The Outside

Written by Ada Hoffman, The Outside, is a good sci-fi novel that taps into Lovecraftian cosmic horror to tell a story about perception, religion, and compliance. Despite its compelling worldbuilding and strong protagonist, the novel is ultimately marred by an unnecessary point of view, which adds nothing but exposition and repetition to the narrative.

The protagonist is Yasira, an autistic scientist that is on board a space station working on a new reactor. When the day comes to turn it on, Yashira is in the middle of a nervous breakdown, thinking something horrible is going to happen. She warns her superiors, but there is no evidence to support her alarm. They don’t listen. The reactor is turned on and… nothing appears to happen. People act normally; they applaud the success of the whole operation and congratulate Yasira for her work. But Yarisa is not paying attention to them, because, unlike them, she saw the whole room shift and the walls breathe. Disaster, then, soon follows.

The universe in The Outside is one in which religion and science are mixed together. Gods are humanity’s main source of technology, being responsible for allowing space travel. They also control what technology is available to humans and regulate scientific research. Here, Gods are not just ethereal beings that are beyond reason and understanding, but things that employ and lend technologies. They don’t use magic and divine powers, but algorithms and nuclear weapons – but this doesn’t mean they are less feared because of that. In the first chapter, we already have Yasira wondering several times if she has been a good person, frantically observing the priests of her station for any signs of imminent punishment. The Gods – with the consequent promise of eternal punishment that they entail – immediately creates an oppressive atmosphere. They’re Orwell’s Big Brother, always watching.

Yasira lives in a universe that doesn’t have just one God but several. Their actions are deemed to be always good, despite their nature, context, and consequences:  an action that would be punished severely if performed by humans – say, killing hundreds of children to force a ruler to act in a certain way – is considered to be good if performed by Gods. Gods are good and, therefore, everything they do must always be good too, even if it really isn’t. It’s Orwell’s doublethink applied to religion. And every single one that dares to question this truth must be eliminated for heresy. It’s no wonder that the world that surrounds Yasira has fascist undertones, especially when it comes to fear:  “When angels of Nemesis took someone, there was no funeral. There was silence and you tried not to think about it.”

And it’s not only the wrongdoers, the heretics, and the ones with questions that await a terrible fate in the world of The Outside. The diligent and penitent ones are surely rewarded by the Gods with eternal life, but this is also painted in dark colors. When people die, they live forever together with the God that best matches their actions in life. However, this “living together” is not “alongside”, but “inside” the God to make it stronger. In other words, human souls are promised to serve as fuel to the divine:

“The Gods rewarded people after they died; that was part of the point of Gods. They collected souls and sorted them. Souls were somewhat diffuse, and even Gods couldn’t data-mine all the specific details of a single life. But souls took on patterns, and the Gods’ technology could recognize those patterns. They could discern the deepest passions that had driven a person through their life. And when the Gods chose souls to become part of Themselves, to keep Themselves running, They chose them by matching the soul’s pattern to the most appropriate God.”

This changes the perspective on the Gods: they are not merciful and generous because of the goodness of their hearts. No, they actually nurture humans like cattle, to be devoured later. The fact that they are associated with technology also makes them more palpable: they are real, tangible gods. Angels are not ethereal resplendent beings, but mechanical humanoids. They are transhumanism made divine. However, the blend of machine and flesh that they represent is often depicted as a monstrous thing, making them appear like a creature that has just escaped from a cyberpunk nightmare:

“A second angel stood by the door: a tall, broad, muscular woman too dark to be from Jai, with circuitry not only in her head but all the way up her hands and arms. Instead of ordinary limbs, she had articulated ones formed of intricate, dexterous metal, folding into guns, claws and other mechanisms Yasira could not identify. As she watched, a complex origami folded the end of one limb into something very much like a human hand, then back out of that shape again.”

Since this is the depiction of the divine that permeates the novel it’s no surprise that Yasira is not fond of her Gods. Her narrative arc is a complex one. During the first half of the book, she dislikes them, but she blames herself for that and tries to keep the fact hidden. Yasira blames herself for everything: it’s always her fault if something goes wrong; she always makes things worse; she’s always making the wrong decision; always failing to do what’s right. When she starts to get in contact with the so-called Outside – the Lovecraftian horror that exists outside reality – she gets to experience something that makes all the difference for her: freedom of thought. Her perception of what is right and wrong gets separated from religion. The Gods’ teachings and rules are not impositions anymore. Their speech can now get analyzed and questioned. She dislikes Gods and maybe, just maybe, that’s their fault.

In the story, Yasira is hired to work for them to track down her old mentor, the inscrutable Dr. Talirr, who is meddling with affairs that should have stayed hidden: with eldritch beings that live outside the realm of space and time, that are indifferent to human existence, and that drive people mad when they have glimpses of them. And Yasira has to discover why Talirr’s research has found out about the Outside, delving precisely into knowledge that could endanger her sanity.

This madness comes because people’s minds can’t cope with the idea of insignificance, meaninglessness, and chaos that these beings entail. In The Outside, people prefer the security of being cattle than the problems of being nothing: order, even if that means submission, is better than not having anything to support them. And this horror affects not only humans but also angels and Gods, for the Outside is also outside their reach. Religion is not capable of explaining or dealing with the effects it produces. Gods fear the eldritch, the chaos of cosmic horror, because it disregards the morality system that makes them stronger. They control humanity by establishing – and strongly reinforcing – what is right and wrong, but there is no right and wrong in the Outside.

The plot of the novel fits clearly into the Overreacher category discussed by Noel Carroll: the overreacher is the mad scientist that attempts some forbidden experiment and is eventually punished for it. Dr. Talirr is the overreacher: she wants forbidden knowledge and – according to those that forbade it – is responsible for dozens of atrocities and accidents around the galaxy because she doesn’t know better. Religions usually deem some kind of knowledge dangerous, which is not surprising: heresy is not a character trait, it’s not something that can be spotted by looking at a person. Heresy is a matter of perspective: “The heresy is not apparent until she begins to tell a story, or to complete a simple perception inventory – and then suddenly it’s everywhere.” Religion offers truth and order. It organizes things and answers difficult questions, providing comfort in times of distress. Religion is a worldview; it’s a matter of perspective. When Dr. Talirr veers into the cosmic horrors of the unknown, she is dilapidating the foundation of all religions. Talirr offers no order or truth.

Yasira becomes a more complex character precisely because of how she deals with Talirr. If the protagonist eventually frees herself from the morality of her Gods, her mentor’s lack of morality also bothers her deeply. For her, an oppressive morality should be opposed, but not substituted by the absence of morality. Yasira, then, starts to see Dr. Talirr as much of a problem as the Gods are. Talirr is depicted as an agent of chaos: much like the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Yasira’s old mentor keeps creating situations that impose moral conundrums to the protagonist while shaking the order of the world. But, unlike Joker, she doesn’t revel in that. She’s a sad and lonely figure that sees in her actions the only way to challenge the divine. Her goal is liberating the people from the shackles of religion, but her actions jeopardize their lives. The climax, then, is a battle for both the perspective and the lives of the common people.

The novel, however, has an Achilles’ heel in the form of the angel Akavi. He is the angel of Nemesis – the God that deals with heretics – that is sent to recruit Yasira. The narrative keeps alternating between Yasira’s point of view and his. The problem is that Akavi doesn’t add much to the story, besides exposition. He is there to explain how the angels and the Gods think and act, giving the reader a glimpse of their relationships. Akavi, however, is a unidimensional cyborg, that only thinks in terms of what’s “useful” and “logical”. Once the reader understands how he functions, the character becomes predictable and its point of view, unnecessary, padding the novel. If the narrative had focused only on Yasara, the character would become more inscrutable and, as a result, more menacing, matching the angel’s cold and ruthless personality.

The book also suffers from a lack of interesting characters. The main ones are Yasira, Talirr, Akavi, Elu, Tiv, and Enga. All the others have just a line or two and zero personality. Elu and Tiv are described as a “good boy” and “good girl” respectively and rarely go beyond that. And Enga, the creepy angel described above – with the origami limb –, works more as comic relief, since her disturbing and dangerous look makes her quirky personality stand out: at one moment, for example, she wishes for a part of her body to be able to “click”. Since only Yasira and Talirr have complex personalities, whenever the book focuses on anybody else – especially Akavi – it becomes repetitive, dragging down the pace of the story.

The Outside makes great use of cosmic horror to discuss religion and morality, although, in the end, it is dragged down by a needless and tiresome point of view.

October 18, 2019.