James Nicoll Reviews

Donald Kingsbury’s 2001 Psychohistorical Crisis is a stand-alone space opera. Well, stand-alone-ish. More on that later.

Eron Osa, having committed an unspeakable crime, is functionally obliterated. Poor Eron. What is he to do with the rest of his life?

Seven hundred centuries after mankind ventured into interstellar space, the galaxy is dominated by the Second Empire¹. The Second Empire is ruled from the capital planet, Splendid Wisdom, which in turn is guided by the Psychohistorians. As long as the Psychohistorians have a monopoly on psychohistory, their ability to predict social development means that the Second Empire is unassailable.

Young Eron Osa of Agander is determined to achieve academic prowess. There are several impediments to his ambition, all of which are due to the fact that his father, while rich on a planetary scale, is not rich on a galactic scale. Thus, Eron’s fam—a computer implant that vastly augments various cognitive abilities — is merely very good. Not only that, the school to which his father plans to send Eron falls short of the elite school on which Eron has his heart set.

Nevertheless, Eron is quite bright. Also, his mentor has a personal motive to support Eron’s ambitions. Thus, despite the apparent obstacles in his path, Eron joins the ranks of the Psychohistorians. In a sense, he is one of the galaxy’s rulers.

In another sense, he is a playing piece in a high-stakes game whose rules he does not fully understand. Long story short: Eron is tried, convicted, and executed for an offense he no longer remembers. Whether the legal pretext would stand up to close examination does not matter, as punishment follows too closely on sentencing.

Luckly for Eron, not all of him was killed. Only his fam was removed and disintegrated. As the fam contained most of his memories and greatly augmented his cognition, the execution destroyed most of Eron as he was. However, some small part of Eron survives, that rudimentary part of him that is entirely biological. This fragment must now carve out a new life for himself.

Eron’s rehabilitation is shaped by the fact he is still a playing piece in games he does not understand. In fact, a great many people do not understand the games being played, including the Psychohistorians. Vast conspiracies are afoot, aimed at breaking the psychohistorical monopoly.

~oOo~

Yeah, this is another novel where the Big Secret isn’t how a certain useful thing can be done, but that it can be done at all. Worse, it’s the sort of useful thing that stops being useful if the technique is generally known.

As you might have guessed, this novel is Kingsbury’s take on Asimov’s Foundation and Asimov’s Psychohistory. If you’ve read those books, when you read Kingsbury’s book you will notice many references to the Foundation series. References, but not rotoscoping. This novel is a comprehensive reimagining of Asimov’s books; trying to fit this book into Asimov’s future history will only end in tears².

Before I start discussing the novel itself, a digression. I don’t know if Kingbury is still alive. As he was born in 1929, he would be fairly old if he were alive. I’ve seen firm assertions that Kingsbury has died. I’ve seen equally firm assertions that he is alive. I went so far as to contact McGill, where Kingsbury taught until the 1980s, but apparently, they don’t keep track of retired faculty. They didn’t even seem to have heard of him.

I thought of emailing his editor but I am pretty sure Kingsbury’s editor was David Hartwell (1941 – 2016).

But onward to the review.

First, complaints. ​‘Mankind’ is used above, not humanity, because mankind is the term used in the book. On a related note, while Kingsbury critiques certain elements of the original Foundation, he did not see fit to address the dearth of women in Foundation. If anything, he embraced it, at least as far as the ruling classes go. Furthermore, while of course social mores 70,000 years from now would be different from ours, it’s just too bad this particular assortment of cultures seems to be all-in on adults having sex with tweens. It’s weird how often that specific practice turns up in SF. Particularly in Kingsbury’s SF.

The first thing a reader will notice about Psychohistorical Crisis is the heft. My ARC is packed away so I cannot say how long it is, but I do recall that the book counted as two books for billing purposes. The MMPB I picked up is 727 pages long³.

This is not a cotton candy tome, one where volume is not matched by solid content. This book is more of a Moby Dick. Psychohistorical Crisis is jam-packed with a plethora of characters and subplots, extensive world-building⁴, and many other fictional accoutrements. Consequently, the brief synopsis above is woefully incomplete. This is because when I tried to cram in everything, my first draft came in at 3000 words before I even got to my comments. Readers should be aware that while Kingsbury has a destination in mind, he is in no hurry to reach it. Nor is he much interested in the direct path.

Kingsbury provides an interesting model authors considering homages could consider. This is not (as mentioned above) Foundation with a new layer of paint. Kingsbury dismantled Asimov’s work down to the essentials and then built his own work out of that.

I am always surprised to discover how small Kingsbury’s body of work is, given the six-decade length of his career: somewhere between three to five novels plus between six and eight shorter pieces⁵. His magnum opus was supposed to have been The Finger Pointing Solward, on which he worked since the 1950s without ever publishing it. As it is, Kingsbury’s best book is either Courtship Rite or Psychohistorical Crisis⁶. Neither is without flaw, but both are full of undeniably fascinating settings, characters, and plots.

Psychohistorical Crisis is out of print.

1: Over the next seven hundred centuries, many empires have come and gone. The USA is long delenda. However, as far as the Second Empire is concerned, only the galactic empire immediately before it matters.

2: Something that I mention only because I’ve seen at least one person get very frustrated trying to reconcile this novel with Asimov’s series.

3: That and the fact the novel is science fiction narrows down the period when Psychohistorical Crisis could have been released in paperback: after paperback binding improved enough that beasts like this would not fall apart, after publishers began taking advantage of this for science fiction novels, but before 2003, when various book chains announced they would not accept midlist SF over 120,000 words.

4: I couldn’t fit this into the main review. While the Second Empire is more familiar with Earth history than I would expect, given the passage of time, it’s a minor plot point that certain eras are far better documented than others. The issue isn’t the amount of time that has passed but whether the media used were durable (like clay or even paper) or ephemeral (like computer records).

On the subject of elements that don’t fit into the main body of the review: at one point a character proves that galactic scale democracy cannot work, because decision-making would slow to a glacial pace. It’s not clear how any centralized government could work on that scale. However, it is also not clear that any centralized government does, no matter what Splendid Wisdom tells itself.

5: How you answer this question (how many novels did Kingsbury publish?) depends on how you classify The Survivor (1991) and The Heroic Myth of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine (1994). Both are arguably novel-length, but were published in anthologies. If they are novels, then Kingsbury published five novels and six shorter works. If they are not, then Kingsbury published three novels and eight shorter pieces.

6: His best book is very much not The Moon Goddess and the Son, which [ominous background music] I own and could review.