by Rachel A Rosen

If you’re in education or academia in the age of austerity, you’ve likely had a moment or two where you’ve wondered what you’re doing there, and whether or not you’re doing more harm than good. I know that I’ve had more than a few of those moments. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar’s wonderfully strange and dreamy novella about education, class divisions, and the carceral state on a mining ship, gets this contradiction.

In the Hold, generations of workers are Chained, never seeing anything other than their miserable conditions. But a boy who is good at drawing is plucked from the Hold and brought up to the ship’s university, where he joins the bluelegs, people like his professor, who get an electronic ankle bracelet instead of a chain. Some people even have no fetters, and get names instead. As the boy adjusts to his new circumstances and the professor navigates the boundaries of hers, they become embroiled in a struggle for freedom—not just for themselves, but for their entire society.

This novella manages to be at once intensely relatable and transcendent: a story of the power and the limits of academia, the compromises of political action, the relationship between labour and the state, and the promise of breaking free.