The Heavens

The Heavens is a book that is by turns confusing, compelling and frustrating. Confusing because the structure is a bit hard to follow, with multiple timelines slipping in and out of view....but hang on, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning.

Kate lives in New York in the year 2000, but not the New York that we know. This is a world where there is no war, where a Green senator named Chen is about to become the first woman President, and where the UN has landed on Mars. Kate meets Ben at a party hosted by the fabulously wealthy Sabine. Ben is entranced but doesn't know what to make of this rich girl with an interest in left wing politics and who doesn't seem to actually DO anything.

Kate is a dreamer. Literally. In her dreams she travels in time back to 16th Century England where she inhabits the body of a woman called Emilia. But the really odd thing occurs when Kate wakes up - for the world has changed subtly. And she doesn't know how to fix it. And she keeps seeing visions of a dead, destroyed city.

This is the premise of The Heavens. Can Kate save the world before it burns? Are the things she dreams actually altering reality? Because only she can remember her “real world” when she awakes. Either that or she's going insane.

So is this a New York love story, a time travel novel or a bit of both? Yes. And no. Ben and Kate's relationship is damaged by Kate's dreams, because Ben thinks she is going crazy. She gets upset when people don't remember the world as she did. As time goes on the changes get more and more extreme. There is war in Afghanistan. Gore is President. Then Bush. 9/11 happens. Each time the world gets a little bit worse, shifts closer to the dead, burnt city.

I'll admit that the first half of the book was a bit meh, a bit okay where is this going? But it kicks into gear just past the halfway point as Kate's desperation to “fix” things makes for a compelling conclusion. Her dream life is extremely well done and I preferred that to the socialite New York bits, which seemed more unreal than the dreams.

I'm not sure that it's totally successful in what it sets out to do. Is it satirical? Speculative? Dystopian? In the end it's a love story. A well written mess, perhaps. It's good, we'll worth a read, but not something I'll return to. Hence the three stars.

This book mixes several genres, including romance, fantasy, and science fiction, into its story. The gist of the story is that Ben meets Kate in approximately 2000 New York at the party of a wealthy Left-Wing political organizer. Kate is a kind of manic pixie dream girl of “Persian-Turkish-Hungarian” extraction, and Ben is “half Bengali, half Jewish.”

These things matter if you are trying to increase your points for “representation.”

Before you know it, Ben, who is working on a doctorate in geology, moves in with Kate.[1] Ben learns that Kate has a history of dreaming that she visits a medieval world called “Albion.” We soon learn that Kate is traveling in her dreams to the time of Good Queen Bess. While there, she is the courtesan of a wealthy noble and has an affair with “Sad Will.”

Of course, you know who “Sad Will” is.

Strangely, in Kate's, Shakespeare is unknown, having died in 1603 without writing any plays.
In her dreams, Kate intervenes with Shakespeare, who doesn't die in 1603. Instead, Shakespeare goes on to write plays that are remembered in Kate's time.

Unfortunately, the more Kate intervenes with Shakespeare, the more things get screwed up in her own time. Originally, she spoke French, and the Louisiana Purchase was made in the 1930s. Also, the president in 2000 was a Green Party candidate who danced in the streets with stereotypical ethnic votes that the Left trots out as props at speeches. As time goes on, Gore replaces President Chen and, then, nightmare! President Bushitler becomes President in time for 9/11, which is not the multicultural utopia Kate started in.

Kate's life takes a tumble. Everyone thinks she's crazy because her memories are different than what they should be. Ben leaves her. One friend stops being a brave, counter-cultural icon of diversity, inclusion, and equity and becomes a hooker....I mean, “sex worker.” Kate's parents' divorce. Her father disappears. Her brother is completely erased from history. Kate ends up becoming pregnant with the child of a gay home garden designer, although, in the original timeline, that was a role played by someone else.

Then we discover that a lot of people have this time-travel experience. Shakespeare had been traveling back to help Alexander the Great conquer Asia. Kate herself meets someone who claims that he is from a future where Kate becomes an influential community organizer.
But like her own personal life, it is all leading to total worldwide disaster.

How does it end?
 
 Who knows. We aren't told.

This book is in the nature of a fantasy-romance. We have romantic angles played out in the present and in the past. There is a typical romance trope of misunderstanding and miscommunication. No one understands what Kate is going through because no one believes she is going through it. Shakespeare understands initially, but at some point, he doesn't and cruelly rejects her. Kate's life is mostly about helping Shakespeare live up to her potential.

The book is more like a fantasy, e.g., travel through dreams. In the final part of the book, there is an information dump that explains that something incomprehensible-but scientific-happened in the future to cause this cascading of time-traveling identities through time. However, that is all mumbo-jumbo and hand-waving.

This book speaks to the feminization of science fiction. The main character does not have much autonomy. She mostly rolls along with the changes and spends no time trying to figure out a solution to her problem. The most science fiction part of the story-the future collapse of civilization-is shunted to the side.

For all that, it is not a bad book. It is well-written, and I enjoyed watching the changes occurring around Kate. I think this might be made into an entertaining movie. If your tolerance for romance is higher than mine, and given the success of Outlander, time-travel romance is very popular, then you will rate this book higher than I do.

A final point about “representation.” I have seen several reviews on YouTube that make “representation” a separate category along with plot and character. It seems to matter to people to know that there are X many gay characters or X many black characters and how they are portrayed.
I think that kind of bean counting is silly at best and regressive at worst. Why not bean count based on religion? How about hair color? How is the representation of Republicans? Bean counting is simply a way of politicizing the discussion to one side's advantage by defining what beans get counted.

But if we play the “representation” bean counting game, we might want to note some of the underrepresented groups that the bean counters ignore, such as “Americans.”

In this book, there are no positive portrayals of any non-leftist American. All the characters are Leftwing and, as such, are assumed to be Good People. On the other hand, toward the end of the book, the wealthy Leftwing political organizer invests in West Virginia to turn West Virginia purple.
We get these kinds of observations:

 It was in West Virginia, in an ex–coal region. For hundreds of miles around, the people were white, xenophobic, open carry, evangelical. Sabine had bought the neighborhood to test-drive a strategy for turning poor red states into swing states by talking to every single person there.
Newman, Sandra. The Heavens: A Novel (p. 234). Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition.

And:

 “White privilege is kind of my cocaine.” Then she talked about privilege, self-castigatingly, gloomily, and fell silent. Ben turned the radio on. They listened to a Christian station denouncing the Red Cross as Satanic. On the hills, billboards began to appear, which exhorted them to protect America and scolded them about the horrors of abortion. Meanwhile, the sun went down in fits and starts. Long after night appeared to have fallen, they would crest a hill and find another purple remnant of dusk backlighting the farther trees, while the people on the radio quoted Isaiah and assured each other that they, too, had at first found it hard to believe.
Newman, Sandra. The Heavens: A Novel (p. 238). Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition.

How nuanced! No stereotypes here! No treating a diverse native culture as the Other by imposing a parochial contemptuous colonizing attitude on the Natives.

Sure, one could find these elements in this culture, but then one can find cliches and expected stereotypes in any culture. But the culture that Newman and Leftwing urban characters come from - and with the DEI bean counters reflect - is supposed to be above and better than this kind of racist/colonializing stereotyping.
 
 Unless it fits the prejudice of the Good People who live in the vibrant and diverse culture they approve of.[2]

Newman blames the West Virginians she characterizes as “xenophobic” without realizing that she is afflicted by the same disease. She suffers from xenophobia, except the “xenos” in her case are people living in the rural areas of her own country. We can call her xenophobia “oikophobia.” [3]

This book did not sell itself to me. The smug contempt of her attitude to the Other Americans did not help.

Footnotes:

[1] The doctorate in Geology is an unfired Chekhov's gun. It is mentioned and then forgotten. It has nothing to do with the story, although since this is nominally a science fiction story, it probably should have. If you are an experienced science fiction reader, a degree in science is a road flare.

[2] After Trump's 2016 victory there was some interest by some Leftists in determining what had gone wrong and why they were so out of touch with so much of America. This was a short-lived genre since Leftists determined that the answer was that Trump had stolen the election with Russian help. However, one of the better entries in this mini-genre was White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America by Joan C. Williams. Williams acknowledged that there was a class difference with the Left constituting the “Professional Managerial Elites” and the unwashed deplorables constituting the “White Working Class.” The PME despised the WWC on the level of social class. It is now June 2024 and the polling in the Trump-Biden election indicates that the four years of Biden have exacerbated this difference with even larger percentages of the working class of ALL races favoring Trump. The PME has attempted to racialize the issue but it appears that class is overtaking that effort.

[3] “Oikophobia” is the fear or hatred of one's own culture. The term was coined by British philosopher Roger Scruton in 2004, in his book England and the Need for Nations, who called oikophobia “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.'“

But is this really what's going on? Do we think that Newman or her Good People think that the unwashed Christian, White Xenophobes of West Virginia are part of her culture? I don't think she does. They might be content to see this culture wiped out by a plague, which is why she may be so disinterested in the coming end of the world...