Meru by S.B. Divya
448 pages, Paperback
Published February, 2023 by 47North
Divya’s first novel Machinehood was one of my top reads of 2021 and I had a fantastic conversation on the podcast with her about the book. Near the end of that interview, we had the normal so what are you working on conversation and this was the novel in progress. This is starting to become a fun part of doing the podcast. Alma Katsu’s The Fervor is now nominated for a Stoker award and you heard on postcards first. Meru is an example of this. Even with a slight tease of Meru, I was hooked on the idea.
I have now another preview of this novel before I started reading it. I was also able to check out a book event at Mysterious Galaxy when SB Divya and Analee Newitiz talked about their similarly themed books. I will be reading The Terraformers soon-ish, but Meru was my priority. There was a slight danger that the book wouldn't love up the hype I had built up in my own head.
Meru is in many ways why I read modern sci-fi. Anyone who knows me knows I love retro 'out of date' SF, and I could read that stuff the rest of my life and be happy. Meru is the kind of modern novel pushing the genre forward. I know there are many, many modern authors doing that. What I am personally looking for is modern concepts, ethics, and a retro feeling of big ideas. That is the balance I have found in both Divya books I read.
Machinehood is much more of an action story, and Meru is a story of deep heart and emotion. Both novels drip off the page with amazing world-building and ideas. Meru doesn’t feel as ripped from the AI headlines but comes with the strength of experience and to me is a slightly better novel. You can tell the author has a novel under her belt in all the right ways.
Meru takes head-on one of the hardest challenges in Science fiction. This novel is set 900 years in the future and if you think back to the world as it was 900 years ago our world would have been unrecognizable. So how do you build a future that is unrecognizable but relatable enough to tell a story in it. Meru is a very different future, I loved it.
The thing is if you are going to set a novel 900 years in the future it will require massive world-building, require an epic number of ideas, and this story just wouldn’t work if didn’t have compelling characters at the center of it. Divya has proven to me in two books that she has a master-level skill for world-building. How does Meru balance the rest?
Meru is an earthlike planet that is set to be colonized by Transhuman descendants of humans called Alloys. It has been five centuries since humans were allowed by the Alloys to leave Earth, this was declared after a disastrous attempt to terraform Mars. Alloys are genetically altered beings who have become the dominant culture that survived Earth although most live in space and explore the galaxy. Some are called pilots, large enough to transport humans inside themselves they are the living spaceships of this future. They don’t have gender so the pronouns are zie/ for he/she and Zir for him/her, something no modern reader should have any issues dealing with. The larger ship-sized alloys also use “Constructs” which are humanoid-sized avatars.
“Over time, alloys had expanded their genetic code to include instructions for all kinds of nonhuman features. They carried a third chromosome, dubbed Z, which the building blocks for their not-so-organic functions like solar-power-generating-wings, electrolyzing lungs, emtalk organs, and thamity-sensing organs. The latter allowed Alloys to sense the underlying energy field of the universe and harness it to traverse interplanetary distances.” The Alloys functioned as ships for early exploration until they made a compact with humans to ensure their survival. It was earth or nothing as humans had already come close to ending life on their homeworld and Mars.
As you could imagine many of the Alloys don’t have a high opinion of the human species they came from. That’s understandable neither do I.
At the event I attended Divya said the novel was inspired by the Indian Amar Chitra Katha comics. I admit they were something I had to look up but they sound interesting I know so far, what I have described is all ideas and world-building but the characters are well-written. Jayanthi is a human raised by Alloy parents who are living on earth. Jayanthi wants to prove that Humans can be trusted on this new alien world. So the experiment is set, she will be the first and only human in a new world to test if humans could survive at all.
If Jay is going to do this she needs an Alloy pilot, to take her to this new world and be her partner in the grand experiment of a human on a new world. Vaha is the pilot who steps forward but Zie is unsure. Her friend Kaliyu wants zir to do it, to ensure failure. Kaliiyu is not a human being fan.
“<Remember your history? Humans are terrible people. First, they polluted Earth, then they turned Mars into a hot, stormy hellhole when they tried to terraform it. Now they want to do the same Meru. They have no gratitude for the work alloys and constructs do to keep Earth clean and safe and livable or work tarawans do to maintain genetic diversity and adaptability. They’re stuck in the same old selfish gene-set they evolved from.>
Vaha takes on this epic journey and from there it becomes your all-common story of a woman and starship who fall in love.
Zie nodded. "At first I thought it was because of the incarn, but even in my true body, I feel the same way. If you don't though, I'll ask you the womb to modify my incarn's-"
"No! I mean, Please Don't." She took a deep breath. "I do I have very romantic feelings for you."
Without spoiling the second-half of the book it is at this point that Jayathani and Vaha make a decision that begins the drama of the final act. I don't know if it is fair or unfair to call this novel LBGTQ Sci-fi but there is something wonderfully queer about the forbidden romance between a woman and her living starship. As unhuman as the Alloys would feel to most humans in 2023, science fiction readers will love the heart and hope of this story.
Meru is more than just a science fiction story, Diviya has stated in interviews that is wanted to point to a future where survival of species happened. She was resisting the many negative dystopias that the genre is overflowing with. That doesn't mean she is blind to the risk we face in the future. in Meru salvation comes in the form of humanity's evolution into alloys something led by technology.
The Alloys don't mince words about it. <We have expended so much effort to provide human beings a good life on earth, a balanced one that respects the planet. On Meru we will have accidents. People will suffer. they will die. that will lead to demands. Living beings are citizens of the constructed Democracyof Sol, We will have to prioritize their needs over the planet's. Ancient indigenous humans understood the value of nature better than our more recent ancestors. They may have attributed its behavior to gods rather than physics, but the result is the same: they treated all things with respect.>
I have a habit of looking for a mission statement in a novel, and in this case, I don't believe there is a single mission statement. While the above line was one of the most powerful moments for this reader I think the mission is to explore this future in many many ways. It is a story about one relationship, one romance that despite all the technology and change is the reason we survive. That is why I will say this story is about the human, and trans human heart.
Meru is an effective and powerful piece of science fiction. It is certainly recommended for all Science Fiction fans.
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