Review: Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley

Review: Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley

by Rich Horton

Aliya Whiteley has been publishing interesting short fiction for a couple of decades, and novels for about half that time. I've reprinted one of her stories in my Year's Best series ("Fog and Pearls at King's Cross Junction" from 2020) but I  hadn't yet read a novel. But at a glance her most recent book, her sixth, from 2024, looked intriguing, so I have read it.

Three Eight One is quite strange, both in structure and content. It is framed as a personal project by Rowena Savalas, begun early in the 24th Century. Rowena tells us she's 17 years old physically, but 663 years old "streaming", and we gather that people live in digital form primarily, but may incarnate themselves into a physical body. Rowena's project is to research a digital document from the "Age of Riches" -- digital reaches, thus extending from late in the 20th century to early in the 22nd century, we are told. Rowena's era, the "Age of Curation", spends some effort trying to understand the quintillions of bytes of online date from our time. And Rowena is studying something called The Dance of the Horned Road, created July 23, 2024.

You probably have questions. I certainly did! The Dance of the Horned Road is the first person narrative of a young woman named Fairly, living in a walled village. She is about to go on a "quest", a common effort for young people of her village. This quest involves periodically pressing a button on a Chain Device, and attempting to follow the "Horned Road", as the Breathing Man follows. The sections of Fairly's narrative are each 381 words long. They are often glossed with footnotes by Rowena. 

This structure obviously somewhat resembles that of Geoff Ryman's 253, but really there is little resemblance between the two novels save the similarly sized sections. As far as this narrative goes, despited that fact that it was ostensibly created in 2024, neither Fairly's home nor anywhere she visits on her quest can plausibly be recognized as present day places, though the technology is vaguely current (or perhaps a few decades before now.) Rowena's footnotes acknowledge this, and often try to define aspects of Fairly's milieu, while also discussing her own responses, and something of her own life.

Fairly's journey takes her to a variety of places -- tending bar for a while at the nearby big town; a trek into the mountains where she is hosted by strange animals called cha (which is also what the three pieces of money she's been given for her quest are called); into a cave; across the sea; working on a pig farm -- or are they cha?; in a city of treehouses with a group of brothers who claim to have been royalty; joining a caravan that seems analogous to her quest; up in a balloon; and finally on a starship heading for a newly colonized planet; and finally drifting in a spaceship's lifeboat back to Earth and home. She makes friends, takes lovers, and encounters the cha in various forms, including repeatedly humans in cha costumes. Are the cha, as rumored, aliens who have taken over Earth and forced humanity into this odd sociality? Are they simply symbols? And what of the humans in cha costumes? To say nothing of the Breathing Man, who never stops following her, but in the end seems especially close to her. Things only get odder when she returns to her village.

Behind that there are the hints of Rowena's life. Her project is interrupted by a decades long period of "Lived Experience", which in some way seems similar to Fairly's quest. We learn that her people only live in bodies for 70 years, and then must die -- yet return to digital life. Her commentary on Fairly is -- interesting but perhaps not wholly trustworthy?

In the end I'm not sure what the novel means, but it's very interesting and very thought provoking. And it's astonishingly new -- original. I wonder -- how much of everything we read is simulations, or digital life, or simply story. That seems the only way to explain the strangeness of much of Fairly's quest. Or the way Fairly's curious life, allegedly in or before 2024, aligns with our own 21st century. And what are the cha, really? Is the space travel real? Is digital life a way to remove humans from Earth's ecosphere? A radical way of living lightly on the land? Is the village life Fairly grows up something to aspire to? Or a misstep? Is it all a metaphor for constructing a life? Or a story?

I don't have answers. But I'm glad to be able to ask the questions.