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The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
Celebrated author Sofia Samatar presents a mystical, revolutionary space adventure for the exhausted dreamer in this brilliant science fiction novella tackling the carceral state and violence embedded in the ivory tower while embodying the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
"Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?"
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out amongst the stars.
His whole world changes―literally―when he is yanked "upstairs" to meet the woman he will come to call “professor.” The boy is no longer one of the Chained, she tells him, and he has been gifted an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
The woman has spent her career striving for acceptance and validation from her colleagues in the hopes of reaching a brighter future, only to fall short at every turn.
Together, the boy and the woman will learn from each other to grasp the design of the chains designed to fetter them both, and are the key to breaking free. They will embark on a transformation―and redesign the entire world.
"Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?"
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out amongst the stars.
His whole world changes―literally―when he is yanked "upstairs" to meet the woman he will come to call “professor.” The boy is no longer one of the Chained, she tells him, and he has been gifted an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
The woman has spent her career striving for acceptance and validation from her colleagues in the hopes of reaching a brighter future, only to fall short at every turn.
Together, the boy and the woman will learn from each other to grasp the design of the chains designed to fetter them both, and are the key to breaking free. They will embark on a transformation―and redesign the entire world.
128 pages, Paperback
First published April 16, 2024
279 people are currently reading
7,120 people want to read
About the author
Sofia Samatar
80 books618 followersSofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 374 reviews
April 24, 2024
Ignore immediately anyone who calls this book "dark academia." They either don't understand the term, or they don't understand the book. This is a sci fi mythology. It reads like Coehlo's The Alchemist, or like Le Guin's later Earthsea books. It is a story of miracle that happens to be set in a dark and awful sci fi setting. But it's fundamentally a story of joy and goodness and connection and humanity - and how easy all of that is to lose and to abandon. It is connected to academia in the same way that Hamlet is a story about ghosts.
A plot summary is silly here. The chains of slavery become sci fi and tangible in metaphor. Connection is found through darkness. Just read the book, it'll take you like 3 hours.
A plot summary is silly here. The chains of slavery become sci fi and tangible in metaphor. Connection is found through darkness. Just read the book, it'll take you like 3 hours.
March 7, 2025
I thought this was an interesting novella with important themes related to oppression and incarceration. As someone in academia I could see how what happens in this book manifests in real life academia too, like performative social justice with no real material changes, and/or people who act like they care about inequity and then perpetuate that inequity toward their colleagues and students with less power. I unfortunately found the writing a bit abstract and the characters generic – they felt more like symbols or vehicles for a message than three-dimensional characters – but I respect what Sofia Samatar set out to accomplish with this novella.
July 16, 2024
Some say the writing was lyrical, but I say it was fucking insufferable. Tomato, tomato.
August 21, 2024
This is a SF novella that attempts to tackle important problems from inequality of opportunities (including in academia), and human rights for freedom, and a few others. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for August 2024 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group.
The book starts with a boy’s memories of how, as he grew up, he got a new bolt on his ankle that chained him to others. He lives in the Hold and works with others, linked by a gain, on a strange job – using picks to take asteroids apart from inside. Sometimes chained workers die if something goes wrong. Die as one, for they are chained. The boy starts to express himself by drawing on walls, he gets noticed and moved up.
A woman who moved the boy up is the daughter of another man from the Hold. Unlike the chained underclass, she and people like her have blue leg bracelets, which initially are something akin to smartwatches, a useful item, but really just another kind of chain. The woman works in local acedemia, she is a version of a ‘diversity hire’, and she tries to set the boy on a similar path. There are a few of thinly disguised jokes on modern academia, where researchers are afraid to be accused of cultural appropriation of ‘lower classes’, but have no qualms exploiting them. Or a struggle to re-name Old and New Knowledge to The task force had been successful, the names changed—not, as the woman had wished, to the Department of Arts and the Department of Sciences, but still, the shift from Old to Older Knowledge was an improvement, and to get those arrogant windbags on the other side of the bridge to call themselves Newer, rather than New…
However, despite the strong and talented prose, the story hasn’t worked for me at all. The messages, like slavery is bad, and we are slave in disguise aren’t new. The economics of hand-mining asteroids is plainly stupid, added to show how miserable lives can be, but actually bringing from SF fans questions – in zero-g when you hit by a pick, you just fly away! The economics as described: Certain things are always with us.” She counted on her fingers. “One: scarcity. Limited space and resources. Two: the need to maintain order, which, when things are scarce, is always under threat. Three: surplus. Too many people, not enough stuff: the result is extra people. What are you going to do with all these extra people? If you’re smart, you’ll turn them into a business. That’s the Hold. So there will always be a Hold. Because the Ship is a problem. And the Hold is the answer.” As an economist I say it is mind-blowingly stupid. If your people add net value they aren’t a surplus, if they subtract it ‘business’ won’t help.
Sadly, I think on the strength of prose alone it very likely will be nominated for SFF awards…
The book starts with a boy’s memories of how, as he grew up, he got a new bolt on his ankle that chained him to others. He lives in the Hold and works with others, linked by a gain, on a strange job – using picks to take asteroids apart from inside. Sometimes chained workers die if something goes wrong. Die as one, for they are chained. The boy starts to express himself by drawing on walls, he gets noticed and moved up.
A woman who moved the boy up is the daughter of another man from the Hold. Unlike the chained underclass, she and people like her have blue leg bracelets, which initially are something akin to smartwatches, a useful item, but really just another kind of chain. The woman works in local acedemia, she is a version of a ‘diversity hire’, and she tries to set the boy on a similar path. There are a few of thinly disguised jokes on modern academia, where researchers are afraid to be accused of cultural appropriation of ‘lower classes’, but have no qualms exploiting them. Or a struggle to re-name Old and New Knowledge to The task force had been successful, the names changed—not, as the woman had wished, to the Department of Arts and the Department of Sciences, but still, the shift from Old to Older Knowledge was an improvement, and to get those arrogant windbags on the other side of the bridge to call themselves Newer, rather than New…
However, despite the strong and talented prose, the story hasn’t worked for me at all. The messages, like slavery is bad, and we are slave in disguise aren’t new. The economics of hand-mining asteroids is plainly stupid, added to show how miserable lives can be, but actually bringing from SF fans questions – in zero-g when you hit by a pick, you just fly away! The economics as described: Certain things are always with us.” She counted on her fingers. “One: scarcity. Limited space and resources. Two: the need to maintain order, which, when things are scarce, is always under threat. Three: surplus. Too many people, not enough stuff: the result is extra people. What are you going to do with all these extra people? If you’re smart, you’ll turn them into a business. That’s the Hold. So there will always be a Hold. Because the Ship is a problem. And the Hold is the answer.” As an economist I say it is mind-blowingly stupid. If your people add net value they aren’t a surplus, if they subtract it ‘business’ won’t help.
Sadly, I think on the strength of prose alone it very likely will be nominated for SFF awards…
August 9, 2024
This is fairly good, but as with most recent fantasy novellas, never fully satisfying for me. It’s a story of hierarchy, oppression and resistance in space, and handles its themes well. Plenty of ideas those familiar with current discourse will recognize (physical and metaphorical chains, the symbols of oppression functioning also as the locus of solidarity, etc.), but Samatar does not feel the need to explicitly point these things out as a lesser author would—she’s confident enough to just show characters behaving like people, without comment. If the privileged seem self-centered and clueless, well, power does that to people, and Samatar’s portrayals feel believable rather than exaggerated for effect.
The writing is also good, with some complex sentence structures as one would expect from Samatar, and there’s a lot of worldbuilding introduced quickly and naturally to the reader. The story is engaging and moves at a brisk pace, given the brief page count; basically, it involves a professor with lower-class roots, who has revitalized a scholarship program for ex-slaves, and the teenage boy she is mentoring as a result. The characters are sympathetic enough and I wanted the best for them, but despite some harrowing experiences (including a very effectively written bit in which the dehumanizing nature of the system is brought home through an unexpected betrayal), I was never fully invested. This is likely related to the fact that I cannot describe either of the leads’ personalities; they are more personification of roles than people.
In fact the characters may be intentionally generic (to me always a bad decision, though some seem to like it), given the name thing. Neither of the protagonists is named, being referred to instead as “the boy” and “the woman.” At one point the book implies that in fact only the highest caste even possesses names (and they are the only ones named in the book), but then this situation is never actually explored, and a big deal is made at the end of a higher-caste character not knowing a lower-caste person’s name. So presumably they have them after all. In the end I think the whole naming situation is intended thematically rather than literally, and am not sure the distance and confusion it creates quite justifies it. But I would be interested to hear from a reader who loved this aspect or saw a clear purpose to it.
Finally, I wasn’t fully satisfied with the ending: it’s a natural conclusion in terms of plot, but so many recent fantasies have ended in places like this that I’m reminded of Matthew Desmond’s critique of a particular strain of progressives, fluent in the language of grievance but far less interested in concrete steps forward. Of course, this may be in part because
Despite the criticism, however, I do think this is fairly good, and short enough to be worth a read, especially for social-justice-oriented sci-fi lovers, or those who particularly enjoy novellas.
The writing is also good, with some complex sentence structures as one would expect from Samatar, and there’s a lot of worldbuilding introduced quickly and naturally to the reader. The story is engaging and moves at a brisk pace, given the brief page count; basically, it involves a professor with lower-class roots, who has revitalized a scholarship program for ex-slaves, and the teenage boy she is mentoring as a result. The characters are sympathetic enough and I wanted the best for them, but despite some harrowing experiences (including a very effectively written bit in which the dehumanizing nature of the system is brought home through an unexpected betrayal), I was never fully invested. This is likely related to the fact that I cannot describe either of the leads’ personalities; they are more personification of roles than people.
In fact the characters may be intentionally generic (to me always a bad decision, though some seem to like it), given the name thing. Neither of the protagonists is named, being referred to instead as “the boy” and “the woman.” At one point the book implies that in fact only the highest caste even possesses names (and they are the only ones named in the book), but then this situation is never actually explored, and a big deal is made at the end of a higher-caste character not knowing a lower-caste person’s name. So presumably they have them after all. In the end I think the whole naming situation is intended thematically rather than literally, and am not sure the distance and confusion it creates quite justifies it. But I would be interested to hear from a reader who loved this aspect or saw a clear purpose to it.
Finally, I wasn’t fully satisfied with the ending: it’s a natural conclusion in terms of plot, but so many recent fantasies have ended in places like this that I’m reminded of Matthew Desmond’s critique of a particular strain of progressives, fluent in the language of grievance but far less interested in concrete steps forward. Of course, this may be in part because
Despite the criticism, however, I do think this is fairly good, and short enough to be worth a read, especially for social-justice-oriented sci-fi lovers, or those who particularly enjoy novellas.
February 11, 2025
داستان در سفینهای معدنکاو جریان دارد. مجموعهای از فضاپیماهای چندنسله مثل یک شرکت در کار استخراج مواد معدنی هستند. در این جامعه مثل تمام داستانهای پادآرمانشهری بیعدالتی افسارگسیختهای وجود دارد. عده کثیری در بخشی از فضاپیما به نام هولد در تاریکی و نکبت زندگی میکنند و وظیفه پستترین کارها رو برعهده دارند. این افراد همیشه با زنجیری به پای خود زندگی میکنند. پسری از هولد که تحت تأثیر شخصی به نام پیامبر قرار دارد، بهکمک بورسیهای ریاکارانه به بالا میرود تا در میان اغنیای سفینه زندگی و تحصیل کند. زنی که استاد نامیده میشود و پدرش مثل پسر هولدی بوده با او همراه میشود تا در نهایت بساط ظلم را برچینند.
کتاب بسیار گنگ و با وجود حجم کم تا حدی کسلکننده پیش میرود ولی عمق زیاد و معنای ژرفی دارد. بهنظر فضای داستان عمدا توسط نویسنده مبهم نگه داشته شده است. اگر حجم کتاب کم نبود شاید خیلیها خیلی راحت آن را کنار میگذاشتند چون بیشتر به یک بیانیه عدالتخواهانه سیاسی شباهت دارد تا یک داستان پادآرمانشهری. در مجموع اگر به داستانهای علمی تخیلی علاقه دارید تجربه کوتاه و خنثی (نه عشق و نه نفرت) را با این کتاب خواهید داشت. بهخاطر همین سه ستاره تقدیمش کردم.
کتاب بسیار گنگ و با وجود حجم کم تا حدی کسلکننده پیش میرود ولی عمق زیاد و معنای ژرفی دارد. بهنظر فضای داستان عمدا توسط نویسنده مبهم نگه داشته شده است. اگر حجم کتاب کم نبود شاید خیلیها خیلی راحت آن را کنار میگذاشتند چون بیشتر به یک بیانیه عدالتخواهانه سیاسی شباهت دارد تا یک داستان پادآرمانشهری. در مجموع اگر به داستانهای علمی تخیلی علاقه دارید تجربه کوتاه و خنثی (نه عشق و نه نفرت) را با این کتاب خواهید داشت. بهخاطر همین سه ستاره تقدیمش کردم.
January 13, 2025
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is fine. It’s not bad, but it’s not the life-changing novella the accolades had me expecting either. It has all the makings of something great: a stark critique of capitalism, a mining ship setting with a rigid caste system, and the promise of revolutionary change. And yet, it left me feeling... well, not much.
The story opens with “the boy,” a chain-gang worker in the depths of a mining ship, and “the woman,” a professor who plucks him from the hold through an academic scholarship program. What follows is a mix of bleak realities and hopeful attempts to “humanize space” through education and art. It’s a noble premise, but the execution felt heavy-handed. The book often seemed more interested in delivering a lecture than telling a story, with its metaphors about labor exploitation and societal hierarchies spelled out in bold, underlined, and highlighted for good measure.
There are moments of beauty-Samatar sure can write-but sometimes I felt elegant sentences masked the thinness of the plot. The worldbuilding is subtle, sometimes to a fault. Details trickle in, but not enough to ground me fully in the setting. Psychic powers tied to physical chains? Sure, why not. But with little explanation or buildup, it felt like a narrative shortcut. Or, to be more blunt, the world-building feels like a teaser rather than the whole package.
At 128 pages, it’s a quick read. And it’s not bad, just... fine. Maybe worth a read if you like your sci-fi dense and with a side of moral philosophy.
The story opens with “the boy,” a chain-gang worker in the depths of a mining ship, and “the woman,” a professor who plucks him from the hold through an academic scholarship program. What follows is a mix of bleak realities and hopeful attempts to “humanize space” through education and art. It’s a noble premise, but the execution felt heavy-handed. The book often seemed more interested in delivering a lecture than telling a story, with its metaphors about labor exploitation and societal hierarchies spelled out in bold, underlined, and highlighted for good measure.
There are moments of beauty-Samatar sure can write-but sometimes I felt elegant sentences masked the thinness of the plot. The worldbuilding is subtle, sometimes to a fault. Details trickle in, but not enough to ground me fully in the setting. Psychic powers tied to physical chains? Sure, why not. But with little explanation or buildup, it felt like a narrative shortcut. Or, to be more blunt, the world-building feels like a teaser rather than the whole package.
At 128 pages, it’s a quick read. And it’s not bad, just... fine. Maybe worth a read if you like your sci-fi dense and with a side of moral philosophy.
Read
October 5, 2023This was awesome, the true dark academia. I hope to review it soon once I've climbed out from under the grading pile!
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Source of the book: Print ARC from publisher (I was very vocal about requesting it and it did not disappoint :) )
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Source of the book: Print ARC from publisher (I was very vocal about requesting it and it did not disappoint :) )
December 1, 2024
4,5✨
Sofia Samatar is Always Amazing !! Magnifique comme toujours, la plume de l'autrice m'emporte.
Sofia Samatar is Always Amazing !! Magnifique comme toujours, la plume de l'autrice m'emporte.
April 10, 2024
I think this is a me problem, but it took me a bit too long to latch onto the meat of the story. Because the majority of it is told in these vague abstractions (made more impersonal by using euphemisms instead of names for our main characters), I had a hard time following what was actually happening. I also have absolutely no idea what the timeline of this story is. For me, that’s a pretty important anchor - especially in spec fic where the rules as we know them might not apply.
I did however really like the theme of connection and community, even when they’re people you might not know or would ever interact with. I wished we’d seen it earlier.
My copy also had some really distracting formatting issues, which hindered my reading
{Thank you Tor.com for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review}
I did however really like the theme of connection and community, even when they’re people you might not know or would ever interact with. I wished we’d seen it earlier.
My copy also had some really distracting formatting issues, which hindered my reading
{Thank you Tor.com for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review}
May 5, 2024
An incisive novella exploring systematic injustice (especially in academia), set on a fleet of generation ships that have left a post-climate apolocalytic Earth. Samatar's plotting is tightly paced, and her characters, while archetypical, are well developed. The clear historical parallels lend the narrative compelling weight and Samatar's prose balances mysticism and practicality well.
As a Jew in academia, as the recipent of grants and scholarships designed to "raise me up" to an (white) upperclass world of generational wealth and priviledge, a world I am allowed to witness, but never fully participate in, Samatar captures in hideous perfection the trap of respectability politics, of "buying in" to a morally bankrupt system, and the power (and moral imperative) of resistance.
As a Jew in academia, as the recipent of grants and scholarships designed to "raise me up" to an (white) upperclass world of generational wealth and priviledge, a world I am allowed to witness, but never fully participate in, Samatar captures in hideous perfection the trap of respectability politics, of "buying in" to a morally bankrupt system, and the power (and moral imperative) of resistance.
May 15, 2024
Like Samatar's earlier, excellent collection Tender, this is always complex, nuanced, and thoughtful. Instead of inundating us with clunky world-building details, we're allowed to observe through a few sympathetic but often bewildering characters, and impressionistically infer and absorb the intricate systems and relationships in her dark, troubling world. As in her short fiction, this is packed with ideas and thought-provoking engagements (on incarceration, academia, cultural friction, levels of control...). Much is left unexplained, but the emotional impact is powerful.
May 19, 2024
2.5/5 I may have just been in the wrong mood or looking for something this wasn’t trying to be, but I read this in one sitting and was never really feeling it. It’s more of an allegory than a story and the general premise of caste, class, and oppression didn’t seem that original to me and was overshadowed by lyrical writing and a corresponding lack of comprehensible world building and story. Maybe it just went over my head and I need to try again in a different frame of mind.
Shelved as '2024'
June 3, 2024📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom
January 28, 2025
A short but impactful novella on class and race oppression in academia but also society at large.
A boy lifted from the confinement of slavery to the world of academia for his unusual talents, separated from everything familiar. Expected to be gratedful. A professor, child of a similarly chosen father, slowly having her perception of the world changed. A prophet, still held down below, robbed of his child, telling stories of worlds unknown.
A novel considering practices both used to oppress them and used by them to survive. Reflecting on a horizon never seen, the horizon that could be. Contemplation the chains that contain, that oppres us, but also the ones, the connect and unite us.
This is a novella of only 122 pages. Of course, there could have been more depth to the relationships between characters. Certain character developments would have been more believable if the reader were given more time to witness them. The world-building was also rather vague, although that was an aspect I quite enjoyed.
What I mean to say is that the format of a novella naturally has specific constraints, and within those constraints, this story did quite well what it set out to do. It asked questions that keep me thinking and gave answers that give me hope.
A boy lifted from the confinement of slavery to the world of academia for his unusual talents, separated from everything familiar. Expected to be gratedful. A professor, child of a similarly chosen father, slowly having her perception of the world changed. A prophet, still held down below, robbed of his child, telling stories of worlds unknown.
A novel considering practices both used to oppress them and used by them to survive. Reflecting on a horizon never seen, the horizon that could be. Contemplation the chains that contain, that oppres us, but also the ones, the connect and unite us.
This is a novella of only 122 pages. Of course, there could have been more depth to the relationships between characters. Certain character developments would have been more believable if the reader were given more time to witness them. The world-building was also rather vague, although that was an aspect I quite enjoyed.
What I mean to say is that the format of a novella naturally has specific constraints, and within those constraints, this story did quite well what it set out to do. It asked questions that keep me thinking and gave answers that give me hope.
April 21, 2024
Okay first thing I need to address: the eARC formatting in this was bad-bad. Like, mistakes are cool, minor formatting errors are totally expected! But at times, this was simply not readable. I mean, some of my favorite quotes include "Hislifehadbeensoordinarythatgoingupstairsinthe lift,thatbrilliantboxoflightwhoseraysseemedtopierce", and the ever famous "Intheshower,thewomanrememberedthatlaugh.She recalledthevoiceoftheprophet.Hiswordsreverberated aroundher,slurredandbreakinglikefallingwater,telling" What am I supposed to do with that? Look, I did translate them all, but how much is one enjoying a story that way? This is all to say, take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Or several, or the whole damn shaker, frankly.
Because here's the rub: the premise was cool and I appreciated the ideas, but I was mostly confused and bored. Was I confused because of the formatting? Well, no, because like I said, I meticulously figured out what it was supposed to say, because I think I have problems. But also, when you spend so much time just deciphering the words, the context has a tendency to get lost in the shuffle (no, really! This is a thing that happens to kids who are not fluent readers- their comprehension doesn't lack because they can't comprehend, their brains are just too busy decoding the words to bother with the meaning.
Erm. Anyway, that has nothing to do with this book. The premise, like mentioned, is great! A kid who was doomed to spend his whole life in servitude on a mining ship is plucked out of obscurity and given a chance to be educated with the "elite". But is life "up there" really any better than before? And probably some other philosophical stuff I missed because I don't always understand symbolism. The thing is, I just didn't feel all that connected to any of the characters, they felt... distant, maybe is a good word? Muffled? I don't know, I just didn't feel all that immersed in the story.
Bottom Line: I really wish I had read a more coherent version, because I truly can't tell if the problem was the formatting, the story, or a combination. But because of that, I feel like it is unfair of me to really rate it. (For the sake of argument, let's give it a three for now on sites where I have to.)
You can find the full review and all the fancy and/or randomness that accompanies it at It Starts at Midnight
Because here's the rub: the premise was cool and I appreciated the ideas, but I was mostly confused and bored. Was I confused because of the formatting? Well, no, because like I said, I meticulously figured out what it was supposed to say, because I think I have problems. But also, when you spend so much time just deciphering the words, the context has a tendency to get lost in the shuffle (no, really! This is a thing that happens to kids who are not fluent readers- their comprehension doesn't lack because they can't comprehend, their brains are just too busy decoding the words to bother with the meaning.
Erm. Anyway, that has nothing to do with this book. The premise, like mentioned, is great! A kid who was doomed to spend his whole life in servitude on a mining ship is plucked out of obscurity and given a chance to be educated with the "elite". But is life "up there" really any better than before? And probably some other philosophical stuff I missed because I don't always understand symbolism. The thing is, I just didn't feel all that connected to any of the characters, they felt... distant, maybe is a good word? Muffled? I don't know, I just didn't feel all that immersed in the story.
Bottom Line: I really wish I had read a more coherent version, because I truly can't tell if the problem was the formatting, the story, or a combination. But because of that, I feel like it is unfair of me to really rate it. (For the sake of argument, let's give it a three for now on sites where I have to.)
You can find the full review and all the fancy and/or randomness that accompanies it at It Starts at Midnight
April 20, 2025
Author interview with Ancillary Review of Books:
"In the case of the woman, who is the professor in this story, she’s doing this research project on play and on children’s play, and on play among children who don’t have very much stuff. These are impoverished, marginalized children. They make their games out of almost nothing. She calls it “a slender materiality” where there’s almost nothing there. That’s how I see DEI. It’s actually almost nothing. It’s really not doing anything. But, you can make something out of almost nothing. That’s the ambivalence. Instead of trying to address the fact that you have something that is a university on top and a prison underneath and it’s floating through space forever, you’re in no way trying to change that structure, and your justice work is to pluck this one kid up and have him go to university. That’s basically how DEI works. So it is doing almost nothing—but it’s not quite nothing. From that almost nothing, the question the book is asking is, what can you build? How can we actually use this almost nothing and create something?"
https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/20...
artist collective: a’stric
"In the case of the woman, who is the professor in this story, she’s doing this research project on play and on children’s play, and on play among children who don’t have very much stuff. These are impoverished, marginalized children. They make their games out of almost nothing. She calls it “a slender materiality” where there’s almost nothing there. That’s how I see DEI. It’s actually almost nothing. It’s really not doing anything. But, you can make something out of almost nothing. That’s the ambivalence. Instead of trying to address the fact that you have something that is a university on top and a prison underneath and it’s floating through space forever, you’re in no way trying to change that structure, and your justice work is to pluck this one kid up and have him go to university. That’s basically how DEI works. So it is doing almost nothing—but it’s not quite nothing. From that almost nothing, the question the book is asking is, what can you build? How can we actually use this almost nothing and create something?"
https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/20...
artist collective: a’stric
December 26, 2024
What did I read? I don't exactly know. It's a very abstract, dense little novella with a lot about class and slavery, academia, and human connection packed into a modest pagecount. The boy moves up in the world, but does he really? Both he and his mentor still wear an anklet and I don't think it's a coincidence that neither he nor she get named while their superiors do. The prose is good as always, but distant, and heavy on the philosophy/religion of the titular Practice. Definitely a lot to think about, but I still wish we got a little more.
Enjoyment: 4/5
Execution: 4/5
More reviews on my blog, To Other Worlds.
Enjoyment: 4/5
Execution: 4/5
More reviews on my blog, To Other Worlds.
February 7, 2024
Read via NetGalley.
To be honest I don't even know where to start with reviewing this novella.
To say that it's breathtaking is insufficient. I can say that it should be on every single award ballot for this year, but that only tells you how much I admired it.
I could try and explain how it explores ideas of slavery, and the experience of the enslaved; ideas of control, and social hierarchy; about human resilience and human evil. Draw connections with Ursula K Le Guin's "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas," and probably a slew of stories that connect to the Atlantic slave trade and which I haven't read (mostly because I'm Australian).
There are odes to be written to the lyricism of Samatar's prose, but I don't myself have the words to express that. Entire creative writing classes would benefit from reading this, and sitting with it, and gently prying at why it works the way it does.
I could give you an outline? There's a fleet of space ships, and they're mining asteroids, and mining is dreadful work so you know who you get to do the dreadful work? People that you don't call enslaved but who are indeed enslaved. There's an entire hierarchy around who's doing the mining in the hold, and who's a guard and who's not a guard, and the people at the top have convinced themselves there's not REALLY a hierarchy it's just the way things need to be. Sometimes someone from the Hold is brought out of the Hold, and then has to learn how to be outside of the Hold... and then someone starts to see through the system, and maybe has a way to change things.
The outline doesn't convey how powerful the story is.
I should add: the main characters are never named.
Just... everyone should read this. It's not long, so there's no excuse! But it will stay in your head, and it will punch you in the guts. In the good way.
To be honest I don't even know where to start with reviewing this novella.
To say that it's breathtaking is insufficient. I can say that it should be on every single award ballot for this year, but that only tells you how much I admired it.
I could try and explain how it explores ideas of slavery, and the experience of the enslaved; ideas of control, and social hierarchy; about human resilience and human evil. Draw connections with Ursula K Le Guin's "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas," and probably a slew of stories that connect to the Atlantic slave trade and which I haven't read (mostly because I'm Australian).
There are odes to be written to the lyricism of Samatar's prose, but I don't myself have the words to express that. Entire creative writing classes would benefit from reading this, and sitting with it, and gently prying at why it works the way it does.
I could give you an outline? There's a fleet of space ships, and they're mining asteroids, and mining is dreadful work so you know who you get to do the dreadful work? People that you don't call enslaved but who are indeed enslaved. There's an entire hierarchy around who's doing the mining in the hold, and who's a guard and who's not a guard, and the people at the top have convinced themselves there's not REALLY a hierarchy it's just the way things need to be. Sometimes someone from the Hold is brought out of the Hold, and then has to learn how to be outside of the Hold... and then someone starts to see through the system, and maybe has a way to change things.
The outline doesn't convey how powerful the story is.
I should add: the main characters are never named.
Just... everyone should read this. It's not long, so there's no excuse! But it will stay in your head, and it will punch you in the guts. In the good way.
Read
November 2, 2024DNF @ p. 32 or so. I’m sure academia does suck but I don’t really care to read about it, and this didn’t feel super original/compelling to me otherwise. Can’t win em all!!
June 2, 2024
4.5 ⭐️ very, very well written. full of rage and compassion both. impeccably structured sci fi novella on the intricacies and contradictions inherent in the work of decolonizing both the ivory tower and one’s mind as it has been necessarily shaped by said environment.
September 25, 2024
Spectacular. I am torn as to which is the harder to pen, a short story or a novella. Regardless, penning a great short story or novella is a rare feat, and should be lustily applauded. But a novella this good? Wow, just wow. Maybe I've been reading too few great books, but the depth and breadth and overall awesomeness of this book took me a while to realize, but once I did... Yikes! Samatar hits the reader in so many ways, with such simple but visceral prose, that holding on to the tale AND the subtly disguised ideas is work. Worthwhile work, most definitely. A strikingly rare example of a fabulously grand piece of writing. A bit like fractals. The further in you look, the more and more there is. Essential read.
October 22, 2024
I'm something of a sofia samatar stan, and I found this both extremely readable and extremely funny: What If It Turns Out That Institutions Are Bad? Read On To Find Out!
it's not possible to train and transform at the same time (she's write and she should say it and all of this is never not timely)
lov 2 write what u kno
it's not possible to train and transform at the same time (she's write and she should say it and all of this is never not timely)
lov 2 write what u kno
August 10, 2024
depressing inexplicable dense
has an ending I suppose was uplifting, but I didn't care.
certainly not for me
has an ending I suppose was uplifting, but I didn't care.
certainly not for me
April 14, 2025
My month in reading is going to be mostly dominated by a couple of thousand page tomes, so to keep my sanity I’m breaking them up with whichever of this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Novella my library has handy. Practice, Horizon and Chain was the first one on the list, and besides that nomination I went it literally entirely blind as to its context and contents. Having finished it, it was...not awful. It would, I think, have been better served as a short story than a novella – the added page count mostly gave time for the plot to strain and buckle and the prose to wear out its welcome and go from poetic to overwrought. It was short enough to not entirely overstay its welcome, but the thing felt more like something that would get written as part of an MFA than one of the year’s best pieces of science fiction.
The story is a bit of space age mythology, centring around a boy living in the Hold at the centre of a gargantuan spaceship – one of a whole fleet the journeys from asteroid to another, pulling likely rocks in to their core for the toiling masses to chip away at and process into useful materials for those living in the ship’s more luxurious upper layers. Noted by a doctor changing the size of the chain he would otherwise spend his entire life shackled to for his artistic talents, he’s plucked from the Hold to a new life as a scholarship student at a university, his chain replaced with an anklet that arks him as a provisionally accepted member of polite society. The professor organizing the program – the daughter of the scholarship’s great success story before it was suspended generations ago, now a junior humanities professor in her own right – does everything she can to socialize him and help him make the most of his new life, at least until she has it rubbed in her face how her life outside the hold is just as precarious and conditional as his.
So this is a very academic novella. All the scenes that take place outside the university feel surreal and dreamlike, it is only when the campus that anything feels real enough to actually bite. Which, to be fair, they absolutely do – when it’s trying, the book does very good satire regarding the deeply precarious lives of international students whose acceptance in the first world (and, often, whole lives) is entirely conditional on the good will of the university around them. Similarly with the uselessness of much campus activism, the hierarchy and oppression that is politely unacknowledged right up until the knives come out, the humiliation of one’s presence being justified in terms of the benefit it provides everyone else around them – the exaggeration of chains and anklets and the instantly visible caste system is really quite effective (the author’s incredibly obvious chip on the should about the humanities vs. STEM is rather eyeroll-inducing, but entirely forgivable). Which is why I say that if this had just been a short story, it very likely would have been an excellent one.
As is, the story begins decomposing into something more like a tone poem as soon as the plot properly kicks into gear. Every character aside from the Child and the Professor are rote archetypes, their actions transparently motivated by the need to move things along just so and make the point the author wants to as clearly as they can. The story flips over into a sort of magical realism, the power of love and the (implicit and primordial) solidarity of the oppressed revealing itself as a magical force of all-surpassing power in a way that feels both saccharin and like it’s dodging the actual thematic conflict the story was incredibly explicit about raising.
Now, raising thematic conflicts you don’t know how to resolve is a proud tradition – it’s half the appeal of writing a Novel Of Ideas instead of a manifesto – but still. The book is very, very clear about wrestling with the question about whether it is possible for a university to be a place of both training and transformation – whether an institution created to drill in technical competence and socialization into an expected professional culture can also be a place for moral development and personal or political awakening. Which is a nicely meaty question, and one that I imagine is of no small personal interest to professed radical academics. But after raising it – and dramatizing the conflict and the hypocrisy of the academy really quite wonderfully – it’s just, totally punted. Left behind and replaced with platitudes of solidarity and connection. Again, this is something where it feels like the length of the story counts against it – there’s enough word count there that you feel like there should be some actual meaningful resolution here.
The prose is trying very, very hard to be poetic and literary. Sometimes successfully – it’s beautiful at points! - but more often distractingly. The symbolism and imagery is at times so overwrought it risks drowning the actual characters and events, and is not nearly so affecting as to justify it. As with the rest of it, this becomes worse the further along into the book you get.
All in all, this was short enough that I don’t really regret reading it, and really very interesting at points. But I really can’t say the juice is worth the squeeze unless you have the same masochistic commitment to reading every best novel and novella nomination for the Hugos that I do.
The story is a bit of space age mythology, centring around a boy living in the Hold at the centre of a gargantuan spaceship – one of a whole fleet the journeys from asteroid to another, pulling likely rocks in to their core for the toiling masses to chip away at and process into useful materials for those living in the ship’s more luxurious upper layers. Noted by a doctor changing the size of the chain he would otherwise spend his entire life shackled to for his artistic talents, he’s plucked from the Hold to a new life as a scholarship student at a university, his chain replaced with an anklet that arks him as a provisionally accepted member of polite society. The professor organizing the program – the daughter of the scholarship’s great success story before it was suspended generations ago, now a junior humanities professor in her own right – does everything she can to socialize him and help him make the most of his new life, at least until she has it rubbed in her face how her life outside the hold is just as precarious and conditional as his.
So this is a very academic novella. All the scenes that take place outside the university feel surreal and dreamlike, it is only when the campus that anything feels real enough to actually bite. Which, to be fair, they absolutely do – when it’s trying, the book does very good satire regarding the deeply precarious lives of international students whose acceptance in the first world (and, often, whole lives) is entirely conditional on the good will of the university around them. Similarly with the uselessness of much campus activism, the hierarchy and oppression that is politely unacknowledged right up until the knives come out, the humiliation of one’s presence being justified in terms of the benefit it provides everyone else around them – the exaggeration of chains and anklets and the instantly visible caste system is really quite effective (the author’s incredibly obvious chip on the should about the humanities vs. STEM is rather eyeroll-inducing, but entirely forgivable). Which is why I say that if this had just been a short story, it very likely would have been an excellent one.
As is, the story begins decomposing into something more like a tone poem as soon as the plot properly kicks into gear. Every character aside from the Child and the Professor are rote archetypes, their actions transparently motivated by the need to move things along just so and make the point the author wants to as clearly as they can. The story flips over into a sort of magical realism, the power of love and the (implicit and primordial) solidarity of the oppressed revealing itself as a magical force of all-surpassing power in a way that feels both saccharin and like it’s dodging the actual thematic conflict the story was incredibly explicit about raising.
Now, raising thematic conflicts you don’t know how to resolve is a proud tradition – it’s half the appeal of writing a Novel Of Ideas instead of a manifesto – but still. The book is very, very clear about wrestling with the question about whether it is possible for a university to be a place of both training and transformation – whether an institution created to drill in technical competence and socialization into an expected professional culture can also be a place for moral development and personal or political awakening. Which is a nicely meaty question, and one that I imagine is of no small personal interest to professed radical academics. But after raising it – and dramatizing the conflict and the hypocrisy of the academy really quite wonderfully – it’s just, totally punted. Left behind and replaced with platitudes of solidarity and connection. Again, this is something where it feels like the length of the story counts against it – there’s enough word count there that you feel like there should be some actual meaningful resolution here.
The prose is trying very, very hard to be poetic and literary. Sometimes successfully – it’s beautiful at points! - but more often distractingly. The symbolism and imagery is at times so overwrought it risks drowning the actual characters and events, and is not nearly so affecting as to justify it. As with the rest of it, this becomes worse the further along into the book you get.
All in all, this was short enough that I don’t really regret reading it, and really very interesting at points. But I really can’t say the juice is worth the squeeze unless you have the same masochistic commitment to reading every best novel and novella nomination for the Hugos that I do.
March 23, 2025
4.5 Rounded Up
An unexpected yet desperately needed dose of hope-core. Love this one
An unexpected yet desperately needed dose of hope-core. Love this one
December 10, 2024
an engrossing parable about the carceral state and academia !
i've seen people complain about the boy the woman and the prophet being archetypes rather than characters and that this far future scifi setting does not have realistic economics and I have to say. sure, that could bother you. but I don't feel like thats meeting the book where its at? anyway if you don't like analogy and parables, you might not like this
i've seen people complain about the boy the woman and the prophet being archetypes rather than characters and that this far future scifi setting does not have realistic economics and I have to say. sure, that could bother you. but I don't feel like thats meeting the book where its at? anyway if you don't like analogy and parables, you might not like this
July 3, 2024
Thank you to Tor Publishing Group and to Netgalley for providing me with an e-ARC. All opinions are my own.
78 days. That's how long it took me to read this 113 page novella. Contrary to what you may think, this was NOT because I forgot about it. Rather, I had it on my daily to-do list every single day since starting it. What went wrong? Arguably, this is a "valuable" book, in that it has something to say–a lot of somethings, actually. About academia, about class, about social mobility, about interconnectedness and slavery and the prison system and consent and the various types of people who oppose systemic oppression. And yet it was torture to read. I'm sorry. Word for word I've probably read this book three or four times over because my neocortex kept turning off as my eyes read. I've got a high need for closure, so the ambiguity of the writing came off as being ungrounded in the world's reality/scenes, and the ambiguity of the metaphors led to feeling disconnected/dissociated from the story. Also, the fact I work in an academic field made reading about the inability to control your research beyond what is profitable/popular and how you can give your all and still not amount to much, especially when you're forced to forfeit your true passions for more mainstream topics that allow for funding, and how progress can be glacially slow since the core body of institutions are resistant to change etc. Maybe I'm projecting.
Anyway, the writing style. YMMV but Samatar has this way of writing and describing feelings or cognitive states or scenes that just did not compute in my brain. It's like… Even the names! Especially the names! Bold decision to replace your main characters with archetypical placeholders. In theory it's cool–in actuality, it annoyed me… Also the occasional capitalization of similarly archetypical names like Hold and Ships and Fleet. I just didn't jibe with Samatar's stylistic choices or prose. Like, completely opposite of jibed. All of this to say, you might love it! But try reading the excerpt first. I could tell from the very first page I was going to have trouble getting through it.
On a more meta note, one of the most interesting aspects of books to me is how you can present your own solutions or imagined reactions to societal problems. You can literally create a world and propose new ideas and methods for dealing with existing issues. However, imo, a lot of these issues presented in the book were never addressed/no one proposed methods of improvement, except for the main plot point, and even then it ends before it says anything interesting. The buildup/payoff aspect–the entire story is about true change to the system, true transformation, and yet it ends right before what would normally be the major event happens! It's like if Game of Thrones ended right before winter came. Like Red Rising ending as soon as Darrow leaves the underground tunnels.
There's also a lack of world-building, which can partially be due to it being a shorter story, but I still felt very ungrounded in terms of understanding what the society and world was like. For like half the story I didn't even know what they DID in the Hold. It got better as the story progressed but I actually wouldn't have minded some broad scale info-dumping. Also having phones for some reason seemed incongruous–like imagining Gil with an iPhone completely broke whatever immersion existed.
Still… 78 days for 113 pages–I read hundreds of pages of A Game of Thrones and listened to the entirety of Elantris, Turn Coat, and Animal Farm in the span of starting and finishing this novella (granted, I could listen to those while driving and working, whereas I had to sit and read The Practice). But if that doesn't say something about how anti-compelling/engrossing this book was, I don't know what would.
TL;DR this book is like one of those modern art paintings with a million in-depth meanings that play off previous famous works but the actual image is confusing to look at and not aesthetically interesting enough to warrant delving deeper. 2/5.
78 days. That's how long it took me to read this 113 page novella. Contrary to what you may think, this was NOT because I forgot about it. Rather, I had it on my daily to-do list every single day since starting it. What went wrong? Arguably, this is a "valuable" book, in that it has something to say–a lot of somethings, actually. About academia, about class, about social mobility, about interconnectedness and slavery and the prison system and consent and the various types of people who oppose systemic oppression. And yet it was torture to read. I'm sorry. Word for word I've probably read this book three or four times over because my neocortex kept turning off as my eyes read. I've got a high need for closure, so the ambiguity of the writing came off as being ungrounded in the world's reality/scenes, and the ambiguity of the metaphors led to feeling disconnected/dissociated from the story. Also, the fact I work in an academic field made reading about the inability to control your research beyond what is profitable/popular and how you can give your all and still not amount to much, especially when you're forced to forfeit your true passions for more mainstream topics that allow for funding, and how progress can be glacially slow since the core body of institutions are resistant to change etc. Maybe I'm projecting.
Anyway, the writing style. YMMV but Samatar has this way of writing and describing feelings or cognitive states or scenes that just did not compute in my brain. It's like… Even the names! Especially the names! Bold decision to replace your main characters with archetypical placeholders. In theory it's cool–in actuality, it annoyed me… Also the occasional capitalization of similarly archetypical names like Hold and Ships and Fleet. I just didn't jibe with Samatar's stylistic choices or prose. Like, completely opposite of jibed. All of this to say, you might love it! But try reading the excerpt first. I could tell from the very first page I was going to have trouble getting through it.
On a more meta note, one of the most interesting aspects of books to me is how you can present your own solutions or imagined reactions to societal problems. You can literally create a world and propose new ideas and methods for dealing with existing issues. However, imo, a lot of these issues presented in the book were never addressed/no one proposed methods of improvement, except for the main plot point, and even then it ends before it says anything interesting. The buildup/payoff aspect–the entire story is about true change to the system, true transformation, and yet it ends right before what would normally be the major event happens! It's like if Game of Thrones ended right before winter came. Like Red Rising ending as soon as Darrow leaves the underground tunnels.
There's also a lack of world-building, which can partially be due to it being a shorter story, but I still felt very ungrounded in terms of understanding what the society and world was like. For like half the story I didn't even know what they DID in the Hold. It got better as the story progressed but I actually wouldn't have minded some broad scale info-dumping. Also having phones for some reason seemed incongruous–like imagining Gil with an iPhone completely broke whatever immersion existed.
Still… 78 days for 113 pages–I read hundreds of pages of A Game of Thrones and listened to the entirety of Elantris, Turn Coat, and Animal Farm in the span of starting and finishing this novella (granted, I could listen to those while driving and working, whereas I had to sit and read The Practice). But if that doesn't say something about how anti-compelling/engrossing this book was, I don't know what would.
TL;DR this book is like one of those modern art paintings with a million in-depth meanings that play off previous famous works but the actual image is confusing to look at and not aesthetically interesting enough to warrant delving deeper. 2/5.
July 29, 2024
First impressions: this dense little novella has a lot to say about class, the chains of social structures, and the oppression inherent in academic institutions–if you’re looking for a short and philosophical read, this one might be your speed. To me, it was just a half-step too far into the conceptual style. The major characters are called “the boy” and “the woman,” and the timeline is quite hazy such that it’s hard to tell whether the narrative is covering a few months or years, all wrapping up in a tangled conclusion that's emotionally resonant but logistically confusing. I think this would have been stronger as either a tight novelette or a full mosaic novel exploring this thorny caste system. RTC.
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