THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD

In Coles’ SF novel, humankind has divided into two factions, dangerously separated from each other by incompatible languages and cosmologies, each claiming to be exclusively “human.”

The author plunges readers into a deliberately puzzling and cryptic environment known as the “universe,” an enclosed, apparently subterranean, mechanized structure. Its human inhabitants, when not ensconced in a limitless virtual reality called the “digiscape,” carry on daily duties within a culture that emphasizes cycles of test-tube births, maturation, and regular refittings of “skin,” actually high-tech, close-fitting exoskeletons that effectively render their wearers cyborgs. There’s a counterpart to this “underworld”—the seldom-visited “overworld,” where raw materials are funneled to the cyborgs by a largely nontechnological tribe of surface-dwelling, agrarian “Natchers,” humans so far removed from their brethren as to now be regarded as undesired aliens. Kanan, a young underworld resident, turns out to be one of the occasional aberrant nonconformists—he flees a painful skin-upgrading ceremony and ends up in the overworld, a captive of the tribalistic Natchers, who have grown to mistrust and resent the armor-plated folk from below and conduct periodic raids for dwindling supplies. Flashback chapters inform readers that this bizarre social construct began centuries ago as a hopeful, pioneering deep-space expedition from Earth to colonize a distant planet. Over generations it evolved into something terribly different. The author’s gradual revelation of the true nature of the “universe” is masterful, accented by themes of subjective perception, self-deception, and language; words in the underworld and overworld have gradually grown apart in meanings and intent, reinforcing prejudices that subvert and divide both sides (each of which stubbornly claims to be truly “human”). The author has written about LGBTQ+ topics in nonfiction, and it’s noteworthy that personal pronouns have become irrelevant and sexless in the confines of the “universe,” though this may not necessarily reflect a gender-fluid mindset. As one character observes, “Everyone is blind in their own way. And in their blindness, they see what those with different eyes are blinded to.”

Provocative and imaginative SF about space-going humans constrained by language and technology.