intersting and unique scifi story with the chained class being the "other". very well done. thanks for the arc

The boy, raised in the world of the Chained, an endless cycle of work gangs to benefit those who live above him on the generational ship they call home, had received a scholarship opportunity to attend school and live above. He’s taken to the Lrofessor, whose own father escaped the world of the Hold and had to adjust to a life unchained. The professor is determined to help the boy succeed but has trouble balancing that with her own advancement. As they grow closer and learn from one another, they forge a unique bond in search of breaking free from the chains.

This is a slim volume packed with questions, meaning, and ideas about subjugation and freedom. It poses the question if a world without subjugation can exist. I loved the boy and the professor as well as the prophet. Their journey was full of ups, downs, and danger. The character arcs were impressive and it left me wanting to know more about what’s next for this world and the characters.

This had a strong start, but my interest waned as it went along. There's plenty to unpack in this world and it felt like the novella-length was not enough to flesh everything out properly.

I was really intrigued by this book because I love speculative dark academia. However, and I almost never say this, I wish the book had been a little longer. After a fast and intriguing start, I found that the rest of the book was trying to be "smart" and abstract in a way that I did not prefer. I think this might work well for someone who wants an abstract, lyrical exploration of ideas. That person is not me :(

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted eARC!

(As a side note - the formatting of the eARC was AWFUL. I tried my best to not allow this to influence my review and to focus on the content rather than the experience.)

This book just wasn't for me. I don't know if it's the time I'm reading this, but I struggled with this book. It's not a bad book, it's written well. I think it's just what's going on in the world and this book made it rough. I think its supposed to be that way. I think this book is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable and make you think. I will probably come back to this book later, but it just wasn't one I could finish.

Thank you to Tor Publishing Group and to Netgalley for providing me with an e-ARC. All opinions are my own.

78 days. That's how long it took me to read this 113 page novella. Contrary to what you may think, this was NOT because I forgot about it. Rather, I had it on my daily to-do list <i>every single day since starting it</i>. What went wrong? Arguably, this is a "valuable" book, in that it has something to say–a lot of somethings, actually. About academia, about class, about social mobility, about interconnectedness and slavery and the prison system and consent and the various types of people who oppose systemic oppression. And yet it was torture to read. I'm sorry. Word for word I've probably read this book three or four times over because my neocortex kept turning off as my eyes read. I've got a high need for closure, so the ambiguity of the writing came off as being ungrounded in the world's reality/scenes, and the ambiguity of the metaphors led to feeling disconnected/dissociated from the story. Also, the fact I work in an academic field made reading about the inability to control your research beyond what is profitable/popular and how you can give your all and still not amount to much, especially when you're forced to forfeit your true passions for more mainstream topics that allow for funding, and how progress can be glacially slow since the core body of institutions are resistant to change etc. Maybe I'm projecting.

Anyway, the writing style. YMMV but Samatar has this way of writing and describing feelings or cognitive states or scenes that just did not compute in my brain. It's like… Even the names! Especially the names! Bold decision to replace your main characters with archetypical placeholders. In theory it's cool–in actuality, it annoyed me… Also the occasional capitalization of similarly archetypical names like Hold and Ships and Fleet. I just didn't jibe with Samatar's stylistic choices or prose. Like, completely opposite of jibed. All of this to say, you might love it! But try reading the excerpt first. I could tell from the very first page I was going to have trouble getting through it.

On a more meta note, one of the most interesting aspects of books to me is how you can present your own solutions or imagined reactions to societal problems. You can literally create a world and propose new ideas and methods for dealing with existing issues. However, imo, a lot of these issues presented in the book were never addressed/no one proposed methods of improvement, except for the main plot point, and even then it ends before it says anything interesting. The buildup/payoff aspect–the entire story is about true change to the system, true transformation, and yet it ends right before what would normally be the major event happens! It's like if Game of Thrones ended right before winter came. Like Red Rising ending as soon as Darrow leaves the underground tunnels.

There's also a lack of world-building, which can partially be due to it being a shorter story, but I still felt very ungrounded in terms of understanding what the society and world was like. For like half the story I didn't even know what they DID in the Hold. It got better as the story progressed but I actually wouldn't have minded some broad scale info-dumping. Also having phones for some reason seemed incongruous–like imagining Gil with an iPhone completely broke whatever immersion existed.

Still… 78 days for 113 pages–I read hundreds of pages of A Game of Thrones and listened to the entirety of Elantris, Turn Coat, and Animal Farm in the span of starting and finishing this novella (granted, I could listen to those while driving and working, whereas I had to sit and read The Practice). But if that doesn't say something about how anti-compelling/engrossing this book was, I don't know what would.

TL;DR this book is like one of those modern art paintings with a million in-depth meanings that play off previous famous works but the actual image is confusing to look at and not aesthetically interesting enough to warrant delving deeper. 2/5.

“Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?”

I dove into this having no idea where it was going, and it was mesmerizing. The story of a chained boy taken up into the Ship, getting a scholarship for his artistic talent. Protected by a professor, the boy will shed insight into the University’s programs, he will better learn to understand the Ship and what the Prophet below has told him about the Practice:
moving and feeling together, being linked, connected and aware, that is the Practice, the flow of breathing.

This novella is a piercing account on the hypocrisy of higher education and its scholars amidst complete and ravaging inequality, it’s an antiracist, anticolonial work and an absolute must read for any academic working with marginalized peoples or being marginalized themselves. The Practice, the Horizon and The Chain is as poetic as it is eye-opening, a work of superb rhythm and force. I loved it!!

“How did the dead know what you wanted? It had to be the Practice. Something linked you together, like the kneebone to the thighbone. And you knew it, felt it. Like a game of Scatter.”

Thanks NetGalley & Tor for the E-arc!

This was a powerful and poignant story that is so important for the times that we live in. Even though the contents were tough to read, Samatar handled it with grace. I would read from this author again!

Okay first thing I need to address: the eARC formatting in this was bad-bad. Like, mistakes are cool, minor formatting errors are totally expected! But at times, this was simply not readable. I mean, some of my favorite quotes include "Hislifehadbeensoordinarythatgoingupstairsinthe lift,thatbrilliantboxoflightwhoseraysseemedtopierce", and the ever famous "Intheshower,thewomanrememberedthatlaugh.She recalledthevoiceoftheprophet.Hiswordsreverberated aroundher,slurredandbreakinglikefallingwater,telling" What am I supposed to do with that? Look, I did translate them all, but how much is one enjoying a story that way? This is all to say, take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Or several, or the whole damn shaker, frankly.

Because here's the rub: the premise was cool and I appreciated the ideas, but I was mostly confused and bored. Was I confused because of the formatting? Well, no, because like I said, I meticulously figured out what it was supposed to say, because I think I have problems. But also, when you spend so much time just deciphering the words, the context has a tendency to get lost in the shuffle (no, really! This is a thing that happens to kids who are not fluent readers- their comprehension doesn't lack because they can't comprehend, their brains are just too busy decoding the words to bother with the meaning.

Erm. Anyway, that has nothing to do with this book. The premise, like mentioned, is great! A kid who was doomed to spend his whole life in servitude on a mining ship is plucked out of obscurity and given a chance to be educated with the "elite". But is life "up there" really any better than before? And probably some other philosophical stuff I missed because I don't always understand symbolism. The thing is, I just didn't feel all that connected to any of the characters, they felt... distant, maybe is a good word? Muffled? I don't know, I just didn't feel all that immersed in the story.

Bottom Line: I really wish I had read a more coherent version, because I truly can't tell if the problem was the formatting, the story, or a combination. But because of that, I feel like it is unfair of me to really rate it. (For the sake of argument, let's give it a three for now on sites where I have to.)

This didn’t go any of the places I expected it to go. But the places it went and the themes it explored turned out to be much bigger than I expected – even though they conducted that exploration in the narrowest of spaces.

The space-faring fleet on which both the Hold and the University exist is part of a vast armada of interstellar leeches. This is not a generation ship, although generations of humans have certainly been born and died on its journey.

Instead, this is a human colony designed and engineered to roam the black, much as Quarians were in Mass Effect, but without their tragic, albeit self-inflicted, backstory.

Rather, the human population of this fleet represents humanity in all its dubious glory, greedy and rapacious by design, striving and hopeful in only a part of its execution. The stultifying caste system of Braking Day, Medusa Uploaded and even Battlestar Galactica, as highlighted in the first season episode “Bastille Day” (It took me forever to locate exactly which episode had this plot point but I just couldn’t get the reference out of my head) is on full and disgusting display, particularly in the context of the University.

Not that academia doesn’t do plenty of caste stratification of its very own, and not that it can’t be both blood thirsty and bloody minded – particularly in its small-minded, impractical politics. If an exploration of that appeals and you enjoy SF mysteries, Malka Older’s Mossa and Plieti series, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles plumbs those depths in all their ugliness while figuring out just whodunnit in a brave new/old world, while Premee Mohamed’s forthcoming We Speak Through the Mountain is a similarly searing indictment of the way that Academe rewrites its own history to obscure its pervasive condescension.

Howsomever, as is clear from the above citations, several parts of this story have been done before – and well – if not quite in this combination.

The place I wasn’t expecting it to go was into the metaphysical, quasi-religious depths of Andrew Kelly Stewart’s We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep, which is where The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain gets both its heart and its quite literal depth.

Because the story here, in the end, is both about learning that even people who believe they are free can be conditioned – or fooled – into forgetting that they are just as chained as the obviously and literally named ‘Chained’ people that they are taught to look down upon.

And that it is only by banding together, not through violence but through perception and mindfulness and just plain finding common cause – that they can all be free.

Escape Rating B: This is a story that, at first, seems a bit disjointed. And it does have a sort of metaphysical aspect that seems foreign to its SF story – also at least at first. At the same time, as much as the obvious abuses of the Hold system resemble the contemporary carceral state, the sheer bloody-minded small-minded nastiness of academia sticks in the craw even more harshly – if only because it makes the hypocrisy of the whole, entire system that much more obvious.

This isn’t a comfortable book. It’s beautifully written, compulsively lyrical, and manages to both hit its points over the head with a hammer AND obscure any catharsis in its ending at the same time. I’m not remotely sure how I feel about the whole thing, but I’m sure I’ll be thinking about the spoken and unspoken messages it left implanted in my brain.

The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain, Sofia Samatar’s new novella, is a book of dualities—above/below, old/new, science/humanities, free/chained—and a story full of the process of deconstructing, blurring, complicating, or erasing those dualities entirely. It follows an unnamed boy from an enslaved class of workers chained together in the depths of a mining ship, and a woman, a professor, in a university above who works to raise him up into education and her social class—not fully elevated, not free from oversight or oppression, but in the upper part of the ship. But that description does little justice to what the book is, or what it is trying to communicate within its mere 112 pages. The book is more than the sum of the story’s events… but what it is is harder to pin down.

All threads, however, lead back to those dualities: most critically, that of up/down, which becomes the lens through which most of the story can be understood. There is the Hold below. There is the city above. There are people in the Hold, and they too are below, lower in class and consideration than the people living above their heads. We follow the boy as he is raised up—lifted in a literal sense from the Hold below the city, and out of his lower class existence into that of a university student. An act of pure philanthropy, a boon to someone in poor circumstances? Or a patronizing sop to a member of a people dismissed? Welcomed in as an equal or watched as an exhibit?

The grit in the lens—because it might at first seem that the answer to all those questions is the latter one—is the woman. Her father, like the boy, was raised up from the Hold. Her motives seem, at first, pure. But again, Samatar blurs the lines and shows us that even someone with a close association cannot always understand the viewpoint of the oppressed. Throughout the story, and through her own changing understanding of her father’s life and the world in which she lives, the woman is a force of complexity and nuance through those harsh dualities, and instead of shifting the boy from one category to another as intended, makes him like her—something in between. Except… maybe he is the one changing her.

Using these two characters, whose position in their social hierarchy is bounded by complexity, Samatar steadily examines and unravels the uses—both in-world and in general—of Up and Down in both literal and metaphorical senses. It is a novella intensely about class and oppression, the up and the down of the social, and of the power that enforces. But the literal and physical, the movement of boy to Up and woman to Down and back and forth throughout the story, as well as the eventual revelation of how the station is truly shaped and maintained, reinforces that metaphorical sense at every step. There is no verticality except the one literally crafted by the hands that built the station, nor hierarchy but the one enforced by power.

This metaphorical reading is only enforced by Samatar’s approach to the tone of the story. There is a distance to our relationship with both characters—who remain forcefully unnamed throughout, even when others do not. They are held at arm’s length… and yet closer than breath. A strange proximity without intimacy that elevates (the linguistic binary of up and down seems inescapable, even here) the tone to the level of the fable or myth, imparting its wider wisdom through synecdoche.

There is no verticality except the one literally crafted by the hands that built the station, nor hierarchy but the one enforced by power.

Which leads into the other core focus of the story—the stream of spirituality that pours through underneath the events, rising to the surface from the Hold, and slowly suffusing everything in the boy and then the woman’s perspective. It is the catalyst for the boy’s growth beyond the limitations imposed on him, as well as the lens through which he views himself and the events he lives through. It is described only in aphorisms, snippets of wisdom from the prophet in the Hold. And yet, by the end of the story, it feels almost within our grasp, if not our understanding. In a story all about separation and polarity, the Practice, as the prophet calls it, is the tie that binds, the chain that frees.

This approach feels revitalizing for SF, a genre in which religion and spiritualism can so often be written as a relic of the past, something that must be shed to enter The Future, rather than recognising the extent to which they underpin the lives of so many people. A future that purports to be human but which is absent the spiritual is one that must surely have excised a significant portion of that humanity from its scope.

The story’s close is not so much a conclusion as an erasure—all those boundaries Samatar has been steadily blurring are laid bare, and something else, in which they may be wiped away all together, takes root and begins to reach tentatively upward. Duality and polarity broken down in favor of connection and community, threatening every bit of structure we have slowly learned throughout the story, and rightly so. No ending then, but a beginning, Samatar inverting the shape of the story just as she has everything else. It is a beautifully crafted narrative, grappling with class as so little SF does—even when it seems so relevant. Likewise, she has infused the cold clarity of space with the necessary breath of spirituality as a component of human experience. This is not only a story of ideas, but one of humanity, distilled into some of its purest, yet most complex forms, revealed with dazzling and efficient grace. In 112 pages, she provides a whole thesis on hierarchical worldviews, the tyranny of the binary and the power of spirituality. What could be more impressive?

A powerful story with beautifully writing, haunting imagery, and a poignant sci-fi take on slavery and colonialism. Fans of Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts will love this wonderful novella easily.

Thank you @b2weird for setting up this tour for Sofia Samatar's "The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain" from @tordotcompub.

The boy is in the Hold. There he works with the other Chained day in and day out. The boy draws on the walls of the Hold, gaining attention. He is pulled out and sees what is above. The professor is trying to have her work acknowledged by her peers. She brings the boy out of the Hold to educate him in the university of the mining ship they are on. The fact that there is a university on a mining ship and they still require forced laborers who don't know what's going on is a tremendous red flag. Together they will see how the chains are around them both - and how they can be broken.

Reasons to read:
-This is sci-fi about the people and the society and how they are used. And once the systems are shown it screams a warning
-Uni flashbacks to terrible advisors
-Put the book down and just looked into the middle distance when a certain technology is shown

Cons:
-The fear that someone at a corpo is going to try to make some of the cuffs

It's both a harsh picture of a future oppressive society and a beautiful meditation on freedom, where no one can be really free unless everyone is free. Definitely invokes associations with the likes of Omelas (which gets referenced way too frequently but is useful for a certain kind of short spec fiction that's not action driven but morality-focused). It was my first read of Samatar's writing, and it makes me curious to go find the backlog of her works.

This little novella provided a grim look at the possible future. The boy and the scholar live on a spaceship whose purpose is to mine materials - one ship of many. There is a strict hierarchy on this ship where those at the bottom live and worked chained together in the hold, those in the middle live above but still have a chain, and those at the top; these have the ability to control the others chains. Pretty grim stuff

It's not a pleasant reading experience if you only care about plot and characters, but it's a strong story that packs a punch thematically, and as always Samatar's writing is gorgeous and poetic. It expertly discusses themes about power structures, and shows how none of us are really free unless all of us are - how money and profit will always come before human life. There were also a mystical/religious element here that I really liked, showing how even the people at the literal bottom develop their own faith and culture even if those above deem them unable. I really liked it!

I think if you like Ursula K. Le Guin, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and/or An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, you're gonna like this as well!

Sofia Samatar sketches a powerful story about an unjust society that travels among the stars many years after the Earth has become uninhabitable. Those at the bottom of this society are the Chained, people who are chained up in the dismal hold of the spaceship, live in squalor, and are forced to keep the ship running at the whims of the people who live in the upper levels of the ship. The upper levels are a veritable paradise, full of people who don't give a single thought to those below them unless it is to brutally discard them. But when a woman working at a university in brings back a defunct scholarship program that takes people from the hold to the university to be educated, something is set into motion that might be the key to freedom for the Chained.

Sofia accomplishes much in this story in very little time, and importantly does so without sacrificing the beautiful writing and atmosphere that she has brought to life in some of her previous projects which were much longer. You quickly understand the scope and scale of the horrors faced by those out of power in this society, and as you learn more alongside the characters you feel like you are right there alongside them in their search for understanding (and eventually, more than that), I struggled a little with the more mystical elements of the plot, but didn't feel like they detracted from my enjoyment of such a fine piece of writing. I'm very excited to see what this author does next!

You know, every time I read a quality fantasy or sci-fi novella I think hmmm, this is being published by Tor isn’t it? This is definitely toward the literary end of the genre as it explores social issues around class and imprisonment. It’s what appears to be a three tiered society of those in chains, a working class of those only lightly bound with an anklet and a ruling class on a fleet of interstellar ships that don’t appear to have any plans of ever not traveling. It’s dark. The chained are pretty grimly treated but it’s an interesting book and it is a quick read.

This novella packs a powerful punch. Exploring themes of slavery, privilege and power structures, in a science fiction dark academia setting. I wasn’t sure what to make of it in the beginning and was left reeling at the end.

A boy is taking out of his chain gang cell in the Hold and given a new life with a scholarship above. The Woman - a professor with an affinity for Hold people becomes his mentor and helps his transition. Through the use of the practice, their horizons expand, as does the scale of oppression on the world they live in.

There’s a particular scene where the woman is given a rude awakening to the true reality of her existence and it struck such a nerve. So many of us are blind to the chains we are locked into and the privileges we are granted by nature of our location or institutions we are born into.

Would highly recommend this. Giving it 4 stars because the format of my arc made reading very difficult with lots of joint up words and I couldn’t tell if that’s how it was meant to be written or a formatting error. Also a credit to how lyrical the writing is that it didn’t hamper my overall enjoyment of the book.

I think this is a me problem, but it took me a bit too long to latch onto the meat of the story. Because the majority of it is told in these vague abstractions (made more impersonal by using euphemisms instead of names for our main characters), I had a hard time following what was actually happening. I also have absolutely no idea what the timeline of this story is. For me, that’s a pretty important anchor - especially in spec fic where the rules as we know them might not apply.

I did however really like the theme of connection and community, even when they’re people you might not know or would ever interact with. I wished we’d seen it earlier.

My copy also had some really distracting formatting issues, which hindered my reading

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've always been rather impressed by Samatar's wordsmithing. And this new novella showcases a more SF case for lyricism tackling the chains of our society, our own minds, in a futuristic prison-mine that just happens to support a whole society.

The subtext is quite clear. On the backs of the broken is the world built.

I enjoyed this look across the divide. It is as hopeful as it is tragic.

Understanding is always the key.