For Darkness Shows the Stars is a science fiction YA romance loosely based on Persuasion by Jane Austen. It’s not a very good version of Persuasion, and it’s not very good as romance, but it’s quite good as science fiction and I felt intense empathy for the heroine even though I frequently felt that her story was not the most interesting story in the book.
For Darkness is about Elliot North, a Luddite. Many generations ago, genetic experimentation went horribly wrong and most humans died during a period known as The Reduction. Only the Luddites, people who refused genetic augmentation on religious grounds, survived. Since then they’ve formed a society in which Luddites are the ruling class. Another group of people, the Reduced, were born with severe mental impairments (allegedly). They are kept as the lowest class of slaves. However, of the children of the Reduced, a certain number are born with no impairments at all. They call themselves Post-Reductionists (or Posts for short). Some are slaves and some are free. Unlike Luddites, they are not afraid to experiment scientifically and invent new things.
When Elliott was a child, she became best friends with a Post, Kai. Eventually Kai decided to flee the estate for a free Post community. He asked Elliot to join him but she didn’t because she felt that the people on the estate needed her to protect them from her father, who manages the estate poorly, causing the Posts and Reduced to go hungry. Four years later, Elliot manages the estate as best she can with constant interference from her father and sister, and tries to protect the estate workers from abuse. Kai shows up with his family to rent the North family’s shipbuilding and docking facilities. Turns out Kai did quite well for himself after leaving the estate, but he regards Elliot as a spoiled rich girl who was too much of a snob to run away with him.
Refreshingly, this is a YA story that is not told in present-tense, first-person narration. I have nothing against first-person, present-tense narration but having read about five YA novels in a row that use these devices I welcomed the change. Even though the narration is not first-person, it’s squarely from Elliot’s point of view. This is a bit of a problem because while we get to know Elliot very well, we barely know Kai at all, and what we see of him consists of him acting like a huge jerk. As far as romance goes, I only wanted Kai to be with Elliot because I liked Elliot and wanted her to be happy. I understand their previous connection, but in the present there doesn’t seem to be any connection or rapport or even sexual tension – just a lot of anger on Kai’s part and sadness on Elliot’s.
As far as being a remake of Persuasion, there are some pretty serious differences that change the effectiveness of the story. The most obvious is also the least problematic, because of how the world building is set up. Persuasion is notable for being a story about older people who have cause to believe that their chances of love are behind them, while Darkness is about eighteen year olds. However, thematically this works fairly well, because in this setting people seem to mature extremely young (one character who is considering marriage is fourteen, and while people seem to think that this is unusually young they aren’t shocked). Also, Elliott clearly has cause to believe that her chances for love and marriage are over, if indeed they ever existed at all, because of her downtrodden role in the family and her responsibilities.
A bigger difference, and a more serious one, is that there is no ease or rapport between Elliott and Kai. Kai does go through a bit of an arc where he seems to develop respect for Elliott, but it’s very late in coming, whereas in Persuasion, Wentworth softens his attitude towards Anne about halfway through the book, which allows a relationship to grow between them. Kai and Elliott are just angry, and Elliott is actively mean. I never rooted for Kai and Elliott as a couple. I never saw them as a potential team.
One thing I did understand about Kai is his abhorrence of the socio-economic system he lives in and his refusal to accept it. Elliott can’t overthrow the system, or she thinks she can’t, and she’s often an apologist for it even as she tries to alleviate the suffering caused by it. Kai is unfair to Elliott because he thinks she’s spoiled, but he makes very good points when he asks why she won’t tolerate her “friend,” a Reductionist, being treated in certain ways, but she will tolerate all the other Reductionists being treated in those same ways.
Which leads me to my biggest problem with the book (other than the romance being un-appealing). This is a book about slavery. It’s set in an imaginary future, but it could just as easily be set in the antebellum South. The story is told effectively in terms of making us sympathetic towards Elliott, but I kept feeling like it was the wrong story, because it makes everything about Elliott and her problems. Elliott is moral, responsible, and terribly trapped and limited, not to mention pretty damn oppressed. But that’s not really the point, is it? The story of how slaves suffered under her father’s rule isn’t really about her, it’s about them. To cast Elliott’s allies who are Post and Reduced as her supporting characters furthers their own disenfranchisement, just as when artists make a story about slavery in this country and tell it entirely from the point of view of a white person, it furthers the marginalization of people of color. After I realized the degree of marginalization of the Post and Reduced characters, my discomfort grew. I was reading a story about how a free, aristocratic woman becomes empowered and finds love with the help of her slave sidekicks, when I increasingly wanted a story about a group of slaves who found freedom and empowerment with the help of their aristocratic ally. Same plot, different focus.
Despite my nagging feeling of unease about which story I was reading and my nagging desire to hit Kai over the head with something heavy, I otherwise enjoyed the book. The world building is solid and the attitude towards science is quite nuanced – what could be a heavy-handed cautionary tale about the evils of GMOs is much more interesting. Yes, The Reduction was caused by genetic experimentation, but the Luddites’ refusal to engage in science causes an enormous amount of suffering for them, and one of the chances Elliott has to save the estate involves a breed of genetically modified wheat that she introduces. So it’s not “Science Good” or “Science Bad,” it’s more “Science Can Be Either.”
I also liked the way that the science fiction conceit allowed for a close mimicking of a Regency world, but one with cool ships and scenery. The Luddites are basically the land-rich, money-poor aristocracy, while the Posts represent new money and new levels of social mobility. It’s a clever idea that the author uses to good effect. In the end, however, I was distracted by my own discomfort at the pattern of marginalization.
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This reminds me that I never did finish Persuasion.
I was rather off-put after I read “mentally impaired” and ” a certain number are born with no impairments at all” as if to say “But some of them are worthy of being a main character!” It rubs me the wrong way, but I’m not sure how to put it into words. Were the Reduced actually mentally impaired? How were they treated by the novel? Did they have any agency? I’d like to know how disabled characters are handled in the book, mostly out of a morbid curiosity. I had my falling out with YA a long time ago.
The issue of mental disability is handled, well, messily. People in the book who are mentally impaired are supposed to be so mentally impaired that they can’t be left alone because they will hurt themselves. In the course of the book, this is brought into question, and one of them is clearly sharper than anyone thought. So the main character wrestles with whether what she’s been taught is correct. But I don’t recall the issue being resolved. Sometimes a review is published a long time after I’ve written it, and this is one of those times, so I might have forgotten details, but I remember being frustrated and thinking that something was missing.
Excellent review. I liked this book, but like you, didn’t get quite as involved in the romance as I would have liked. I MUCH preferred the sequel “Across a Star Swept Sea,” which is about a female Scarlet Pimpernel, and is set in a Pacific Islander culture. I definitely recommend that one, even to anyone who wasn’t quite enthusiastic about the first book.
Hello,
You might find it interesting to compare this novel’s portrayal
of chattel slavery in a future society to one found in another
YA novel (though one of a much earlier vintage), Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy (1957).
Set in a future in which humanity has reached the stars and
colonized many worlds, the novel portrays a technologically
advanced space faring civilization that has re-instituted the practice of chattel slavery.
The story is told from the POV of a young man born into slavery
who is purchased by a member of the Free Traders, a guild actively leading a movement to abolish the slave trade; his new master then
becomes a mentor to the youngster, educating him and imparting to
him the skills he will need to survive on his own when he is given his freedom.
He does eventually gain that freedom but only by way of a fatal
act of self-sacrifice on his mentor’s part. Now left on his own,
and with the unaccustomed new status of a freeman, he must learn
to find his way, and eventually his place, in the wider galactic culture.
The novel’s portrayal of slavery is, admittedly, a bit sanitized
(hardly surprising given the date of publication and the targeted
‘juvenile’ audience) but, by way of the protagonist personal story
arc, it clearly argues that slavery is not only morally abhorrent
but ultimately untenable as a social institution.
I enjoyed this book when I read it last winter, but I wasn’t reading it as a romance novel. That aspect of the book was quite forgettable, and I actively disliked the ending. What fascinated me was the bioethics questions that it raises. How much experimentation on and manipulation of the human genome (and other genomes) is right and proper? Should we take a “luddite” view that nothing is permissible, or do we go to the opposite extreme of anything goes? Or, if we try to find a middle ground, how do we define how far is too far. I liked that this book raised these questions without trying to force a clear-cut answer down the reader’s throat. (Ethics geek here!)
I also liked that it was a refreshing change from so many of the YA dystopian novels out there that are all much of a sameness – I can’t think of another book that this one is like.
I haven’t read this and I probably won’t despite being a Persuasion fan. My resistance stems from both the treatment of slavery from a privileged viewpoint and the sticking point of the Reduced. Either they have a distinctly outcast and subsumed social standing because of the actions of their ancestors and are purported to be mentally disabled as a method of discrediting them and keeping them down or else they were truly damaged by the genetic experiments and are enslaved instead of provided with educational and social services they rightly deserve and need. Either way, I work in a poverty school where I struggle to get services to children and families who desperately need them. Reading about marginalized populations and their suffering in fiction isn’t the escapism I look for when I read novels.
I was very excited about the idea of a scifi future “Persuasion,” but really didn’t get blown away by this (as CarrieS notes, it’s not really a very good version of “Persuasion” and not very good as a romance… which was a characterization that made me snort-laugh….). The entire idea of the “Reduced” was really problematic, and I found myself getting angry at Kai’s attitude towards Elliot for much of the book, possibly because it read like too much like many, many Old School romance heroes who just assume that the women who turned them down did it because they were just spoiled and selfish and never actually consider that more might have been going on.
I’m intrigued by the idea of a more interesting sequel, though….
I second that the sequel was better and my favorite of the two. Intelligence is a factor in those books as well though, because the story takes place on two island nations, one of which is having a rebellion and have designed a drug that will Reduce people. There’s normally a cure for Reduction there, but that drug has different effects on naturally immunes vs. chemically fixed people, and the heroine is afraid that she’ll end up basically getting early dementia like her mother has. It was haunting in its own way.