Beyond the Burn Line

Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/science-fiction-and-deep-time-dc11ec8b81a3

I can be entranced by the concept of “Deep Time.” For example, anthropologists now think (or speculate) that human beings were trapped between Siberia and Alaska for “thousands of years,” specifically for ten to twenty thousand years.

We have a tendency to let our eyes glide past numbers like “twenty-thousand years” without any particular emotional reaction, thinking, perhaps, “Hmm....interesting. Now what's the next point I need to know?” But I invite you to meditate on that number. Our recorded history – the history that we can kind of piece together with records and structures – goes back maybe 6,000 years ago. The pyramids were built 4,500 years ago. Tack on another 1,000 years and we wonder what was going on.

Then turn your attention to the Beringerian Standstill – twenty-thousand years! Three times as long as we have history. For three times longer than earliest pharaohs, there was a population of humans that could not leave this godforsaken sliver of land. Eventually, they did, at which time they populated North America.

Or consider human prehistory which goes back 100,000 years. What were people doing in their small bands as they wandered across the face of Europe and Asia? How could they not have settled down sooner and started farming and cities. Why didn't they start ten-thousand years sooner? It seems like a short time, but it is twice as long as the time that brought us from stone tools to spaceships.

I purchased “Beyond the Burn Line” by Paul McAuley because it promised that deep time perspective. The book is set after the extinction of humanity. Another intelligent species (the “People”) have evolved intelligence, but they were not the first since humanity. After humans and before the People, there was a species of intelligent Bears. The People know about humans – who they call “ogres” – from the fossils that lie underneath a layer of burned soil.

With that setting, I assumed that the book was set perhaps several hundred million years in the future, given the amount of time that it would take to evolve human intelligence. I wasn't sure how McAuley was going to work a story set in a completely post-human setting. Stories that are exclusively alien in perspective lack a connection with readers. It can be done if the aliens are anthropomorphized with human virtues that engage the reader, but a story that was really about real aliens would be incomprehensible.

Beyond the Burn Line is organized into two connected parts. In the first part, we follow an apprentice scholar named Pilgrim Saltmire. Pilgrim's master has died at the outset of the book and Pilgrim is turned out by the heirs. Pilgrim makes it his mission to prove his master's controversial theory that UFO's are real. At various places around the known world, individual members of the People have been visited by flying, glowing ships that carry Visitors who bear a resemblance to the Ogres.
The People's society is going through an industrial/scientific revolution. Trains have been invented. Traditional agrarian clan societies are being disrupted. A class of scholarship is sharing information. In this world, Pilgrim returns to his clan, has some adventures, is exiled to the frozen south – which is a clue about where the story is set – and discovers a key to the Visitors.

In the course of this story, we learn that humans have been extinct for “only” two-hundred thousand years and that the intelligent Bears were overthrown by the People eight hundred years before when a plague reduced Bear intelligence and made them feral.

That is a clue that something is going on which is not natural. Two-hundred thousand years is not enough time for the evolution of a new intelligent species, much less two. There is an explanation for this, but I will not spoil it here.

At the end of the first section, the mystery of the Visitors is solved. The second section is set forty years later. The Visitors play the viewpoint role in this section as we discover the answers to the mysteries that Visitors existence are disclosed. This section involves a Visitor who specializes in Visitor-People relations. Those relations have soured. In addition, the question of the plague that overthrew the Bears becomes important.

I enjoyed this book. McAuley is a good writer. I liked the characters. The action kept the story moving along. What kept me involved was the game of trying to figure out what was going on. When I got one answer, another one would be presented. My curiosity kept me turning pages.

I was not completely satisfied. I had hoped for much deeper time, but, obviously, given the answers to the mysteries presented, that would never work. In addition, new mysteries were raised at the end of the book that were not answered. It may be that McAuley intended to write a second book, but that left this book with the sense that some things were left hanging.

On the whole, this is an enjoyable science fiction book, but not a perfect one.