Review: Dark Orbit

Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dark Orbit's striking cover, strong promotional buzz, and positive reviews and recommendations (Ursula le Guin wrote the cover blurb) had me very excited when this book finally came into the library. It doesn't quite live up to the hype, but it certainly strives to some high expectations and in a shoot-for-the-moon situation, it lands pretty solidly in the "good sci-fi" category.

I really wanted this book to be as good as the hype, and as I read it, I really wanted it to be as good as it could be - as good as it SHOULD be. There are so many elements of great story and character and world-building here that are all dragged down or unsupported by clunky prose that does little more than move the story along and surface-level explorations of wide-reaching, deep ideas. The novel is about exploration and knowledge in a very broad sense, attacking and deconstructing the very ways we learn and experience the world as the characters explore a new planet and unexpectedly deal with a First Contact situation. The feel of the story incorporates le Guin's anthropological bent, the whimsy and sly humor of Charles Stross, and a lot of science and even plot points from Peter Watts' Blindsight (the main character is on a First Contact mission with the soon-impossible job of reporting on the crew to their bosses, and one character literally experiences blindsight). But it falls short of the methodological thoroughness of le Guin, the connectedness and consistency of Stross, and the rigor of Watts (though that last is not necessarily a bad thing).

So, the problems. On the surface level, there's a lot of dialogue devoted to one-liners, interchangeable comments that don't feel driven by any sort of character motivation, and the unnecessary device of italicizing half the book to indicate it's a different speaker. The main plot of the book is solid, but there are a lot of threads that feel unfocused and loose or only appear when the author remembers them, like the tension between Sara and Atlabatlow, Thora's history, and their actual original mission and the rest of the people on the ship who still want to accomplish that mission (Sara never once actually completes her ostensible job on the ship). There were a lot of world-building moments where I wasn't sure if I was supposed to laugh or to take it seriously, and regardless of the seriousness, the stated motivations and belief systems rarely influenced actual behavior. There's frequent listing of ethnicities and religions and even scientific modes of inquiry and how the affect the person's behavior and beliefs, but aside from saying "This means so-and-so acted this way" they aren't carried out, and don't provide depth to the world. Sara is Balavati, for example, which means she is supposed to buck all authority, but she follows the chain of command for the most part - even becoming a co-commander on one mission - though she does so begrudgingly. If all of the quirky belief systems were carried out to their full depth it would have created a beautifully rich and unique and complex world, but it's mostly left to be one-off jokes or occasional hasty re-assertions that "So-and-so IS this way" (even if their actions or dialogue don't show it at all). The lack of depth and the ham-fisted over-explanation of the world is what makes me unsure what is caricature and what is serious. For example: on the main planet, knowledge is the main export, and knowledge is their main product, and while the characters say that copyright and proprietary information are important, their information gathering structure and their general relationship to knowledge is not any different than our own. That lack of translation from importance in small/isolated interactions to importance and change in the macro structure makes the huge emphasis on Sara having to pay for information like where a hotel is seem farcical.

As I mentioned before, the main preoccupation of this book is with how we know what we know, and how our methods of knowing limit what we can possibly know. The scientists on the ship are grouped by their scientific methods (see the paragraph above on lack of consistency of world-building though), one of the characters practices "intuitive science" where she tries to figure out new ways to learn through the senses humans have and ascertain what we can't learn through those senses, and the big plot point - the weird clumps of dark matter or dark energy or fold rain or whatever, the book isn't really clear on whether those things are related but I guess we're supposed to assume they are - is that there's some kind of force at work that we can't directly perceive. And there's "beminding," which basically means that we all instantiate in the ways that others perceive us to be. The themes are inconsistent, though; there are lot of conflicting, muddled messages about what these plot elements tell us that knowledge *is* and what reality *is* and what that means for us, and the story waffles between those messages given whatever plot element is dominant at the time in an aimless, haphazard way that doesn't build, convalesce, or create depth.

But on the bright side! It's incredibly inventive and strives for such a huge, layered world. There's a civilization of blind people who live deep in a cave, and their lifestyle and habits and habitat are so well thought out it's a pleasure to read. Their method of travel is also intriguing, though what's obvious to the reader takes a while for the book to acknowledge and I wish it had gone more into the implications of their method of travel for the physical structure of the world and the people, but overall it's pretty well thought-out. I liked the idea of the characters (though again we see very little character development at all, mostly just neutral narration that underutilizes the unique perspectives of the main characters) and Thora's history and the glimpses of the Twenty Planets civilization and government. There's a lot of surface in the novel, but the surface is pretty to look at and if I could have this be re-written to be just as pretty and intricate on the surface with depth to match, it would be one of the best SF books I've ever read. But sadly, it's not great, just good.

View all my reviews