too dragged on - it was honestly a slug and I kept at it only for the explanation, which came too abruptly and too “told not shown”

I have sat down and contemplated about this book for a while now after finishing it. It's left me with a feeling of emptiness and has me saying “Now what?”. It starts off beautifully I think describing the routines and life in the city introducing us but not giving away fully the sense and motive behind the movement of the city. The story gets much more exhilarating after the 100 or so pages to the point of being overwhelming and shocking. The mysterious unnamed world in which the book takes place is quite fascinating and it's incredible the way it's described, it's very transportive. It puts us in the same boat as the main character we find out the mechanics, reasoning and science behind it along with him. I loved all the different geography with the challenges it provided and the operations that were required for running the city. It is not easy to let go of this world and the characters they will stay with you for a long time.

A city on rails that constantly needs to be moved to ‘stay at optimum'. The reasons for this are hidden from the major city population. The reader discovers the world together with the protagonist, who ventures into the past and the future of the city's pathway and slowly has to change his beliefs of what he thought reality was.

Amazing. Absolutely gripping even though there is not much action. Somehow it felt like Kōbō Abe's “The Woman in the Dunes” colliding with Greg Egan's “Incandescence”.

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Thus book has been around for a long time. I've been intending to read this book for nearly 40 years, but, for some reason, I've been putting it off. I can't say why I've been procrastinating; perhaps because I felt it would be a bit of a chore.

This book is quite readable and fits nicely into the “gosh-wow!” experience of good science fiction. Thus, we have a city - actually, a large building, being dragged on railways laboriously through a wasteland. The City of Earth moves on rails that are picked up from behind and put down in front of the city as it passes through a mostly empty landscape. The focal character is Helward Mann, to whom we are introduced in one of the great opening lines of science fiction: “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.” With that sentence, we are disoriented by a culture that exchanged distances for time.

In a way this is an early kind of “Young Adult Dystopian” novel, written before there was such a sub-genre. at 650 miles, Helward is about 18 years of age and has to choose the guild that he will enter. The elite guilds are secret and sworn to secrecy and are essential to the process of moving the city. Apprentices are tossed into working in the various guilds, where they learn the skills and knowledges of those guilds by on the job training, rather than education. Thus, we have the basic theme of the young person leaving childhood and entering into a conservative tradition that is unexplained to him and which he must accept simply because it is tradition. Even the choosing of the guilds resemble the choosing of a career with insufficient knowledge that is the experience of youth (and a mainstay in YA Dystopian fiction, e.g., Divergence and its “factions.”) In Helward's case, he chooses the “Future Surveyors” without knowing what they survey or why his father and other surveyors seem to be so much older than their fellow guildsmen.

The young guildsmen must also learn about the reason for their strange predicament by on the job training. As they learn about their world, we learn that they are fleeing a topographical and temporal menace just barely by inching their city across the landscape. There are dangling questions that present themselves to the attentive reader. For example, since the land they are traveling through is inhabited by Spanish speakers, where do these people come from and what happens to them when the topographical disaster overtakes them? Strangely, no one in the City is concerned with these questions; they view these inhabitants as fortunate sources of labor to be exploited to lay the track and provide breeding stock.

The Inverted World is also what Professor Gary K. Wolfe in his Great Courses series on Science Fiction calls a “wasteland” novel. Like Cormac McCarthy's “The Road”, the inhabitants of the City of Earth are trudging hopelessly through a strange wasteland for no reason other than to avoid the death behind them and, maybe, find a safe place in front of them. There has been a disaster, but it is not explained. The survivors eventually face a threat to their community when they are attacked from outside by natives and sapped from within by faction that has decided that the time has come to end the trek.

The book is structured in chapters that tell the story from Hellward's first person perspective, from a Helward-centric third-person perspective, and from a third person perspective involving another character. There is a conclusion to the book and an explanation for the mysteries, but we are faced with an even deeper mystery of whether that explanation - which contradicts Helward's lived experience - is the truth. We have reasons to accept both Helward's belief and the belief that explains some of the mysteries of the story.

This is a good book. It is not particularly fast moving, and perhaps to much time is taken up with Helward's learning the mechanics of removing tracks from the rear of the city, but this heightens the mystery, and, eventually, we are paid off with a picture of a topographical monstrosity of a world that rivals the best of world-building imagination, for all that it is probably an impossible picture. Helward himself seems to be distant and cold, but, frankly, it is the plot and the setting that move the story. This book really is a classic and deserves to be read.

Pulling a city along rail tracks for some strange but urgent reason, a community of people struggle to keep ahead of some un-named horror that those at the top wanted kept secret. The story started out innocently enough, then became strange and then weird before turning dangerous. At the end everything came unstuck with a final resolution that was very cleverly understated.