Salt

by Adam Roberts

Book Overview

After 37 years on a brutal and dangerous journey through space, a federation of settlers finally arrives on the planet Salt. Thus begins the colonization of this brave new world--a process that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0575068965
• ISBN13: 9780575068964
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Gollancz
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent

Intense, disturbing and prophetic. The fourth Roberts I've read, his first novel, and my second favorite after Gradisil. Ambitious themes, and complex implementation of them. The setup is the relativistic travel to and colonization of an alien planet, the titular Salt with all the material difficulties attendant on that. The main story is two first person narratives of people from two city states of differing ideologies and daily norms. The two communities have built up tensions, and eventually all out war. One of most interesting things about this is the political parallel. There's a prosperous and plutocratic regime that undergoes a war in the desert to subdue another society, using the justification of faith as well as a recent and galling terrorist attack. It begins its reprisal with a major bombing to break the spirit of the populace, then moves in at force. Overt opposition is easily crushed and victory seems secured after a short time, but then it turns into a long occupation, attritional guerrilla warfare, and a slow disillusionment that causes political unrest. The invading country specifically paints all resistance against it as terrorism, insists such fighters are not legitimate soldiers and reserves the right to counteract such resistance through extraordinary and extrajudicial means. The reason I find this parallel good rather then eye-rolling is because Salt was written in 2000. Roberts had no way of knowing how much his scenario would resemble the reality of 9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War. Here I'd say is a good example of SF's ability to be thematically predictive, and have a continued relevance to understanding the way we operate now and the way we might in the future. In any case, the larger power of the story comes from the way that both main characters, both narratives and both societies are flawed. Things seem at first to be rather balanced in one side, but they each have a lot of problems and injustices that they wear as badges of pride, and in particular there's one rather monstrous action by the 'more sympathetic' character that in retrospect was well set up and that lends a measure of uncertainty to trusting everything about his perspective. Seeing the logic and rationalizations of both sides as they fight and project the worst into their enemy makes for a complex as well as dramatic situation. On a direct plot level the book has no real conclusion, but it says everything Roberts needed to say about the outlined terms of his work. If taken purely as a sort of dual dystopia, the book would be of limited value. In the end it's not that unique or compelling to demonstrate than authoritarian nationalism and conformist anarchy. I'd say the book works beyond that in the way it plays with the form of narrative. In a dystopian novel, there's almost always a level of trust with the story and the viewpoint of the individual existing in opposition to the dysfunctional system. This perspective might come to a point of d

Thought-provoking and tragic

By coincidence, I read this book just after a friend had shown me Tillich's discussion of three kinds of morality in his History of Christian Thought: heteronomy (the law of the other), autonomy (the law of the self) and theonomy (the law of God). Although both groups in this novel, the anarchist Alsists and the military dictatorship of Senaar, consider themselves, in some sense, ruled by God, their different flawed conceptions of God mean that they are actually autonomists and heteronomists, respectively. The Senaarians can't be themselves, they can only be constituted by their society; but the Alsists hardly have a society, because nobody takes responsibility for anyone but themselves. In neither case do they have much in the way of compassion. The Senaarian dictator, for example, when talking about immigration from another city where there has been internal strife, assumes that the immigrants will have to be self-supporting economically; "there would be no point in them coming here to starve in the streets." Charity never crosses his mind. Economics (not free market economics, exactly, but something developed from many of its premises) governs the Senaarians as much as their militarism, and in this way they have a shadow side which is like the self-centred Alsists. The Alsists, on the other hand, work if they want to, but when asked, "What if someone never wants to?" - i.e., what happens to "free riders" - the Alsist narrator says that eventually their friends will get sick of it and beat them up. In other words, the enforcement of social conformity by the threat of violence which the Senaarians use is the shadow side of the Alsists. Inevitably, therefore, they have a hideous and unnecessary war over their irreconcilable misunderstandings of each other, which each side justifies to itself in its own terms, and everything they can't admit to in their own society is projected onto the other. The great tragedy is that the story is so realistic.

A chillingly relevant SF novel

'Salt' is a story of colonists on a distant planet. But in this common SF setup Adam Roberts tells an uncommon tale. The science is there, but while he gives us the practical aspects of making a planet habitabal, Roberts drives us towards another tale. This is a tale of two human societies, who are so different, that they can hardly understand each other. And from these differences a conflict rises, that grows from heated talk to bloody raids. The novel has two narrators, representing both sides of conflict. From their subjective stories we can try to get an objective picture. The ending is a bit of a letdown, but it is still an impressive work. The book was written in 2000, and it is chilling how it seems relevant to the current situation in the world, particularly in Iraq. 'Salt' shows how the worldview of one society can be completely different from that of another. And how unwillingness to understand and blind faith in your way of life being the only right way of life leads to terrible consequences for both sides.

Adam Roberts is a Sci-Fi Genius

I loved this book. The imagery is so enticing. Nothing compares to Adam Roberts.

May day English Patient be with you...

The novel starts off with the voyage to 'Salt'. The planet is so-named because the main element on the planet is a preponderance of sodium chloride. Not the most hospitable environment for a human; but as someone points out to Petja, if there was no supply of salt, then all the colonists would die (although the colonists' recycling process seems to cover all their needs). Petja is the opening narrator of the novel. He belongs to a community of anarchists called the 'Alsists'. Adam Roberts openly acknowledges that there is an element of intertextuality involved in the novel, referring to Ursula Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed', Nabokov's 'Bend Sinister'. There are various other religious groups making the same journey, all strung out like pearls attached to a comet (an inevitably risky form of transport, especially considering the cabin fever inside the various ships, but a speedy one at that). One of the Alsists commits suicide and threatens the whole mission. This causes concern in the Senaar ship, who bid to avoid a repeat performance. They ask the Alsists to send a delegate to discuss the issue, and Petja is sent. Not that Petja is any kind of leader: like all the Alsists, he's against any form of hierarchy. Thus begins the troubled relationship between Senaar and the Alsists, which is exacerbated by the fact that Senaar men have fathered children on the Alsist ship. The undisciplined Alsists then break ranks by deciding to land on Salt first, angering the Senaarians further without even realising it. Not that the Senaarians want to grab the best land for themselves, or anything. The Senaarians have a patriarchal, hierarchical culture. They're named after the place in Genesis where the Tower of Babel was built. Babel later became Babylon, and there is a settlement named 'Babulonis' in the novel, complete with water flowing uphill, just like the famous Hanging Gardens. Barlei, the Senaar leader, would have preferred the planet Salt to be called 'Kepesh', after the Hebrew word for 'silver', which most often seems discussed within the Book of Exodus. Indeed, Barlei later builds a 'Great Dyke', which he describes as a 'Pharaonic feat', without any hint of hypocrisy. It's debatable as to whether the Alsists or the Senaar are representative of 'The Chosen People', and it's Petja who seems most like Moses, despite Barlei's use of language from the Book of Exodus. When the debate is held on how the future Senaar should be built, there is the suggestion that it should be constructed in the shape of 'The Eagle of St. John', which may be a sign of freemasonry in Senaarian society. One of the Senaarians who has fathered Alsist children is called Beltane: perhaps by referring to the Pagan May Day, Adam Roberts intends to remind us of modern anarchists who now wander forth and protest on May 1? The anarchists are well drawn by Roberts, and he is quite topical in including them. Roberts' dystopia is just as biting. All those scenes where Alsists threatens to pun