Gary K. Wolfe Reviews A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias S. Buckell

A Stranger in the Citadel, Tobias S. Buckell (Audible Originals 978-1713646228, $24.99, CD, 7 hr., unabridged [also available as a digital download]) September 2021. (Tachyon 978-1-61696-398-9, $17.98, 256pp, tp) October 2023.

Far-future societies which have forgotten or mythologized their history have been a staple of SF at least since H.G. Wells’s Eloi. If you shift the point of view from that of a visiting time traveler to an inhabitant of such a society, you’re getting pretty close to what has sometimes been called science fantasy (in one of its many vague definitions): a story set in an apparently magi­cal world, but which is gradually revealed to be our own distant future. The epic masterpiece of this sort of storytelling is Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle (beginning with The Book of the New Sun in 1980-83), but the technique is useful in all sorts of other ways. Tobias S. Buckell’s A Stranger in the Citadel begins in the ancient walled city Ninetha, cut off for generations from the outside world, ruled by a family dynasty of uncertain provenance, supplied by an appar­ently magical resource called a cornucopia, and governed by the overriding commandment ‘‘You shall not suffer a librarian to live.’’ Long before thinly veiled allusions to writers as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Alexandre Dumas, and Langston Hughes make it unmistakably clear, we come to understand that this antiliterate society, where books and writing are outlawed, is not a fantasy world at all, but rather a distant descendant of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a point made ex­plicit in Buckell’s afterword.

When a rare traveler named Ishmael is cap­tured carrying a book, the narrator Lilith – the youngest daughter of the city’s ruler or ‘‘Lord Musketeer’’ – saves him from immediate execu­tion at the hands of Kira, the commander of the city’s Guardians. This proves to be the first sign of a growing schism with Kira, who has virtually been Lilith’s surrogate mother her entire life. As Lilith begins visiting the imprisoned Ishmael, Kira grows more imperious and arrogant, lead­ing to an argument in which Lilith impulsively reveals a secret about her father which leads Kira – seemingly in a matter of hours – to mount a violent rebellion that eventually installs her as regent, at the expense of Kira’s entire family. Soon Lilith finds herself in exile with Ishmael, fleeing across the wastes outside the city and inevitably discovering that her world is not at all what she thought it was, that there are other cities, fearsome remnants of ancient technology, and even a rather startling surprise when she finally reaches what she believes to be the edge of the world.

The contrast between Lilith’s innocence – or enforced ignorance – and Ishmael’s rationality is skillfully handled, as he tries to explain to her a few rudiments of science and even mentions ‘‘griots’’ whose task was to keep literature and knowledge alive by memorizing entire books (as at the end of Bradbury’s novel). As vivid as Buckell’s settings and characters are – and Kira especially is a real piece of work, far more complex than she at first seems – the sense of how this world evolved, and how it relates to repressive trends in our own world, is never made particularly clear (Bradbury at least had HUAC and anticommunist hysteria to fall back on). A Stranger in the Citadel thus emerges as a well-told and at times provocative addition to the long SF tradition of tales of postrationalist dystopias who blame scientists and intellectuals for their plight (a tradition that includes such classics as Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow). And although book-burning and government-sanc­tioned rewriting of history seems more ominous now than at almost any time since Bradbury’s classic first appeared, Buckell’s far-future setting takes just a bit off the edge of immediacy that his theme invites. It’s a solid adventure with a winning protagonist, but one that is not quite as chilling as it might be in our particular moment.

This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.

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