A Requiem For Homo Sapiens can only be described as a flawed masterpiece. It is, one might say, a set of sermons, similar to the inspirational but corrupt "Fire Sermon" Hanuman li Tosh delivers in the first volume. The trilogy is inspired, passionate and compassionate, full of cosmic poetry and challenging intellectual gambits; in these respects it is a very persuasive narrative. But it has the defects of a sermon also: a general rigidity, excessive length, verbose flowery language, unproved assumptions, an unwillingness to consider the other side of an argument. Zindell's convictions are eloquently imparted, but too insistent. His work is both extraordinarily good and extraordinarily frustrating; these two aspects should be considered in turn, allowing an appraisal more balanced than the books themselves.
To begin with the good: Zindell's future universe already seemed fully developed when he first described it, in the short story "Shanidar" (1985). This consistency of vision has been one of Zindell's major assets, allowing his imaginary galactic far future to function as a stable, sustained landscape of principles and ideas. In "Shanidar," and in Neverness (1988), the long novel preceding the Trilogy proper, Zindell introduced his city of Neverness, a sort of Byzantium, or perhaps San Francisco, where flock countless pilgrims after enlightenment; a great Academy, housing the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame, is the heart of this urban and intellectual enterprise. Neverness' planet, Icefall, is only one of three thousand Civilized Worlds, to which the Order supplies the best interstellar Pilots and other savants. In Neverness, it becomes clear that the millennia-long stability of the Civilized Worlds is contrived, and under threat: the Timekeeper, Lord of the Order, is covertly restraining the evolutionary development of mankind, while out in the wider galaxy experiments in godhood have already reached fruition. The novel's narrator, Mallory Ringess, a pilot of the Order, sets out to encounter the gods and discover the seeds of deity in humankind.
Mallory's quest allows Zindell to deploy a compelling inventive arsenal. Although Neverness remains at the metaphysical center of the text, the focus moves: to icy wastes with a population of humans genetically remade into Neanderthals; to the "manifold" beneath space, where pilots existing in a state of pure mathematical enlightenment navigate luminous surreal realms; to a region of stars home to a god composed of millions of moon-sized computers; and to Agathange, a world of transcendent wisdom where Mallory is remade into something more than human. These variously simple and complex descriptive riches are used, generally deftly, by Zindell to state his case that neither the Timekeeper nor the cybernetic gods are good models for the human future, that we must evolve, but on our own organic terms, not by means of any systematic interface with "the accursed Computer." As Neverness ends, Mallory is triumphant, commencing an undefined progress into godhood, while new enlightenments promise a glorious human future.
The trilogy that succeeded Neverness--A Requiem For Homo Sapiens, made up of The Broken God, The Wild, and War in Heaven--builds quite majestically on this foundation. These three very long novels are in essence an expanded retelling of the basic narrative of Neverness, with its material better organized and more fully developed. Mallory Ringess remains the narrator, but is almost never on stage; he has apparently transcended the mortal arena, and so his son, Danlo, again a pilot of the Order, must reprise and complete his father's explorations. In what is effectively the biography of Danlo wi Soli Ringess, Zindell employs, with considerable skill, two overarching and unifying structures: the three-stage pattern of Danlo's quest for enlightenment, and the unity-in-opposition of Danlo and his soul brother, Hanuman li Tosh.
A Requiem is a trilogy in the proper sense of the term: each volume is a distinct stage of a developing argument, and each novel has its own particular atmosphere and pace (or lack of pace). The Broken God is the account of Danlo's training and initiation, his coming into his own as a pilot and as a practitioner of non-violence or ahimsa. Here Zindell describes, in great detail, many of the practical and intellectual disciplines of the Academy and of the various sects of Neverness, where the whole of the text is set. Danlo, reared among the Neanderthal Alaloi in the wilderness, comes to the city to escape a terrible plague among his people; he is a savage, soon known as Danlo the Wild, and his unique integrity and simplicity of viewpoint interact fascinatingly with the mediaevally intricate civilized values of Zindell's urban culture. Danlo is a child of Nature, and this decisively influences his perspective on humanity's evolutionary possibilities. The generally slow, contemplative pacing of The Broken God acquires urgency chiefly when Danlo's relationship with his friend (and, in due course, enemy) Hanuman comes to the fore. Both are involved in the foundation of a new religion, Ringism, which is designed to instruct the human race in the possibilities of godhood; in the novel's closing stages, the conflict of the two as to the proper way forward is rendered with superb drama, although the clash is still chiefly one of ideas, the preoccupation of the entire novel. By maintaining this cerebral tone, Zindell shrewdly reserves violent resolutions for subsequent volumes.
The Broken God, with its meditations on Oriental mental disciplines and the speculative potentials of physics and information theory, lingers in the mind as an album of intellectual curiosities. Its evocation of academic games-of-the-mind recalls, at times, Hesse's Magister Ludi. The second stage of Danlo's growth, that of his rigorous testing, recounted in The Wild, is in utter contrast, seeming more like a romance of a pacific knight errant transposed to a galactic milieu. While the Order is corrupted at home, a terrible threat must be faced: far from the Civilized Worlds, but expanding ever nearer, is the Vild, a region of stars afflicted by an epidemic of supernovas. These are occasioned by the Architects, fanatical believers in cybernetic immortality and eventual union with their founder, Ede, a man "vastened" into infinite intelligence. The more extreme Architects are destroying stars because they believe all matter and energy must be freed to become a part of their life, their sentience.
Danlo, as part of the Order's mission of negotiation to the Vild, encounters in his interstellar wanderings sundry well-devised variations on this pattern of cosmic hubris. First he meets the Solid State Entity, an example of fully-realized godhood, whose traps and enticements symbolize the emptiness of any virtual reality; then he resides among the Narain of the planet Alumit Bridge, lotus-eating contemplators of further artificial worlds, which for them replace the real; finally, he must deal with the Architects themselves, persuading their leader to see reason. The fanatics flee, star-killing device still in hand; they destroy the Narain; but Danlo, by winning over the moderates, has begun to end the supernova plague. The Wild, then, has all the narrative momentum The Broken God lacks; it actively applies the principles the previous volume passively set forth. In its structure of ever more demanding physical and logical tests, The Wild confirms by experiment the hypotheses of its predecessor. War in Heaven describes Danlo's final phase, that of the warrior, now mature, returning home and restoring balance to the world. While the Order's mission to the Vild has been in progress, Hanuman has become dominant in Neverness, controlling both the Order and the Ringist religion; his influence is spreading across the Civilized Worlds. While the anti-Ringist elements of the original Order prepare for war against Hanuman, Danlo arrives back in Neverness, hoping to make peace. Now the Trilogy undergoes a further shift in manner, taking on the dark realist colors of a nineteenth century Russian novel. Wintry Neverness becomes a sort of science-fictional Tsarist Moscow, and Danlo suffers terrible ordeals and privations, all depicted in grim detail. He is tortured by Hanuman; he lives as a fugitive among the city's masses, who starve as the war cuts off food supplies; his young son dies of gangrene; he has to abandon his ahimsa vow in the face of these searing realities. More horrifying still is what Hanuman threatens: the destruction of the physical universe, so that a sterile virtual utopia may take its place. Eventually, Danlo triumphs; his victory is that of the ethic of balance, for Danlo has abandoned his extreme of pacifism even while defeating Hanuman's extreme of aggressive hubris. A new, and more benign, Ringism will prevail, one promising evolution that is harmonious with physical Nature, that will not destroy that Nature in order to make it a part of ourselves. War in Heaven is designed, in its sometimes cruel bleakness, to suggest how difficult such a victory as Danlo's is, how it requires suffering, compromise, denial of the self, revision of the self. As a portrait of a personal and philosophical passage into full adulthood, this novel is a fine conclusion to the trilogy.
As mentioned earlier, the Trilogy is structured not only by its division into three progressive stages or movements, but also by a thoroughly sustained tension between Danlo and Hanuman. They are, symbolically, yin and yang (in Zindell's terms, "halla" and "shaida"), soul brothers whose opposition is symptomatic of the need to restore an ideal balance. Although Hanuman is physically absent in The Wild, the Narain and Architects are his symbolic representatives. Danlo signifies peace, openness, the natural, love of life; Hanuman, who would flee the physical and psychic pain of life for an artificial immortality and saccharine virtual reality, stands for jealousy, possessiveness, hatred, the unnatural. Yet Zindell is careful to make clear that these opposites result from the same basic sensations and impulses; Hanuman, even at his worst, is as much a figure of pathos as of evil. The trilogy's twin principles are in conflict and yet in sympathy; the conflict drives the plot, the sympathy ensures the trilogy's deeper cohesion.
Beyond these structural strengths of A Requiem For Homo Sapiens, Zindell displays many other varieties of novelistic craft. One of these is the dialogue his novels sometimes establish with other works of SF: his philosophical chapter epigraphs recall those of Frank Herbert, and so argue the relative merits of Danlo and Paul Atreides as symbolic messiahs; the trilogy's close affinity of tone with Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (of which more anon) generates all manner of instructive parallels; and the obvious resemblance of the Universal Computer constructed by Hanuman to Gordon R. Dickson's "Final Encyclopedia" hints that technological repositories of racial memory, such as Dickson advocates, are not in fact to be trusted. Chapter IV of The Broken God mentions the Encyclopaedia of Tlon from Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" as if that encyclopedia were an actual text, allowing Zindell to proffer playful hints as to the fictiveness of the erudition of the scholars of Neverness. Zindell's ironies also function at the level of plot. While Danlo is bearding the Architects, the worshippers of Ede the God, in their den at the heart of the Vild, he carries with him a small "devotionary computer," which contains the remnant personality of Ede, who has long since been cast down from divinity by a rival deity. The radical Architects denounce Danlo even as he serves as a last companion to their god, who himself hopes that Danlo can restore to him the mortal humanity his followers would renounce. And War in Heaven proposes an intriguing conundrum: given that Mallory Ringess is the text's narrator, and that he dies before the novel ends, is he truly the narrator? Do the events of the Trilogy's last few pages occur as narrated? Or has the dying Mallory, who is prescient, simply anticipated them? Such ploys periodically add complexity to an already rich tale.
But there is a disappointing side to Zindell's work. For all his eloquence and craft, for all the sense that he has produced one of SF's few genuinely sustained long novels in this trilogy, he falls again and again into the sermonizing trap. Zindell's passionate advocacy of the unity of all life, of our place in that unity, of the need to look to our natural inner resources rather than to artificial external ones if we wish to transcend our limitations: all this he overargues, insistently and hectoringly repeating his point (which is not so original or profound in any case). It may be that this propagandistic overconfidence stems in part from Zindell's general allegiance to the example of Gene Wolfe: Wolfe articulates his faith quite adamantly in his similarly extended novels, through characters whom Zindell's protagonists echo (in Mallory Ringess one may discern Severian, in Danlo Patera Silk). But Wolfe is subtle, cloaking and complicating his religious attestations; Zindell, not equal to this example, declaims his manifesto in an at times monotonous and stentorian blare. The results are not gratifying.
One of Zindell's ensuing shortcomings lies in characterization. Mallory Ringess, the protagonist of Neverness, was an interesting personality: romantic, impulsive, perverse, never able to stand still. But his son Danlo, because Zindell wishes him to bear a cumbersomely didactic weight of exemplary experience and ideas, is cast as a paragon, physically "beautiful," a saint of near-infinite patience and compassion, deeply courageous and of visionary wisdom. In his near-perfection and consistent ability to outdo his opponents through sheer Virtue, Danlo is, despite his pacifistic humility, a prig. His superiority, demonstrated over nearly two thousand pages, is insufferable. SF has produced many propaganda heroes, but Zindell's blithe confidence in his addition to the list is grating. And his skill as a narrator is compromised: in one case, in The Broken God, Danlo is provided with a love interest, a courtesan, Tamara; this is all very well, but their relationship is stereotypically idealized, often reading like a neo-tantric sex manual with examples. As a paragon, Danlo can have only the best; but the best is boringly incredible.
And villains, of course, must be as awful as possible. Although Hanuman, as Danlo's "shaida" counterpart, is well realized, other adversaries of Danlo are crude caricatures, a propagandistic failure of authorial judgment. For example:Lord Audric Pall, Hanuman's puppet head of the Order: "Danlo had never seen a more horrible human being in all his life" (War in Heaven, page 122). A page later, Bertram Jaspari, head of the radical Architects, is "an ugly man"--perhaps the ugliest whom Danlo had ever known." Pall is an albino, Jaspari a victim of a common disease. Should involuntary physical ugliness be equated with villainy, any more than beauty with virtue? Yet Zindell resorts repeatedly and automatically to this unfair, archaic cliche, so keen is he to persuade. Understatement would be preferable.
Understatement is not Zindell's strong suit in his many visionary passages either. Danlo, as an adept of meditative disciplines and as a seeker of evolutionary potentials within himself, often-probably too often-falls into contemplative trances and fugues. Zindell's very detailed descriptions of these are sometimes precise and intriguing, amounting to finely nuanced and highly symbolic prose poems. But elsewhere Zindell, careless in his haste to preach, allows this material to become shapeless and rambling. In order to reflect Danlo's status as a child of the wilderness, the language of these passages employs a few elemental concepts: fire, light, stars, wind, water, ice, four or five totemic animals. And yet many complex things must thus be represented: fine gradations of belief and emotion, the many forms that the fire of life can take. With such a limited vocabulary, and with the need to use it so often, and given Zindell's tendency towards polemical incoherence, a shambles often results. The sermon is fiery; its subject is the fire and light within us all; but it meanders and it alienates.
Other deficiencies might be cited: the descent of some chapters into space operatic cliche; inconsistencies inevitable in a very long novel (fatalities in the war suddenly appearing again as if resurrected). But Zindell's major shortcomings are those of the propagandist. The paradox of this is that his strengths stem from the same urgent, informing Belief as dictates his propaganda. A Requiem For Homo Sapiens is conceived as a grand philosophical novel; its structure, its style, and its characterization all work single-mindedly to that end. This brings to the text an impressive, impassioned purposefulness and an erratic, distracting didacticism. The trilogy is a significant and worthwhile work; but more moderation in the author (and better editing) might have made it a classic.
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