Review: The Sol Majestic

The Sol Majestic by Ferrett Steinmetz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My first five-star read of 2020 thoroughly earned its fifth star with insight, drama, and bravura writing.

Ferrett Steinmetz holds the unusual distinction of having written a dystopian novel I don't hate, primarily because of the way he handles his characters and the thoughtfulness and insight he brings to ideas about human society and interaction, so when I saw this one I knew it would be worth a look. It helps that (thanks to my wife's obsession with food competition shows) I've developed an interest in, and some knowledge of, high-end restaurants and their cuisine.

A high-end restaurant is the stage for this coming-of-age/revolution story, and saving it from bankruptcy that would take down the entire space station on which it's located and everyone working there is a central plot driver. Kenna, the protagonist, has been raised in undernourished poverty by parents who practice the Inevitable Philosophies, a more-or-less constructed religion that was a fad a generation or two before, but is now in eclipse. His mother's (ironic) philosophy is "I will save the starving millions," his father's "I will lead my people back to greatness". Neither of them has come anywhere close, despite extensive sucking up to the rich and powerful that entails a lot of travel on slow, cheap transport ships, in the course of which Kenna gets beaten up a lot and rarely has much to eat.

Despite the toxic nature of his parents' religion (they are really nasty, self-righteous people in two different but entwined ways) and his own rough life, Kenna has the compassion that his parents lack. In the course of the novel he journeys to the wisdom that they lack as well, in a context they despise: hard work by people who are unappreciated for their service to the wealthy elites that Kenna's parents cultivate. His parents, and of course the elites themselves, see the elites as the only ones who truly matter; Kenna comes to disagree, and articulate his disagreement powerfully.

Along the way, there's love, there's friendship, there's a new appreciation for food as something more than simple nutrition, there are vivid and memorable characters, there are tough choices, there are moments of great emotional power. Kenna's journey took me along on a journey of my own; this is the best book I've read in well over a year.

Of course, it isn't perfect. Kenna, as an Inevitable Prince, has been trained to use an exalted style of speaking (which he eventually abandons, to speak straightforwardly from the heart in the manner of ordinary people), and the vocabulary he uses is not always used quite correctly. "Vouchsafe," for example, sounds like it should mean "vouch for the safety of," and that's how the author uses it, but it does not mean that.

ThIs is (technically) space opera, even though it doesn't focus on the usual concerns of space opera but just uses the furniture, and like most space opera, it isn't intended as an actual projection of technological development. There are technologies that are probably impossible, like the Escargone, a space which speeds up time inside it (my French isn't that great, so I couldn't figure out why something that speeds time up is named after a snail), but there are technologies that already exist today or are being developed that are conspicuous by their absence, like AI and mixed reality. The tech is a means to the end of the plot, so I just had to treat it as such.

Also like most space opera, there's a glaring hiatus in culture between now and however many years in the future we are (it's never specified, but there are many inhabited planets, so presumably a couple of centuries or more). Contemporary references include Niffeneger syndrome (a reference to the novelist and her randomly disappearing character); "kerbal" used as a verb for working out movement in space; the Freon smell of old refrigerators; and dubstep. This is a difficult one for space opera writers; if you want to drop a quick reference that will have emotional resonance for your audience and convey a lot in a few words, you pretty much have to pretend the reference is still relevant however many years in the future, even though realistically it's a bit like a nineteenth-century novel set in 2020 referencing Sarah Bernhardt when it wants to evoke the idea of a glamorous woman. I don't know that there's a good answer to this dilemma. Probably the best answer is what Steinmetz has done: just drop the reference in, relying on the fact that most people won't notice the anachronism but will have the emotional response you're looking for.

I did have other moments of disbelief, too: for example, why does Paulius have purchasing authority, if he's so bad with money, and given that he does have it, how has the restaurant not gone out of business years ago? But I'm unusually critical, and despite all these nitpicks, this is an amazing novel with a glorious ending that took me on a thought-provoking, gripping emotional journey.

It's not quite so good that I intend to read his trilogy; I like books about drug use even less than I like dystopias, which is saying something. Though I suspect that if I did read those books, I would be delightfully surprised. Again.

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