Jake Casella Brookins Reviews Inversion by Aric McBay

Inversion, Aric McBay (AK Press 978-1-8493-5504-9, $17.00. 240pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Bob Kayganich & T.L. Simons.

Every once in a while, I run into a new science fic­tion story that feels remarkably classic, as though it had been written at the height of some previous era and only recently discovered. Or classical, perhaps – so well-versed in its themes and tropes that you can immediately see where it fits into the conversation. Aric McBay’s Inversion is, on the one hand, clearly drawing on a particular vein of hard SF and space opera – giant engineered objects, interstellar empires, and resistance thereto. But, and this is the part that caught my attention, it’s also in the tradition of utopian and anarchist sci­ence fiction. With a snappy plot and tons of ideas, this is a real treat.

Inversion opens with a brisk bit of worldbuild­ing, in which one of our protagonists, a young woman named Char, starts to walk us through her home: Germinal, a planet that seems to take up the inside of a giant sphere, and across which walls of flame periodically sweep. These are no normal fires: They both destroy and rejuvenate all they touch, including restoring broken machinery and reincarnating those caught in the flames as infants. Char’s people, and the other peoples of Germinal, have nomadic (and rather idyllic) lifestyles built around the flamewalls’ passage, a sophisticated set of interlocking permacultures.

One of the challenges with utopian stories is a lack of narratively productive tension: Absent some sort of crisis, one is left with a frequently vanilla tour brochure. McBay solves this by having an invasion fleet storm in within just a few pages. Germinal, it transpires, is actually an artificially created pocket universe, and the interstellar empire that commissioned it is now kicking down its door to reclaim it. They’re fairly cartoonish villains – an aggressive imperial force, obsessed with racial purity and oppressive hierarchy. Fortunately for Char, time moves differently within Germinal, and its builders, her ancestors, built quite a few tricks into its very physics – the military invaders find not only a set of cultures that have been maturing for centuries, but also that their violent technological advantages aren’t quite as superior as they thought.

Nor is ‘‘fully automated luxury gay space communism’’ (with a rather more tree-hugging approach) its only focus – like the best kind of classic SF, it has more than one big idea. Through the character of Graft, a prisoner/servant of the in­vading forces, we’re introduced to the collective re­cords of an entire society; narrating in first-person plural, Graft opens a window on comet farms and interstellar conflict, and on the persistence and re­silience of cultural memory. These glimpses of the outside world, and the construction of Germinal itself, are in the mode of big-idea science fiction such as that of Karl Schroeder or Ted Chiang, and all the more interesting for how they interact with Char’s seemingly simplistic world.

The cultures of Germinal evoke some of the best utopias to be found in science fiction – Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time was particu­larly on my mind while reading this, as well as, in a more recent example, the futuristic wandering culture of Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star. And Ursula K. Le Guin is deep in the DNA here, as well – both the laudably ax-grinding Le Guin of The Word for World is Forest and the more thought­ful, nuanced Le Guin of Five Ways to Forgiveness, with its fierce, tearstained appreciation for peace and its glimpses of a culture socially and ecologi­cally healthy enough to last for millennia. Inver­sion is loaded with these kinds of practices, from ubiquitous therapy and careful social structures to sophisticated biological and physical engineering – and with bits of ancient wisdom in sayings like ‘‘We keep us safe’’ and ‘‘Don’t talk to cops.’’

But, one might object, the only effective resis­tance in the novel comes from the planet itself – a resistance designed, built-in, and fictional. Inver­sion offers a fascinating and very welcome view of a pastoral utopia, the kind of escape I sometimes desperately need – but it doesn’t seem to be the kind of utopia one can get to. As much as I was thinking about Le Guin throughout this, I was also thinking of the philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick: Rawls with his A Theory of Justice, setting out ideas for fair distribution, and Nozick with his critique, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that these ‘‘patterned’’ notions of justice don’t com­port with many conceptions of individual rights, and must be artificially and externally enforced. McBay pretty much ducks the argument by build­ing that patterned justice right into his world. It allows for a very cool society, but it’s not one we can construct with our current tools.

More generously, one can read Inversion as taking seriously the idea that, if you can’t beat an oppressor on their terms, and you don’t want to become them by matching them, the strategy must be to change the terms. And I’m glad it does – the novel that results is immensely fun and inspiring, and a welcome addition to a very long conversation.

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

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