Sargassa by Sophie Burnham: Review by Liz Bourke
Sargassa, Sophie Burnham (DAW 978-0-7564-1936-3, $28.00, 416pp, hc) October 2024.
Sophie Burnham’s Sargassa is another first novel, and another novel that flits with playful seriousness between the trappings of fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history, using all three to question and upend the reader’s assumptions about the world of the novel (and perhaps the world at large) and how it works. Sargassa takes the aura of Rome – perennial influence on the empires of fantasy and science fiction – and creates a mirage of a world with an enduring Rome, one that has persisted even after a terrible, empire-disrupting period known as the ‘‘Quiet.’’ (I use the term mirage advisedly, for the contradictions that emerge from this enduring ‘‘Roma’’ become very relevant).
The Sargassa of the title is a city that, so far as I can tell, is a satellite and mirror of Roma, independent in its day-to-day life, subordinate to the greater imperatives of empire. It possesses a senate and a consul of its own, and plays home to the Imperial Archives and the position of Imperial Historian, just recently inherited by twenty-two-year-old patrician Selah Kleios, on the death – the murder by poison – of her father. She has inherited from him two classified items: an ancient atlas filled with landscapes that don’t exist, labelled in an incomprehensible language, and a black piece of stone – the so-called Iveroa Stone – that appears to do nothing at all, but which it soon becomes clear is an object that several people want to steal.
Sargassa is a novel about the structures of power and the way in which systems of power, privilege, and exploitation reproduce themselves. The truly compelling thriller plot, the secrets and lies and relationships that drive the engine of this novel with a beating and furious heart, would not exist without the relations of power given force both by Roma’s laws and by Roma’s social mores: the system work ing as designed to keep the privileged patricians in power and exploit a permanent underclass of conditional citizens and enslaved people. (Burnham uses the Latin terms ‘‘servus’’ (slave) and ‘‘verna’’ (slave born to the household), and gives the impression of a society that regulates degrees of unfreedom by contract and punishment-at-law as much as inherited status or by the time-honoured violently turn-conquered-captives-into-slaves version of enslavement. Apologists for slavery would likely quibble over whether the status Burnham portrays here is ‘‘true’’ slavery rather than a form of serfdom, but let’s be straightforward here.)
Selah is born to the pinnacle of this world, a patrician daughter of patrician parents, well-meaning but ignorant. Her beloved elder half-brother, Arran, was raised with the love and affection of their entire family, but he’s not a patrician: He’s a freedman raised in a patrician household, neither fish nor fowl and fitting in nowhere. Arran has a great deal of protective love for Selah, but her wilful ignorance to the consequences for people without her privileges sometimes infuriates him.
Theodora Nix is one of the underground revolutionaries – the Revenants – that the state likes to blame all crime and anarchy on. Theo is also undercover as a senatorial aide to Alexander Kleios’s widow, where their paths cross with Arran’s. They might just be using him for information, but surprisingly, they find themselves growing close to him. The compelling leader of the Revenants, a woman known as Griff, wants a future with direct democracy, self-rule, and independence; the very logic of empire itself undermined. Griff wants the Iveroa Stone –- she calls it a weapon – and she wants to recruit Selah to the movement, if she can.
Tair was raised in the Kleios household, educated alongside Arran to a high level in order to fit her to become Selah’s secretary in her adulthood. Unfree, but with a path to conditional freedom, she and Selah were drawn to each other, loved each other – though Selah didn’t understand the constraints on Tair’s life. Circumstances ripped Tair’s chance at legal freedom away from her, but she had the chance to escape regardless. Now she lives – carefully – and works with the Sisters of the First, a mutual aid organisation in the poorest area of Sargassa. Until someone who knows her history (for harbouring a fugitive would bury the Sisters) blackmails her into trying to steal the Iveroa Stone.
It ends up bringing Tair and Selah back together, and pushing Arran and Theo together too. Because Griff is right about the Iveroa Stone: Its mysteries could indeed undermine Roma itself, and it could provide the key to weapons that might bring down an empire.
This is a deft, vividly observed novel that is precisely interested in social realism and the relations of power. It uses Rome, and Romanitas, to examine and to critique the nature of systems of oppression, and it uses Selah’s dawning realisation of just how insulated she has been from consequences, and her potential (or lack of it) to use her power to make change, to very pointed effect. Personal relationships cut across divisions of status: Love is real and important, but it is not enough to cut away everything else that matters, too.
The climax of Sargassa moves a little away from this precisely observed deft combination of caper-thriller and social realism to a more outright SFFnal showdown of corrupt politicians, illegal gladiatorial combat, dramatic revelations about the truth of the world, and hectic action scenes. It’s deeply entertaining, but slightly more gonzo than what has come before. And yet it works, hitting with vivid emotional impact: a breathtaking finale for a novel that remains, to the last, interested in power, propaganda, and consequences.
Sargassa is the first book of a trilogy. I found it thoroughly compelling, and I’m eager to see what Burnham does next, since as a writer, so far they’re definitely working with themes that appeal to me.
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Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus
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