Reimagining, Restructuring, and Remembering Society
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Tor Publishing Group, 2024)
Reviewed by Samantha Wilber
Sofia Samatar is an underrated science fiction author, skilled at retelling the atrocities of the contemporary world in fictional packages. Her stories allow readers to put distance between themselves and current injustices—science fiction generally allows for a birds-eye-view of our current political, educational, and economic climate under the guise of another, far distant reality.
Samatar’s latest novel, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (2024), occurs in the near future, where humans have exhausted the planet’s resources and live in outer space on a ship. Entities like rivers, oceans, and forests are reduced to myth; occupants of the ship only know a nature-less world. This new society conforms to a vertical hierarchy. The top level of the ship is reserved for the named, the educated, and the rich, while the bottom level is a prison for the uneducated and unnamed.
Although science-fiction, Samatar manages to invoke a reality in which the climate crisis has rendered the earth uninhabitable. The community on the spaceship is still concerned with things like education, work, and other pillars of society. While the physical environment appears different than our own, the structure of society is vaguely recognizable.
The short, 122-page narrative follows a boy and a female professor (both intentionally nameless) as they navigate the “upstairs” life of the ship. Throughout the novel, they are only referred to as “boy” and “professor.” The boy is brought upstairs on scholarship and must adjust to his life on the upper level. In an attempt to rectify the injustices caused by the ship’s hierarchy, the education department chooses one student from the bottom of the ship to live on the top level. As another nameless person in the uppermost level of the ship, the professor feels a kinship with the young boy. Conflicted by his troubled existence on the top floor, the professor pushes the boundaries of her work and life to help him adjust to his constraints. Her desire to assist the boy at first appears to be an individual problem, but shortly readers observe her actions are not just motivated by one student. Her frustration is not just aimed at one student’s situation, but the entire educational system that put him here in the first place.
In addition to following the relationship of the professor and student, Samatar’s novel is divided into three parts in correspondence with the book’s title. The Practice section refers to an ancient breathing practice that is eventually revealed to connect humans to one another. The Horizon portion of the novella refers to the desired outlook of the professor. She longs for a world that is focused on the horizon instead of this arbitrary vertical hierarchy. The Chain refers to both the literal chain connected to the humans to monitor their location and the metaphorical chain that links the humans to one another through the aforementioned breathing practice. The chain is both constrictive and liberating; united through spirit and bodily knowledge, the professor and boy can think beyond their literal chain. Joined together, the structure of Samatar’s book gives readers a visual component to her theoretical ideas.
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain invites us to join the boy and professor in their intellectual (and at times, very literal) journey to dismantle or challenge their reality. Escaping the confines of their institution risks losing the professor her job. Questioning the integrity of their education and breaking free from their ankle monitors is only the beginning of their attempts to escape the ship into the world beyond their ankle monitors. The boy and professor attempt to focus on the breathing practices that unite them together. The novella ends on the sentiment that together we are stronger, by describing society “one [as] the river, everyone is a sea” (122). The return to the extinct features of nature and breathing practices seem to act in opposition to the cold, clinical nature of the ship’s design. By alluding to other forms of knowledge prioritized by indigenous or non-Western communities, Samatar gently reminds readers American versions of society are not the end-all be-all. Perhaps restructuring contemporary society requires looking to the past, to other cultures, and to other worlds.
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain proposes a fresh perspective on the world. Instead of conforming to society’s power structures and oppressive systems, Samatar asks, “what would happen if we began to look at the world horizontally instead of vertically?” Instead of attempting to bring people up levels at a time (such as the boy and the professor), what would happen if we leveled the playing field? The scholarship program, although seemingly well-meaning, reinforces the hierarchy between the named and nameless; the professor and boy intend to dismantle this structure entirely. Instead of bringing one student up from the bottom, why must there be a bottom and a top at all? By reimagining the structures of government and social statuses, Samatar suggests that there is hope for power imbalances, racial injustices, and other societal issues. Samatar’s powerful narrative invites readers to question the effectiveness of the systems in our life.
Sam Wilber double majored in English and Biblical Studies at Palm Beach Atlantic University, and recently graduated with a Masters in English from James Madison University. You can find more book reviews on her Instagram, @whatsonsamsshelf.
