Review: The Actual Star
Monica Byrne
608 pages
Harper Voyager (2021)
Read this if you like: Maya civilization, anarchist utopias, long-view fiction
tl;dr summary: A story across three timelines spanning 2,000 years, from a dying dynasty in the Maya empire to a nomadic far-future civilization and a teenager on vacation in Belize in the middle.
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The ambitious scope of this novel is the first thing that drew me to it. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that functions both as historical fiction and sci-fi, and The Actual Star achieves that genre-blurring beautifully with its three story arcs, one each in the past (1012), the “present” (2012) and the future (3012). My first thought, reading the jacket copy, was: well, how the hell is she going to pull this off?
The answer comes in the form of the connecting threads the author weaves between the three timelines from the beginning. It starts with just a brief glimpse of the 3012 timeline, a news announcement that the Diluvian Age has ended, scattered with key words like Xibalba and Liah Oliveri that ping for the reader as they’re introduced first to royal siblings Ket, Ajul, and Ixul in 1012 Tzoyna, then to the eventual Saint Leah herself, a horny Minnesota teenager on a visit to Belize, her father’s homeland, during December of 2012. The echoes that resonate between the three timelines provide an orienting bridge for the reader as they cross the large time gaps, keeping them grounded across the jumps from one storyline to the next. The regular pattern of the chapters helps with this, too, and was a smart way to structure the narrative.
The echoes of the past in future timelines also adds mystery and tension that give The Actual Star a page-turning forward momentum—a great trait for any book to have, but especially important in one of this length and complexity. The reader knows roughly what will happen to the characters in the past and present timelines, giving those storylines an almost whodunit energy. Did Leah really disappear? Are those Ajul and Ixul’s bodies in the cave—and, if so, how did they die? With a thousand years between the storylines, the details known to future characters have been warped and distilled into myth, which keeps the more intricate in-scene account of the events from reading as repetitive. The future may have revealed the ending, but it doesn’t spoil the story.
While all three threads have their own joy and energy, the 3012 world of Laviaja, and all the worldbuilding that went into creating it, is predictably my favorite. It is an artfully-constructed far future with a strong internal logic that reads as both plausible from a modern perspective and completely unique from other future Earths in the canon. Few details are given about what transpires between 2012 and 3012 but they’re well-chosen, sketching a civilization-shattering cataclysm and the resulting global society of leaderless high-tech nomads that formed among the scattered survivors. The details of how the world ended aren’t important to the story being told. By letting the reader fill in those gaps from their own imagination, Byrne leaves herself space to focus on the tangible details of the world’s here and now, and gives this far-future landscape the same level of realism as the threads grounded in known settings.
Another worldbuilding detail that was employed expertly throughout The Actual Star is the use of other languages. Now, to be fair, I geek out pretty hard for any book that uses Spanish since I get the chance to feel smart when I can read it. What I really love in this story, though, is how she writes the Kriol dialogue to give readers that same experience. It added an extra little moment of joy and satisfaction to dialogue that could have felt peripheral, like the character-building conversations between guides in Belize or the world-establishing ritual greetings and other interactions in Laviaja.
A novel with this kind of ambitious scope has the potential to become dense and convoluted. The Actual Star avoids this with a tight focus on the characters, supplemented with thoughtfully-chosen details about the broader world only where they’re necessary to provide context for these narrative arcs. I would go so far as to call it a must-read for anyone writing long-view fiction, especially those working in sci-fi and adjacent territory.
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