Review: Calypso
Oliver K. Langmead
223 pages
Titan Books (2024)
Read this if you like: novels-in-verse, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jeff VanderMeer
tl;dr summary: Colony ship engineer wakes from stasis to learn she slept through a war and is one of the few experts left to complete their mission.
As a world mythology nerd, my context when I hear the phrase “novel in verse” is something akin to epic narrative poems like the Iliad or the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have the feeling this is also the context Oliver Langmead drew on to write Calypso—a sense I got from the tone and the voice, certainly, but if I had any doubt I only had to flip back to his author photo, whose vibe can be roughly described as “I am a Viking bard here to sing you the song of my people”:
This mythical voice and form are a perfect match for the story being told. This is a myth, at its heart—a creation story told from the point of view of the creators. The expedition’s leader, Sigmund, wants to start a new strain of humanity that’s untainted by its past. He’s brought a bioengineer, Catherine, to transform the world these new humans will live on, as well as a slew of other engineers to oversee the establishment of the colony. Unfortunately, only one of those other engineers, Rochelle, survives the entire journey. The mystery of what happened to the rest is the driving tension for the first half of the book. Apparently this lack of staff isn’t an issue for the project’s completion, though, and the reader gets the sense Rochelle was the most critical of the team, though we know little of what she does aside from the fact that she was chosen to be a dissenting voice against Sigmund. If this were told in a straightforward narrative, I would have been more annoyed by the lack of details. But since it’s presented as mythology, those omissions made sense.
I also enjoyed the way the epic poem voice manipulated the reader’s sense of time. It puts the reader in a mind of something from long, long ago, despite the fact that we’re clearly in the future. A very long future, in fact, some 600 years since the Calypso departed Earth, which we can infer was already a good amount ahead of the present. In the few glimpses we get of Earth through Rochelle’s memories and Sigmund’s flashback chapters, we can see technology is well advanced of the present. There are colonies on Mars and the Moon; even the fact that they’re capable of sending this kind of deep-space mission indicates it’s a far future. But no exact years are given, and the specifics of the world they left behind are vague.
Again—in a different type of book, this may have bothered me. Here, though, it mimics the experience of the crew, most of whom weren’t in stasis for the journey. They’re generational, living their entire lives aboard the ship. Rochelle, Catherine, and Sigmund are the only ones on Calypso who remember Earth, and society on the ship has progressed while they slept. Many no longer even speak the same language, save the special few Heralds who have been taught it to communicate with the awakening engineers. The small glimpses the reader gets into daily life aboard the Calypso were some of my favorite moments and I was a bit sad the crew stayed so much in the background. I understand why; this is Rochelle’s story, ultimately, so it makes sense to devote more pagespace to her thoughts and experiences, but I found myself wishing I could explore more of this world, because I found the few glimpses of the Calypso culture very intriguing.
What really gives Calypso its energy isn’t the plot or world, though. Partly it’s the characters, but mostly it’s the fact that this book is absolutely fucking gorgeous. It’s a visual experience as well as a literary one, and not just because it’s written in verse. The use of images as character markers puts the reader in a mindset to connect each voice to a visual clue. This is reinforced by using different formatting for each voice: Rochelle aligned left, in 10-syllable lines; Sigmund aligned right, in 12-syllable lines; Catherine, centered and using more experimental, visual forms; and The Herald, centered and justified to look the most like prose. They also use different points of view—Rochelle in 1st person, Catherine and the Herald in 1st plural, and Sigmund in 3rd. This creates different levels of distance between the reader and the various narrators that reinforces these shifts in tone. We’re closest to Rochelle, while Sigmund’s motivations remain an enigma almost the entire way through, and Catherine feels the most alien.
I adore a good “we” voice, so I was predictably most enamored with Catherine’s segments. They’re also just the most visually interesting, and introduced a touch of weirdness at exactly the right times. The narrative in Rochelle’s sections is so smooth I found myself almost forgetting that it was written in verse, but there’s no ignoring the poetic form in Catherine’s parts, which are more image-driven and less narrative. The sequence where Catherine terraforms the new planet is stunning in the way it builds and devolves at the same time, making excellent use of the unique storytelling potential of the poetic form.
This is one of those books that makes me want to spent some time with it, digging into how it was constructed and lingering over the language. The use of myth and connections to spirituality and religion caught my eye on the first read, and are definitely things I want to tease out more. If I had one critique to make, it’s that some of the big questions this book wrestles with feel like they could have used a bit more pagespace. The debates between Sigmund and Rochelle felt like they were just getting started when it ramped up into the conclusion, and I would have loved to see a bit more from the Herald that could give the crew’s perspective on things slightly more depth. All of that said, though, it’s been a while since I read a book that left me feeling so excited and inspired. I’ve never seen someone approach a planetary colonization story quite this way before, and that alone makes it worth adding to your TBR list for fans of modern sci-fi.
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