[REVIEW] Lee Mason's Belarus

[rfmcdonald]

Lee Hogan's novel 2002 novel Belarus is an interesting sort of failure. Hogan simply tries to cram too much material into Belarus, from criminal investigations into serial killings to the mechanics of dynastic civil war in a FTL galaxy, passing en route by the problems of alien first contact and the difficulties of nation-building. Too many interesting subjects needed to be unpacked to be adequately explored and, alas, Belarus' 2003 sequel Enemies was equally rushed besides being set almost a millennium later. Still, reading Belarus again recently I was hapy to discover that my initial reaction to Belarus stands. There is just enough interesting material in Belarus to make it a worthwhile read on its own terms, to say nothing of its utility as proof of the crying need for competent editors.

The setting--a glitteringly ornate neo-Tsarist world on the far fringes of human space--is largely irrelevant to the themes explored in Belarus. This is a good thing since, minutes after I began reading the book, I realized that the novel was misnamed. rydel23, similarly misled by the title, wrote at length about the stupidity of this book's title, which was apparently chosen because Hogan conflated the "White Russia" that is now Belarus with the "Russian Whites" of the 1920s. As Gregory Ioffe notes in his 2003 paper "Understanding Belarus: Belarusian Identity" (PDF format), the ethnonym "White Russia" and its cognates were first used in the 14th century. The question of whether modern Belarus was known as White Russia because its inhabitants didn't pay tribute to the Tatars or because it was the westernmost land of the Rus' is mildly interesting. It's also completely irrelevant to the fact that the anti-Communist coalition in the Russian Civil War chose to be represented with the colour white to distinguish itself from the Communist Reds. The difference between "White Russia" and the "Russian Whites" is a non-trivial difference that any halfway competent editor should have been able to pick up on after several minutes of research. The absence of such an editor very nearly spoiled the book for me.



Belarus is set in the 30th century, in a prosperous interstellar civilization dominated by humans bordering upon assorted non-human civilizations just beyond the frontier. In this civilization, intellectual property rights are strong, so much that the descendants of those researchers who invented key technologies--faster-than-light travel, say, or advanced nanotechnology--are able to organize themselves into remarkably powerful families, each possessing such vast wealth as to qualify as quasi-sovereign powers. One of these families, the Russian-descended Mironenkos, decides to translate their virtual sovereignty into real sovereignty by colonizing a world at the fringes of settled space, a planet thought to be fallow. There are alien ruins in orbit, but no sign of any living alien civilization in-system. And so, mass settlement enthusiastically begins, and the world's empty lands are filled by human civilization.

This happy period is interrupted a series of very mysterious, very brutal, and very skillful killings. The deaths look at first like the acts of conventional human serial killers, but as investigators piece together the clues they realize that this explanation doesn’t work universally, that the responsible agents are very selectively targeting some of the most graceful people of Belarus. Where once single individuals disappeared, too, entire families begin to vanish, leaving only bloody traces. And then, entire communities.

The people of Belarus are distracted from their horrors by the bloody breakdown of humanity's first interstellar civilization. Many of the scions of the great aristocratic clans, it seems, not only became bored with their unimaginable wealth, but terribly depraved for the bargain. A technology capable of mastering the vast energies required for faster-than-light flight turned out, for these bored young things, to also be a technology capable of triggering periods of massive volcanism which could easily resurface inhabited Earth-like worlds, and a technology capable of triggering novas in main-sequence stars. The more conventional interstellar wars, fought by planetary civilizations fearing that theirs might be the next planet to be exterminated which decided to preempt the terrorists by destroying their potential bases, merely accelerated the downwards trend in interstellar society. Belarus' interstellar capabilities were broken in the second phase of the conflict, just in time for the terrorists to try to make Belarus' sun go nova.

The sun doesn't go nova, much to everyone's surprise. It turns out that the alien ruins were not the last legacies of a vanished species after all, but rather the castoffs of a vital and technologically advanced culture that hardly had any more interest in seeing their world destroyed than Belarus' human colonists. Besides being rather technologically advances, the aliens are a remarkably attractive species by human standards--fine-featured, quick-witted, stylish. Indeed, they are rather interested in humans. The problem with these beautiful brilliant elven aliens is that their culture is centered upon ritualized murder and cannibalism; human beings, so like themselves and yet alien, make perfect prey. And now that Belarus has been cut off from whatever's left of humanity's interstellar civilization, they are free to run rampant.

Earlier, I wrote that Belarus' pseudo-Tsarist setting was irrelevant to the central plot. The planet Belarus might as well have been, say, New Éire, populated by bright-eyed redheads who dance to neo-traditional fiddle music and speak their language with a charming brogue, or a Yamato home to solemn bureaucrats versed in the ways of bushidô who contemplate stone gardens in their off time. Hogan could have written a book that dealt with East Slavic cultures in non-stereotypical terms, but she didn't. The character of Baba Yaga, to name a single example, was simply confusing.

Belarus isn't about Russia. Rather, at a superificial level Belarus is an exciting science-fiction horror book: What happens to people when they're locked in the vast haunted mansion and the power has gone out and the bridge connecting the mansion to the weird small village collapses and the deformed serial killer is slaughtering at will? Belarus does this well. More importantly, Belarus is a novel about power, its inequities, and their consequences. It combines a study of the human serial killer with an examination of first contact with a plausibly alien species, examining en route the question of what a functioning human society should look like.

Hogan's novel could have been so much better if she only had a better editor for Belarus. Too many separate plot threads crowd her novel for any to be adequately developed, at least to the point of advancing characterization beyond a fairly rudimentary level. Belarus is an interesting novel of ideas, but it had the potential to be a truly good novel. It can still be enjoyed on its own terms, but for me, there's the sadness of knowing that it could have been so much more.