Paved with good intentions

 

“Journey Star” by John Michael Greer is the sequel to “The Fires of Shalsha”, the author´s very first published novel. Greer recently described the sequel as “disturbing” and promised that if he ever writes a third novel in the saga, it will be even more so. After reading “Journey Star”, I have to say that it isn´t disturbing enough! I mean, it even has a happy ending.

Or does it?

The plot is set at Eridan, a planet in an alien solar system colonized by humans fleeing an Earth destroyed by man-made climate change. The democratic Colonial authority was soon overthrown by mad scientists who killed millions in slave labor camps in a vain attempt to mimic 20^th century progress on Earth (compare Stalin´s Soviet Union). The Directorate, as the genocidal regime was called, was in turn overthrown by the Insurgency, the rebels using nuclear bombs to drive home their point. Post-apocalypse, the occult Halka order (a kind of samurai with paranormal powers induced by psychedelic plants) took over control of Eridan, banning most high technology while the surviving population formed settlements in the wilderness known as Shelters. These were constantly attacked by quasi-intelligent machines surviving the downfall of the Directorate, and by Outrunners, humans who refused to join the Shelters and turned to cannibalism instead.

The Halka eventually managed to defeat the machines and began a brutal campaign aimed at exterminating the Outrunners, who were forced to cannibalize each other. Some of the Outrunners carried a mysterious symbiont, who unknown to everyone is really the surviving brain tissue of Carl Emmer, the genocidal Director long believed to have been vaporized in the aforementioned nuclear war. The Emmer brain-worm eventually finds a suitable Halka host and tries to get to Journey Star, the space ship that took the original colonists to Eridan and which is still in orbit around the planet…

Disturbed yet?

After a relatively promising beginning (disturbing-wise), “Journey Star” winds down and becomes progressively more slow-paced and frankly dragging. It also goes from dystopian pessimism to the cautious optimism characteristic of most Greer novels (even those involving apocalyptic events). The Halka are clearly idealized feudal lords who selflessly defend the Shelter population against external threats on condition that the peasants accept the Six Laws, who exist for the greater good of Eridan-kind. When the external threats are gone, the Halka manage to gradually abolish themselves thanks to new psychedelic revelations, rather than cling to power in the usual fashion of elite groups who outlived their usefulness. And while the Halka do “genocide” the cannibal Outrunners, those willing to turn away from eating tender human flesh are resettled in a different territory and left alone. Indeed, it´s strongly suggested that the Outrunner bands turned to cannibalism only under the influence of the evil symbionts. And in the end, even Carl Emmer´s worm-mind seems willing to redeem itself by refraining from blasting everyone sky high.

Maybe *this* is the disturbing message of “Journey Star”: not that everyone has darkness in their hearts, but rather that everyone means well and only makes bad choices due to limited information…which results in some really evil fallout. Emmer turns out to be a kind of utilitarian who wants to save Earth from runaway climate change, the cannibal Outrunners could be seen as a strange Native tribe desperately trying to survive (they have unique cultural traditions), and the early democracy on Eridan suggests that the humans who survived dying Earth were fundamentally good guys – and yet, their actions must have caused the climate crisis in the first place!

“Journey Star” ends with some of the main characters embarking on a newly arrived starship, Bright Circle, with the intention of visiting another human colony in the Sirius star system and then return to Earth, seeding its atmosphere according to the geoengineering formula discovered by the Directorate and later inherited by a renegade who joined the Insurgency. Also, two young women get the same man in a female-centered polygynous marriage. As I said, a happy ending. But ye have been warned: if the Eridan saga ever expands into a trilogy, the author has promised us a truly disturbing climax…

The way to hell is paved with good intentions.