Inverted World

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Thus book has been around for a long time. I've been intending to read this book for nearly 40 years, but, for some reason, I've been putting it off. I can't say why I've been procrastinating; perhaps because I felt it would be a bit of a chore.

This book is quite readable and fits nicely into the “gosh-wow!” experience of good science fiction. Thus, we have a city - actually, a large building, being dragged on railways laboriously through a wasteland. The City of Earth moves on rails that are picked up from behind and put down in front of the city as it passes through a mostly empty landscape. The focal character is Helward Mann, to whom we are introduced in one of the great opening lines of science fiction: “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.” With that sentence, we are disoriented by a culture that exchanged distances for time.

In a way this is an early kind of “Young Adult Dystopian” novel, written before there was such a sub-genre. at 650 miles, Helward is about 18 years of age and has to choose the guild that he will enter. The elite guilds are secret and sworn to secrecy and are essential to the process of moving the city. Apprentices are tossed into working in the various guilds, where they learn the skills and knowledges of those guilds by on the job training, rather than education. Thus, we have the basic theme of the young person leaving childhood and entering into a conservative tradition that is unexplained to him and which he must accept simply because it is tradition. Even the choosing of the guilds resemble the choosing of a career with insufficient knowledge that is the experience of youth (and a mainstay in YA Dystopian fiction, e.g., Divergence and its “factions.”) In Helward's case, he chooses the “Future Surveyors” without knowing what they survey or why his father and other surveyors seem to be so much older than their fellow guildsmen.

The young guildsmen must also learn about the reason for their strange predicament by on the job training. As they learn about their world, we learn that they are fleeing a topographical and temporal menace just barely by inching their city across the landscape. There are dangling questions that present themselves to the attentive reader. For example, since the land they are traveling through is inhabited by Spanish speakers, where do these people come from and what happens to them when the topographical disaster overtakes them? Strangely, no one in the City is concerned with these questions; they view these inhabitants as fortunate sources of labor to be exploited to lay the track and provide breeding stock.

The Inverted World is also what Professor Gary K. Wolfe in his Great Courses series on Science Fiction calls a “wasteland” novel. Like Cormac McCarthy's “The Road”, the inhabitants of the City of Earth are trudging hopelessly through a strange wasteland for no reason other than to avoid the death behind them and, maybe, find a safe place in front of them. There has been a disaster, but it is not explained. The survivors eventually face a threat to their community when they are attacked from outside by natives and sapped from within by faction that has decided that the time has come to end the trek.

The book is structured in chapters that tell the story from Hellward's first person perspective, from a Helward-centric third-person perspective, and from a third person perspective involving another character. There is a conclusion to the book and an explanation for the mysteries, but we are faced with an even deeper mystery of whether that explanation - which contradicts Helward's lived experience - is the truth. We have reasons to accept both Helward's belief and the belief that explains some of the mysteries of the story.

This is a good book. It is not particularly fast moving, and perhaps to much time is taken up with Helward's learning the mechanics of removing tracks from the rear of the city, but this heightens the mystery, and, eventually, we are paid off with a picture of a topographical monstrosity of a world that rivals the best of world-building imagination, for all that it is probably an impossible picture. Helward himself seems to be distant and cold, but, frankly, it is the plot and the setting that move the story. This book really is a classic and deserves to be read.