Sometimes, looking at some historical artifact, I stop and ponder precisely how old that object is, all of the events to which it’s borne witness, and I consider that ages of more than about a hundred years are almost unfathomable to us. Yes, we can look at the rings of a tree and say that it is seven hundred years old, we can date dinosaur fossils back a hundred million years, and we can extrapolate the age of the universe to almost fourteen billion years, but at some point these values are just numbers, not something that we can genuinely internalize. The entire span of “modern” human history, as it is usually reckoned, is ten thousand years.
Ten thousand years is not a long time when you compare it to fourteen billion, yet it is also a staggering span. Consider how drastically the world changed over just the twentieth century. Someone born at the start of the 1900s would have grown up with automobiles as a novelty, seen humanity take to the air, split the atom, and walk on the moon. They may even live long enough to see the beginnings of the internet. All in a mere hundred years. A recent excavation revealed a hominid-built wooden structure from 476,000 years ago, almost fifty times older than we typically reckon the entire extent of human history. Trying to achieve perspective on these matters is part of why I read historical works, but those only help for about six thousand years at best.
What if human history was measured, not in thousands of years, but in millions? What if recorded human history, which for us is perhaps six thousand years, was almost fifty million years? Could anyone internalize just how long a span that was, how many civilizations rose and fell during that time, all of the changes which must have occurred? That is the setting of Orson Scott Card’s The Memory of Earth, on a world called Harmony. But this is not Foundation, jumping from vignette to vignette across the millennia. Fifty million years ago, humanity fled Earth after they nearly destroyed it, and they established themselves on Harmony, vowing not to return to Earth until they had tamed the instincts that led them to destroy Earth in the first place. Except that, after fifty million years, no one remembers any of that.
Card is probably best known for Ender’s Game, which, while excellent, is possibly the least imaginative of his many stories. In The Memory of Earth, he gives us a world with an immense weight of history upon it, and he manages to convey enough of that weight to convince the reader of it. He presents a unique culture, which we can know exists as a transient blip in that enormous history, and he gives us the Oversoul, one of the most philosophically challenging science fiction elements I’ve ever encountered.
Speaking of historical perspective, it is somewhat difficult, from the current viewpoint, to grasp the mid- and late-twentieth century preoccupation with nuclear holocaust. Approaching a century since the first (and so far only) use of atomic weapons in warfare, and indeed, almost a century since the last total, era-defining war, the imminent threat of nuclear war has already become something we might struggle to imagine as realistic and probable. Oh, I think most people understand intellectually that the possibility of nuclear annihilation remains, and those who follow foreign policy might even contend that we are closer to a fresh employment of nuclear weapons than at any time since the Cold War, but that visceral sense of its proximal probability is absent. Maybe this is a residue of the fallacious, naïve, prematurely euphoric “post-history” narrative that permeated academic circles following the end of the Cold War.
This matters to The Memory of Earth because only grasping the tangible possibility of extinction enables Card’s reader to accept the drastic changes which Harmony’s colonizers made to themselves. To prevent humanity’s capacity for harm from reaching that scale again, while the species tried to evolve beyond its conflict-ridden instincts, the people who escaped Earth and came to Harmony built the Oversoul, and they altered their own genes to make them and their descendants able, not just to hear the Oversoul, but to be influenced by it. On Harmony, the Oversoul affects everyone’s thinking without them even being aware of it.
Not surprisingly, the Oversoul becomes the centerpiece of Harmony’s religions…but after fifty million years, the Oversoul is beginning to break down. That is the premise that starts The Memory of Earth, and it underpins the fundamental question that the book confronts without resolving. Most people cannot even recognize when the Oversoul is influencing them, but the Oversoul claims to not impinge upon free will – only on the extent of the damage that people can do. It does not stop a murderer from murdering, but it stops the murderer from having access to biological weapons or from being able to easily fly from city to city and avoid being caught. It keeps anyone from thinking about certain “dangerous” topics, like using wagons to transport equipment for war, while preserving knowledge of certain advanced technologies.
Is this free will? Is conduct right because the Oversoul demands it, or does the Oversoul demand it because it is right? It is as much an examination of religion as it is of human morality, and these are the sorts of questions that kept me reading The Memory of Earth, despite not being particularly fond of any of the characters. The characters are certainly realistic, just not all that sympathetic, and the plot is reasonably executed, but it truly is the philosophical dimension of the book that makes it interesting to me, even on this second read-through (I first read the whole series many years ago). With my greater grounding in philosophy, I might find it even more interesting now than I did the first time. This is the kind of story that science fiction enables us to tell, it is why I consider the genre so important, and it is a story I think you should add to your list.
IGC Publishing 