Five Star Reviews: The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred

Another book that comforted me during Chemo Christmas in the Balkan Tower of Matriarchy, this one has really stayed with me.

The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred, is a novella by Greg Egan, and like all of his work, boils down to a grim, SMBC-style joke.

Q: Should you pull a lever and definitely save 800 people, at the cost of possibly killing 4,000 people?

A: This is a monstrous decision that nobody should have to make!

A human colony on the asteroid Vesta sends mineral-rich boulders to the colony on Ceres, in exchange for water-rich icebergs. A tidy system, except now there are refugees in the Vestan cargo stream. These people are willing to glue themselves to ballistic rocks and enter suspended animation on the hope they’ll be picked up and revived for a better life on Ceres. What went wrong on Vesta?

Egan does a fantastic job of documenting Vesta’s descent into madness. There’s a lot in there about the nature of moral decision-making, democracy, and good old-fashioned tribalism. Come for the realistic treatment of an isolated society in space, stay for the genocide!

Have I made this book sound depressing. It is. But it’s also uplifting. I feel like I’m a better person for having read it. Plus it’s short, so you’re not suffering that long. You can take it.