Having just read a couple of decidedly underwhelming sci-fi books, I was excited to come to Providence. I was reasonably certain that Barry wasn’t going to disappoint me as his 2013 novel Lexicon was—and still is—one of the most original pieces of science fiction writing I have read. I was not disappointed. Set in a future where humanity has made first contact with a hostile alien species, the story focuses on four people who crew a new ship with top of the line AI as they are sent in to deep space on a two year mission.
Barry creates a narrative the unfolds in incremental pieces in a psychological slow-drip. The story’s opening contains a number of questions that I was so desperate to have answered that I found myself at 12:30am having to pry myself away from the book so that I could be functional at work the next day. Those meta questions (for example, what exactly is the nature of the AI that runs the ship?) are complimented beautifully by the personal mysteries, the questions surrounding each of the four characters who eventually all have chapters from their own perspectives. The motivations of the four for joining the war effort and signing on to the crew of the Providence (genuine idealism, curiosity about the unknown) become poignant dramatic foils and compliments to the overarching story of the ship going deeper and deeper into uncharted territory to kill the dreaded salamanders.
What was particularly delightful about the meta story is that it could be many things. It could be a story about touching the unknown. It could be a story about what drives four very different people to take a claustrophobic, socially isolated two year mission (certainly, there isn’t enough money in the world to compel me to do that). It could be a story that offers a scathing critique on the machinery of war; how it’s perpetuated due to the financial interests of certain stakeholders, how it is ‘sold’ to an otherwise war-weary public, how there is a certain senselessness to it after a while. It could be a story that is about the intersection of all of these things. The multifaceted strands of Barry’s story make it thought provoking without being taxing in large part due to writing.
Interestingly, there are echoes of Ender’s Game in the story (although without the side serve of homophobia that haunts Orson Scott Card’s name); the sense of disconnection from the terrifying salamanders – the alien enemy – as they are slaughtered by the Providence is emphasised by the fact that we know very little about them and they are thoroughly demonised as an existential threat to humanity without clear basis for this claim. It’s this which led me to feel the novel’s primary focus was about war more so than anything else. While we do learn a bit more about the salamanders as the novel nears its conclusion, it’s never enough to understand them, which keeps the mystery alive and keeps them a menacing force, drawing on the Lovecraftian tradition in leaving the most terrifying monsters the ones only partially glimpsed. The way in which Barry depicts them is a testament to his skill as a writer and the fact that he really knows his craft.
Providence is one of the most original conceits I’ve encountered in quite some time. Barry provides a setting that is so authentic that it vividly captures the intense atmosphere of four people living on top of one another, struggling to understand what exactly they’re doing and why they’re doing it. This intensity grips the reader form the get-go. The narrative unfolds in unexpected ways, yet the ending has been clear all along, especially if you listen to the character whose voice we first hear and thus, who we trust the most, Gilly. Perhaps that’s what makes it such a great book – the fact that the answer is there all along, but, like the other crew members of the Providence, the reader doesn’t want to buy in to it.
Thrilling in truly every sense of the word, Providence is a triumph that grabs you with mystery, tension, and great writing, and won’t let you go until the last page.
Providence is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of March 31st 2020.
Will you be picking up Providence? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A dazzling, inventive, and thought-provoking new novel from the ingenious author of Jennifer Government and Lexicon.
Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson are astronauts captaining a new and supposedly indestructible ship in humanity’s war against an alien race. Confined to the ship for years, each of them holding their own secrets, they are about to learn there are threats beyond the reach of human ingenuity–and that the true nature of reality might be the universe’s greatest mystery.
In this near future, our world is at war with another, and humanity is haunted by its one catastrophic loss–a nightmarish engagement that left a handful of survivors drifting home through space, wracked with PTSD. Public support for the war plummeted, and the military-industrial complex set its sights on a new goal: zero-casualty warfare, made possible by gleaming new ships called Providences, powered by AI.
But when the latest-launched Providence suffers a surprising attack and contact with home is severed, Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson must confront the truth of the war they’re fighting, the ship that brought them there, and the cosmos beyond.
