Oddlands Magazine: Review of “The Crystal Cosmos” by I.E. Lester
Despite its short length, this novella, The Crystal Cosmos by Rhys Hughes, manages to incorporate two complete story lines without coming up short on either of them. On the one had we have a rather delicate little satire on religion and science. One man, a goatherd, dares to question the accepted teachings and theorize on the nature of reality from his observations of the world and cosmos around him. He is, of course, persecuted for these beliefs, accused of heresy and condemned.
The difference this time is that he is putting forward the old views of superstition and religion - a creator, flat Earth, sun orbiting our world rather than our heliocentric system - against the doctrine of science. With his world this scientific truth is presented as absolute - he sees no proof of it, just that he has to accept the word of the authorities as undeniable truth, so this reality is a wonderful mirror image of medieval Europe.
Against this down-to-mirrored-Earth tale we are presented a tale which is really out there. This space bound piece requires the reader to pretty much ignore every physical law they might know and go with it. You have to suspend your disbelief to such an extent you may as well build it a hammock so it can be comfortably held aloft.
The crux of the tale features a planetary system entirely made of diamond. Travel between points in space is achieved by locating an alternate reality that closely mirrors the current reality into which you jump, taking over from your analogue there, providing that your personality is stronger than your counterpart’s. In a quite wonderful touch, on every “jump” though something is different, something small - the colour of the chairs of instance, and it’s not noticed by everyone. Superb!
But merging these two disparate tales is odd, and doesn’t quite come off totally. They are completely different in placement, style and content, almost as though written by different people.
The first tale’s intimacy and narrowness of scale, its mundane nature and plain simplistic prose style anchor it and links it to our experience of our world and all our questions about it and lack of understanding of it allow us to place ourselves in his position.
The second is almost an Alice-in-Wonderland take on the future of space travel and exploration. The “one pill to grow, one to shrink” method applied to traveling between stars and side stepping of physical reality regarding the fabric of the universe is somewhat jarring, nowhere near enough to stop you reading but be warned, it takes a little work at times.
Hughes has a very understated knack with characters. With a minimum of effort he brings the people in his stories to life, makes them real. But it’s ideas that prove the book’s greatest strength. His morality play on belief and alternate laws of physics are ingenious, the second a little bizarre admittedly but still ingenious.
The fact that he doesn’t quite bring the second of these off, doesn’t make it what it could have been is unfortunate, but forgivable - it’s a big concept to live up to in so few words. Interesting yes, totally convincing no - but it’s close.
