I read this not because a single person recommended it but because everyone I spoke to, including complete strangers, said this was the year’s best novella.* I might quibble with that. I really loved the Alex Jeffers. But The Practice, The Horizon and The Chain is a fine piece of writing—a near certainty to take home the Hugo and Nebula Awards.**

TPTHTC—as I’m never calling it again—takes place on that well-worn science fiction trope, the generation starship. Because nothing ever nice happens on generation starship (look at recent examples from Rivers Solomon and Kim Stanley Robinson), it comes as no surprise that the flotilla of ships is stratified by class, with the underclass—the chained… which is not a figurative label, they are literally chained—mining the fuel from asteroids that propel the fleet. When one of the chained, a young man, is deemed to have artistic talent, an academic—referred to only as the professor—advocates for him to be a part of a program where he will be educated at the University alongside children of the elite. Things go horribly wrong, but for reasons I wasn’t expecting. 

 Gary K Wolfe lauded the novel for being a bang-on depiction of academia, even if it’s academia in SPAAAAAAACE. As someone who never lectured (although I did run first-year philosophy tutes for a semester while writing my Masters), I can’t confirm this, but it certainly feels authentic—the mix of passion and back-biting and faux support. There’s also the pressure to keep publishing and researching, even if the topic is banal.

 The academic material provides flavour to a fascinating discourse on subjugation and scarcity in a constrained environment. There’s also a spiritual/mystical element that should feel out of place in such a gritty, metal world, yet in Samatar’s hands, it gives the whole novella a transcendent, visceral quality. If The Practice, The Horizon and The Chain does win all the awards, it will be well deserved.

 *In the world of science fiction and fantasy. Literary peeps don’t seem to recognise novellas—they call them short novels.

**Nghi Vo’s novella, The Brides of High Hill, which I have not read, is the second favourite. But who knows in this topsy-turvy world?