The Actual Star

Three societies at three moments in time: a Mayan kingdom in decline in 1012CE, modern day capitalist society at the rollover of the Mayan calendar's 'long count' cycle in 2012, and 'Laviaja', a post-climate-change wanderer society of 3012CE.

If you liked Cloud Atlas's cast of characters popping up in different ages, you'll like the braided structure of this novel. In each strand, a small cast of characters face abandonment, alienation, and the yearning to escape.

If Ursula Le Guin's 'Birthday of the World' left you yearning for more, you'll love Byrne's 1012CE strand, as teenage twin monarchs rise to power in a declining kingdom bathed in animal gods, bloody rituals, and sacred places.

If you ponder #PostColonialism, #CulturalAppropriation, or you've ever been a privileged white tourist on a guided tour to an ancient place, there's something in the 2012CE strand for you. It follows the sordid misadventures of a misfit teenager on a quest to find spirituality and her place in the world.

If you wish Le Guin had leaned into the possibilities of anarchy more in The Dispossessed, or you shared the yearning for another world you found in #OctaviaButler's Earthseed, you'll love this novel's 3012CE strand. Like @[email protected]'s Walkaway, this novel projects utopia risen from dystopia. Global warming has come out in the wash. All our current problems are solved. Everyone just wanders the earth, going where they want, doing what they want. But new religion gives rise to new heretics.

If you were irresistibly drawn to the excruciating claustrophobic dread of The Tombs of Atuan (or even the arachnophobic nightmare of the Peruvian temple in Indiana Jones' iconic debut), you'll cower exquisitely before one of the novel's eternal protagonists: the sacred cave of Actun Tunichil Muknal.

But the millennia spanned also affords a long perspective for exploring the arc of humanity; family and social norms, the distinctions that generate prejudice, and even an interesting take on privacy and surveillance. I liked this a lot, and think it will stand a second reading.

This novel alternates between three connected timelines, each separated by 1000 years from the next, each on the cusp of social (and environmental) change.

The future timeline is set in a utopian (though by no means perfect) global nomadic society, organised around principles of mutual aid. It's refreshing to see a vision of how humankind might adapt positively to the challenges facing us, even as some of the fault lines in that vision are exposed over the course of the story.

The other timelines are just as vividly drawn, and feel researched and sensitively written. All three are deftly woven into the greater whole, and I found reading the chapters in blocks (one for each timeline) helped me appreciate the connections being drawn across all three.

This will definitely be going onto my to-reread pile, as I'm sure there's a whole lot that I've missed on my first pass through.

Things to be aware of: this book is pretty bloody in some places, and horny as hell in others.