Penny Ponders On Gravity’s Arrow
The turmoil that results when a settled life is suddenly upended
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live somewhere that starts to dissolve into chaos, somewhere that’s been your safe long-time home, where you’ve raised a family and always tried to live your life within a caring and ethical framework — and then an extremist group that has been nibbling at the edges for years, takes its chance and surges in to take power?
And wow, is Gravity’s Arrow by Jack Mann prescient on that front! The book was published in 2019 but I’ve since learnt how long ago it was that he mapped out the whole story, so it’s even more remarkable.
This isn’t a review
I’m just doing a bit of scene-setting here because this isn’t a book review as such. I’m diving into the spotlight books for Fantastic Books Publishing’s…
Fellow author Stuart Aken has written an in-depth review of Gravity’s Arrow here:
This is science fiction, set in the future and far from the Earth, but we will all find characters we recognise. For example, the star of the show is12-year-old Fhiro who kicks back at not being treated like the adult he feels he is. Who amongst us who has ever been a 12-year-old or a parent of one, will not recognise Fhiro?
Fhiro has no idea — not the glimmer of a clue — of the turmoil his parents face as they see their settled lives spiralling to an end and rush to make plans that they can’t even hint at to their tetchy younger son.
Gravity’s Arrow is a very human story but it’s good hard Sci-Fi too. Jack Mann doesn’t pluck new technologies from the air. He spent a long time researching the world he created and the technologies that make it work. For me, that provides a level of security. I don’t want Sci-Fi where someone can pop up out of the blue and wave a magic wand to get the characters out of trouble.
And technology is the area I’m heading for. I was fascinated by the role that crystals play.
Who knows what about that crystal technology?
Here’s what I asked Jack Mann:
I was intrigued by the crystal technology. They can use it but they don’t fully understand it. It struck me as analogous to early use of electricity. We discovered it and used it but didn’t fully understand how it worked (all those early fires from uninsulated wires embedded in walls). Is that a fair comparison and what stage are they at with crystals as compared to us with electricity?
This is what he said:
The understanding of how the crystals work, in the book, is quite similar to how people used to understand electricity. Back when the properties of electricity were being uncovered, the scientific method and the network of research organisations and philosophical approaches to discovery were not quite what they are now, so it took a while to really understand it (though given an absence of health and safety regulation, it was of course put to use faster than we would have allowed it to be now).
What is strange about crystals is that their properties are still so poorly understood even when humanity, and other sentient life forms, have spread across the entire galaxy, and number in the trillions. For every person in the Gravity’s Arrow universe living in a backward, oppressive community where scientific progress is severely hampered, there are at least as many who belong to civilisations where such advances are desired, and scientific research is encouraged.
However, just as we struggle with understanding quantum physics today, and just as we cannot really grasp the exact nature of how particles and energy relate to one another, the manner in which crystals interact with the empirical universe, and with each other, has not been fully figured out during the time of the story.
Greater understanding had been achieved by the ancients, but many of their technological advances had been lost when the ancients, themselves, were destroyed during the Great Dying 2000 years previously.
The equivalent of this would be if the Romans had figured out how to use electricity (turned out they did have some kind of computer, apparently), but the details of it were lost with the sack of Rome and the plague and less educated folk selling the materials without realising they formed a more valuable whole when put together in the right way. Except the sack of Rome and the fall of the Empire(s) were not as totally destructive as the Great Dying.
The more primitive cultures that survived the event harvested much of what they came across, destroying complex networks of crystals that might have helped them understand more. Meanwhile the havens, where electricity had been working, and AI entities lived and kept libraries of data, were also attacked and had memories wiped by the primitive cultures that inherited the galaxy.
These primitive cultures generally assumed that the ancients had incurred the wrath of a higher power, and were not to be emulated, hence a spurning/conscious destruction of records and technology.
Thanks, Jack. It is all sounding horribly more familiar with each year that goes by.
MABLE 2022
Both Gravity’s Arrow and Jack Mann are in the spotlight during this autumn’s online MABLE 2022 event that will run during September and October. Do sign up. It’s free, you’ll have a chance to chat with the authors, and win copies of books.