Rejoice, A Knife to The Heart cuts to the heart of planet Earth
There are plenty of university classes that will teach you to identify and explore power structures, where they exist in the world, and how their ubiquity is maintained by either a threat of violence or actual violence. However, short of enrolling in the creative writing class you’ve promised yourself that you’ll take one day, most of us do not get to ruminate on and imagine what life on our planet would be without power as we know it. Enter Canadian author Steven Erikson and his most recent book, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart.
Erikson is a New York Times bestselling author living in Victoria, B.C. and is best known for his continent-spanning, 10-book fantasy series, Malazan Book of the Fallen. Educated as an anthropologist and archaeologist in both the classroom and field, he left it all for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he specialized in short stories. Incidentally, he’s not one to shy away from social issues in his novels or novellas. Erikson pulls no punches in Malazan and refuses to start in Rejoice.
As a first contact novel, Rejoice begins with letting the reader know that this version of Earth is very much not alone: a prologue shows us shiny, SUV-sized objects buzzing around Mars’s moons. A sequence of scenes in the first chapter shows us that a science-fiction author has been abducted from the streets of Victoria, B.C.
Samantha, the abductee, wakes up craving a cigarette and finds herself chatting with an extraterrestrial artificial intelligence, named Adam, aboard a vessel orbiting Earth. She’s informed that Adam’s creators have initiated an intervention protocol without the consent of humans — we’ve proven to be poor stewards, apparently — so that Earth’s biome may be saved. Instead, Samantha is there to witness the totality of the intervention and be humanity’s spokesperson throughout each stage of its progress. Turns out, Adam’s extraterrestrial programmers admire Samantha’s work as a science-fiction author and blogger.
Using his own strength in writing plots as if they are short stories, Erikson weaves several points of view around much of his fictional Earth, in his continent-spanning style, so the reader may witness the alien’s invisible force fields push humans and their footprint out of areas of oil drilling, deforestation, ancient migrational grounds, and overfished waters — among others. However, these new zones are still permeable to wildlife and uncontacted peoples. Soon after, the same invisible force fields render nearly all physical violence between humans nonexistent: bullets stop hitting centres of mass, knives no longer stab flesh, and nukes cease to fall.
All of this takes place as the abducted science fiction author and extraterrestrial AI orbit Earth and participate in Socratic back-and-forth conversations that reveal deep, problematic trends in our current trajectory here on our own non-fictional Earth — a trajectory that happens to be without a deus ex machina and therefore requires real, massive, collective efforts to change.
Erikson’s novel poses many big questions. What happens when humans no longer possess a monopoly on their own violence? Can capitalism be sustained in a world without violence? Can a government continue to enforce its laws without violence? If resources and knowledge are forced to be shared between nations, do borders cease to make sense? And, can those borders even exist if they can no longer be violently held?
Using his characters’ conversations and internal thoughts as a mirror to be held up to the world and thereby challenge the reader has never been outside Erikson’s scope, nor is challenging capitalism and its dependency on violence. Rejoice is a milestone work for Erikson for both of these endeavours.
Campy at times, Rejoice is able to bring a small smile and a little hope to the reader between the harder ethical conundrums that can be draining on minds and spirits. In spite of the recent trend in film and television towards dystopian futures after everything falls apart, Erikson cuts out the middleman and uses the first contact subgenre to take on some of today’s biggest problems directly and without the allegory. We get to see the fall as it takes place: the tragedy, the pessimism, and the optimism.
Be it Donald Trump, climate volatility, or land claims in Canada, Erikson offers empathy as a way forward in his post-violence world. To understand that we got here due to violence, but can witness one another without participating in that violence. That is, we can avoid the bleak future altogether. No intervention protocol from extraterrestrials necessary.
For some, the book might be too confrontational or heavy-handed. For others, its philosophical tangents may be slow to get to the point. But, at a time when life can be stranger than fiction, in Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart readers will find a novel that cuts into the heart of the matter and finds the hope we all need to keep going. I can’t help but think that we are lucky to have authors like Erikson who decided to actually take that creative writing class so many of us say we will; someone who can help us think through even the worst of situations and imagine something better.
Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart was released on Oct. 16.