Event Horizon
A marginalized woman is sent into a black hole for the good of her community in Balsam Karam’s extraordinary speculative novel Event Horizon.
Milde was eight years old when her tropical nation declared innumerable women and children noncitizens, rounding them up and deporting them to a borderless zone between the mountains and the sea. The enterprising women, given few directions and little hope of recompense, formed a harried community there, the Outskirts, complete with a school and shared resources.
At seventeen, their childhoods having been consumed by injustice, Milde and two peers led an uprising, burning down three government buildings in protest. Milde spent the next eleven years in jail, subjected to various kinds of torture. At twenty-eight, she was given a choice: die here, or be sent into a black hole as a pioneer. After she bargained for community improvements for those in the Outskirts, she was launched into space.
Despite the interstellar circumstances of Milde’s end, which are described in horrific detail to her before she leaves, the novel’s focus is most on how nations and their people treat the underprivileged and refugees, not its science fiction elements. Milde is raised with strong moral sensibilities by her mother, Essa, and by the other women in the Outskirts, who are diligent about caring for and protecting one another.
In contrast, those in power, and those who benefit from the women’s exclusion, are inventive with their cruelties: hotel owners sprinkle glass in their dumpsters to prevent the Outskirts children from scavenging for scraps; officials kidnap the cats they keep to make their living spaces rodent-free. Once she’s imprisoned, Milde endures sanity-testing indignities and assaults, losing digits and an eye. Still, her soul remains incorruptible.
Marked by bleak, insistent lyricism, the prose, whose details turn upon themselves in a way that mimics the spaghettification Milde faces at her journey’s end, is striking and challenging throughout. Stark landscapes are rendered beautiful, including the Outskirts:
shapeless and soft moves the sky that protects a place beset with mist, and smooth and heavy rests the Outskirts in dazzling fragments that hold everything in place.
Elsewhere, the viciousness of state actors is laid bare, the ethics behind their actions given no shelter by Essa’s metrics—to ask of every moral choice “for whom?,” and to “let the answer guide you home.”
After a lifetime of state-sanctioned cruelty, a courageous young activist takes her community care to the stars in Event Horizon, an exceptional speculative novel.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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