A while back, I stumbled across a recommendation for Ascending by Meg Pechenick, the first of two books in her Vardeshi Saga.
In the recommendation, Ascending was billed as a Science Fiction Romance. And it is, indeed, a very slow-build romance that spans at least three books. The third book, and the series' potential conclusion, has not yet been published.
I was immediately captivated by Pechenick's writing, so much so that I devoured both Ascending and its sequel, Bright Shards, in one very long and quite glorious day.
That first time through, I had borrowed both books from Kindle Unlimited. The next day, I bought the ebooks and read both again. Then I went back to Amazon and dropped the paperbacks into my cart until I can justify buying them. Say, for my birthday. Or Mother's Day. Or because it's Monday.
Since discovering the Vardeshi Saga, I've read both books at least half a dozen times from digital cover to digital cover, as well as gone back and reread my favorite parts independent of the whole. I even wrote the author, asking how progress on the as-yet unfinished third book (working title: Celestial Navigation) is coming along on the slim hope that she would say, "Next week, darling reader." Alas! I received a canned response informing me that work is ongoing.
My mind naturally turned to the possible plot threads Pechenick might explore in the third book. No spoilers, but I've fallen asleep more than once speculating about the possibilities. And awakened with more blooming in my mind.
To say that I'm obsessed with this series is perhaps an understatement.
***
In some ways, the Vardeshi Saga operates as wish fulfillment. What if a young woman of middling talent was chosen to visit the home world of the only advanced extraterrestrial species that humans know of? What if, during the journey and through much adversity, she met and fell in love with a Vardeshi man, who slowly came to love her in return?
It's the quietest, most slow-burn Alien Romance I've ever read. And I have read so many Alien Romances. (So. Friggin'. Many.)
The remarkable point here is how heavily Pechenick drew from her own experiences abroad to form the underlying series arch and, presumably, in creating the main characters.
The main character, Avery Alcott (later, Novi Eyvri Alkhat), is a grad student at a small university in California, where she studies linguistics. She's from New England, where her parents live, and spent time abroad in China, where she learned Mandarin. Avery is roughly 5'6" tall, has short hair, and is a runner. And so on. I suspect that some of the other characters, particularly among the Vardeshi (and especially Hathan Takheri, Avery's love interest), were based on people (or an amalgamation of people) whom Pechenick met during her travels through China.
Does this self-insert character ruin the story? No. Quite the opposite. It is because Avery's experiences are drawn so heavily from the author's that the saga reaches the level of verisimilitude that makes it seem more like a narration of true events than fiction.
For example, there's a whole series of scenes where Avery slowly becomes overwhelmed by the languages and cultural differences, part of which alienate her from her Vardeshi crew. She notes at one point that, "All the constants were being taken away from me: gravity, air, light. It had been so much simpler when it was just about the words."
In fact, the emphasis throughout the book is on language and cultural worldbuilding rather than technological worldbuilding, something that's caused many reviewers to claim that there's little to no worldbuilding. This is untrue. Pechenick excels at "soft" worldbuilding. But because of the way Avery was drawn, the "hard" (i.e. science and technology) worldbuilding is simply not explored as thoroughly.
This is a feature, not a bug. Avery is a linguist. She loves culture and isn't at all interested in how Vardeshi technology works. I don't know how my car works. I still trust it to get me from point A to point B. [1]
At any rate, the worldbuilding is absolutely divine and leads Avery to realize that the grass isn't greener on the other side: the Vardeshi are just as imperfect as humans, sometimes imperfect to the point of savagery. They're not better; they're just different, a point some humans could stand to learn about their own species.
***
One trait humans and the Vardeshi share is their love of exploration. We call it wanderlust. The Vardeshi call it ivri khedai, literally the longing for another sky. The Vardeshi contrast ivri khedai with another concept, ivri avanshekh. These two concepts are mentioned several times in both published books, but this passage from Ascending is the best discussion of it:
Sohra murmured something, a Vardeshi phrase I couldn't quite catch. The others nodded.
Hathan said, "It's a mood that takes deep-space travelers from time to time. We weren't designed to spend months in artificial environments. We miss the feeling of being soilside. Living without walls, with the sky overhead and solid ground under our feet. We call it ivri avanshekh."
"The longing for...stability?" I ventured.
"I might say permanence."
"Can you feel ivri avanshekh for a world you've never seen?"
His smile was slight, but it was there. "That's ivri khedai."
"The longing for another sky," I said.
Saresh quoted something that sounded like a proverb. Sohra translated it into English for my benefit, but I'd caught most of it on the first hearing. "Ivri khedai brings you into the dark, ivri avanshekh brings you home again."
Throughout human history, individuals have been torn between ivri khedai (wanderlust) and ivri avanshekh (homesickness). Survival, specifically the need to find additional resources (food, living spaces, safety), has never been the sole trait pushing us to explore. Many of us wonder what's over the horizon, beyond our current reach or vision, and more than a few don't stop at wondering.
In fact, humans can be aggressively adventurous, a trait that's served the entire species well and ensured its survival. We're always exploring those boundaries between the known and the unknown, pushing the latter farther and farther out and better learning how to not just survive, but thrive. We've now spread across the face of the planet and established footholds on all the major landmasses. Entrepreneurs and scientists are teaming up to build cities in the ocean. And, of course, others are pursuing a millennia-old fascination with the stars.
This latter pursuit is not without controversy.
Several years ago, I read Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization by Robert Zubrin (Penguin, 1999). I was struck by the concrete, detailed explanations of the steps necessary for humans to colonize space.
But what stuck with me the most was Zubrin's hardline stance that private companies would never lead that charge. [2] Instead, he insisted that such programs must be government funded as, essentially, there's no financial benefit to private corporations in colonizing, for example, Mars.
A few decades later, Elon Musk and other adventurous entrepreneurs and businessmen are proving Zubrin wrong, and they're doing it despite the significant costs and risks.
What Zubrin failed to account for, as so many do, is human nature. The need to explore the far horizon, to test what lies beyond acceptable boundaries, is so intrinsic, we would not have survived without it. It's as if Zubrin, when writing his book, completely discounted the personalities behind all of the advances that made space travel possible, solely to feed into and promote his own sociopolitical biases.
Those advances did not spring from the minds of staid men; they sprang from the minds of explorers of the unknown, from men and women who found a gap in human knowledge and sought to fill it.
Zubrin blinded himself to this core trait of scientists and businessmen. And because of that, Exploring Space has not well withstood the test of time and scientific advancement, let alone the individual drive for exploration.
***
The real controversy around human space exploration, and particularly colonization, revolves around human interaction with their native environments. As many environmental activists put it, humans are a virus and have destroyed the Earth; therefore, they cannot be trusted to explore the galaxy.
An alternate version of this is: humans should not colonize the solar system because we have too many problems here that require the use of resources apportioned for exploration.
Both variations of this anti-space exploration argument ignore several truths, the first being humanity's deep seated drive to search the far horizon.
The second is, naturally, economic in nature: as noted previously, private companies are leading the charge into space. [3] The resources they're using to do so belong solely to them. These are not public resources open to allocation from outside parties (activists, politicians, etc.), and where such activities are publicly funded, it's with the full cooperation of the officials in charge of allocating those public resources.
Many other truths could be formulated to counter anti-exploration arguments, but the biggest one in my mind is the potentialities of space itself; or, rather, the potentialities of the many resources located outside Earth's atmosphere.
The space resources waiting to be exploited could help us solve many of the problems we have here on Earth, and not solely physical resources such as precious minerals needed to sustain growth and technological infrastructure. As John Ringo noted in his Troy Rising Series, there's a good chance that many space workers will be drawn from third world countries, where opportunities are limited by geography, local overpopulation, cultural taboos, and so on.
People immigrate away from these countries for a reason. Space will be no different.
Because exploring the unknown doesn't just appease wanderlust, that unquenchable human thirst to conquer new territories; it also affords countless opportunities. And opportunity is a resource all on its own.
By ignoring these opportunities, the anti-exploration crowd isn't just ensuring a downward spiral into perpetual poverty for the vast majority of the human population. They're dooming humanity to extinction. Earth will, eventually, run out of resources; we will bleed our mother planet dry, not out of greed or stupidity, but from the sheer drive to survive.
Ivri khedai is the answer. It always has been. There's no shame in acknowledging it, in accepting human nature as it actually is (rather than how we wish it to be), or in using our natural drives to move our entire species into a better future.
Footnotes:
- Larry Correia and Steve Diamond discussed this in an episode of their WriterDojo podcast. Their examples were fashion and architecture, and they rightly pointed out that not all characters are going to notice such things; therefore, details such as those should not be shown from those particular characters' points of view. This is one way writers can differentiate characters in the minds of readers as well as deepening character development.
- Zubrin also included some crazy notions about rights in that book that go beyond the traditional Western definition of rights, but that's a discussion for another day.
- Not to discount government funded programs, like the European Space Agency or those created and maintained by individual countries. These programs were revived by the leap of individuals and private companies into space, much as NASA was in the US.