David Zindell – The Remembrancer’s Tale – review by Anthony Nanson

Among my very favourite science fiction novels are those by David Zindell, beginning with Neverness, centred on the eponymous ice-planet city that’s home to an order of starship pilots skilled in the high mathematics of navigating hyperspace. After Neverness came a trilogy with the same setting: The Broken God, The Wild, and War in Heaven. Twenty-five years after War in Heaven, Zindell published a fifth novel in this sequence, The Remembrancer’s Tale.

There was an amazing and delightful sense of recognition in returning, after so long, into the Neverness universe. The freezing city, the pathways of hyperspace, the whole feel of the universe all felt so familiar. So, too, did the style and mood of the prose, even though the protagonist this time is not a starship pilot but the Lord Remembrancer, Thomas Rane. Rane’s skills and knowledge are in the arts of memory, but he ends up having to teach himself to pilot a starship too before the story ends.

The plot centres upon Rane’s crazy desire to win back to life his beloved Maria, with whose death the novel begins. The novel takes to the extreme that idea that in memory nothing is lost; that it really might be possible to recover that which is most dear and seems lost for ever. The Order of Remembrancers – especially Rane, their top man – is the ideal vehicle for such an exploration:

Unlike the warrior-poets …who sought to dwell always in perfect awareness of the eternal Now-Moment … the Remembrancers looked to the far, far past all the way to time’s beginning in order to apprehend the One Memory and how consciousness folded upon itself to remember all things – and thus to unfold the great purpose infused in matter’s fiery heart.

As you can see from that quote, Zindell’s fiction engages with deep philosophical themes. It’s written in a highly charged style that brings such themes to life through a lucidly imagined outer and inner journey. Rane’s Orphean quest for Maria leads him to tangle with the transcendent technological deities of Zindell’s high-concept universe. In an interesting afterword – which pertains also to the earlier novels – the author explicitly declares his fiction’s critique of the ‘solipsism and hyperindividualism, of feeling themselves to be whole universes cut off from a much, much greater All’, of those in our own time who desire technological transcendence.

I think this theme speaks not only to those who actually aspire to gain some kind of fake divinity through merging with super-advanced AI, but also to the rest of us who find ourselves drawn ever more tightly into the isolation of digitally mediated experience. It’s a reason why I find so exhilarating the high-performing human consciousness of Zindell’s pilots, poets, courtesans, and Remembrancers, as I do similarly the Bene Gesserit adepts of Frank Herbert and the traditions of intensive study and training from real human history which inspired them.

I can’t say much about how Rane’s quest goes without giving away spoilers with respect to both plot and theme. What I can say is that the mnemonic powers of Rane’s mind are matched by the intensity of his love for Maria. This is a novel written from the heart, to a degree that few novels of such high-concept SF can match. It can be enjoyed without prior knowledge of the other Neverness novels. But I do recommend you read them all.