Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley
(Gollancz, 2022)
Reviewed by by Nick Hubble
Beyond the Burn Line defies easy categorisation. It is simultaneously the tale of a far-future post-Anthropocene Earth and a first-contact novel. The first half is a somewhat leftfield quest adventure set in a just-about preindustrial society. The second half is a high-tech thriller, complete with unreliable AIs and action scenes in exotic locations. If this sounds potentially bewildering, have no fear because the novel is such a beautifully written, character-driven and enchanting narrative, that it is a delight to immerse oneself within. I think a key reason for the intense readerly pleasure I experienced lay precisely in the way that Beyond the Burn Line combines so many types of stories that I like and does something meaningful with them.
The titular ‘Burn Line’ is a layer of ash ‘laid down by the eruption of the Yellowstone volcanic field and the global convulsion of endtime wars’, which happened two hundred thousand years before the novel’s opening. However, the extent to which we go beyond it is more metaphorical than literal, as we find ourselves transported outside conventional social norms in the company of people who do not come in conventional human forms and rejoice in monikers such as Foeless Landwalker, Noble Seatree and Joyous Hightower. While not all of these characters live up to their names, the protagonist of Part One of the novel, Pilgrim Saltmire, certainly does as he undertakes a journey—in the full sense of the word—to complete his recently deceased master’s unfinished work. The problem is that while his master was an undisputed genius and the originator of a Darwinian-style theory of natural selection, his final work is concerned with reports of the ‘visitors’, the far-future equivalent of UFO sightings, a topic which no respectable people want to be associated with.
Pilgrim’s attempt to fulfil this self-appointed task, including efforts to secure funding for the necessary travel and research, lead him further and further towards the margins of society. Eventually he discovers a map that appears to record appearances of the visitors to the civilisation of intelligent bears that had previously enslaved his people, before collapsing to a mind-wrecking plague hundreds of years earlier. The map, which is stolen before Pilgrim can unravel its mystery, remains significant even after he, with the help of ‘the invisible college’, discovers the truth of the visitations and his world is entirely changed. It is the fate of the map which provides the link to Part Two of the novel, set forty years later, in which Ysabel Moonsdaughter of the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs finds herself working alongside Pilgrim’s nephew, Goodwill Saltmire, to unravel the twisted thread of what is actually going on. This turns out to be more complicated than either reader or characters expected. Rather than neat solutions, the reward for our characters is to undergo a continual process of widening awareness, painful though that sometimes is, and this is what allows the novel to work so effectively.
When asked in a recent interview for Clarkesworld what it takes to remain relevant, McAuley answered, ‘Staying alert to the happening world helps rather more, I guess, than trying to follow trends and fashions in fiction that aren’t a good fit for what you are interested in’. This is certainly true of Beyond the Burn Line which is not following any specific current trend but nonetheless captures the dynamic instability of the contemporary zeitgeist with the overdetermined intensity of a lucid dream. Reading this novel doesn’t provide all the answers but it does allow a relatively safe space for the mind to work through some of the sharp issues arising from the clash of tradition with acute social and technological change. It’s almost as though the synthesis of well-written storytelling and speculative science (in this case, the evolution of intelligence and sentience), which characterises McAuley’s brand of SF, has been adaptively selected for this purpose.
Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.