Carving Paths Through Dim Spaces: Craft Review of Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain

Dec 25

Humanity drifts through space in layered, metal-bound worlds. Deep below the upper decks of scholarship and self-congratulation, a Hold houses laborers tethered by bolts and chains. Generations ago, people abandoned old Earth, leaving behind a drowned past. Now, in these corridors of steel and algae-lit windows, we follow three arcs intertwined: a boy who emerges from chained obscurity with a gift for drawing, a professor who struggles to make her intellectual refinements matter, and a prophet who, though trapped in the Hold, whispers of rivers that are also seas, and bones that lie waiting in the dark.

In The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain, Sofia Samatar crafts a narrative that refuses easy hierarchies of heroism or victimhood. Each character navigates degrees of subjugation, grasping for agency that flickers and shifts rather than shines steady. Rather than any frontal assault on the system, the story dwells in subtle interactions—quiet negotiations, cautious gestures, murmured myths—that reveal how even in oppressive conditions, delicate designs of self-determination can take root. The text rewards close reading: tones, textures, and rhythms accumulate significance, pressing the reader to sense what might be possible in cramped, half-lit spaces. It is a novella that, as one reviewer noted, is “lyric and mythic” yet “densely realized,” and it feels as if every whisper travels on communal breath, every mark on a wall or scrap of castoff brims with layered meaning.

Scratching Visions: The Boy in the Hold

In “The Practice,” the opening section, we meet the boy encumbered by a bolt that must be replaced whenever he outgrows it, marking time through metal adjustments rather than birthdays. He lives among others who share unspoken codes: do not tug at night, hold yourself still, do not complain when mucking out. He is no rebel hero summoning grand speeches; instead, his agency begins as a scratch, a whisper of graphite-like residue on the cell walls. He creates drawings from bent nails, transforming communal apathy into quiet artistry. The prophet in the same cell praises him: these images are a kind of breathing, a “Practice” as essential as the body’s intake of air. In this dim environment, the boy’s negotiating for time to draw—trading favors so others will let him continue—reveals how even minimal agency emerges through relational tactics.

These drawings matter more than mere distraction. They pull mythic visions into cramped reality, layering over old marks left by unknown hands. He etches rivers and seas he has never seen, guided by the prophet’s stories of sleeping bones and distant horizons. His art grows complex: he incorporates star-charts of rumored galaxies, resurrects drowned men and whispered visions, turning the rough cell wall into a palimpsest of memory and hope. It is not a straightforward defiance; it coexists with fear and bodily discomfort. Yet through these delicate acts, the boy asserts a sense of self not confined to the bolt around his ankle. One might say that in these etched lines, we see how narrative art can help a character imagine beyond the immediate and the brutal.

The Horizon and New Equations of Power

When the boy is taken “upstairs” in “The Horizon,” the shift is disorienting. He gains a kind of freedom—an electronic anklet instead of a clanking chain—and is introduced to orchards, classrooms, and colleagues who claim to support him. Yet what does it mean to be “free” when every gesture is surveyed, when one must perform gratitude before those who have decided to uplift him from darkness?

He meets a professor, the woman who long fought to rename academic departments and secure tiny symbolic victories. Her father once rose from the Hold, and she wears an anklet too, though one with a different meaning: hers signifies her partial belonging in a caste that clings to fragile privileges. In the boy’s presence, she recalls her father’s gentle rituals, his evening sip of bitter Hold water, and wonders what knowledge evaporated in the gap between these worlds. The atmosphere changes as he enters her radius: “The subtleties shift,” to borrow another’s phrasing, and the “thin fiction of the middle class” emerges. The professor’s attempts to “humanize space” become charged with irony when confronted with the boy’s haunted silence and uncertain steps. What good is renaming a department if the people below starve, chained, barely seen?

The boy’s body rebels in this realm of compressed air and forced camaraderie. He vomits when first trying to stand without a chain’s tension. Freed in theory, he is still tethered by social expectations. The professors believe themselves compassionate, yet they demand that he feed their narratives, acting astonished by their insights about him. He learns to perform, to nod and laugh at their stories, to offer mild agreement that sustains their sense of righteousness. If downstairs he negotiated for drawing time, upstairs he negotiates for intellectual breathing room, careful not to offend or disappoint.

In parallel, the professor’s illusions crack. She has argued for shifts in nomenclature, for symbolic inclusion of arts and sciences in a rebranded manner, hoping to “humanize” the ship’s space. Faced with the boy, she confronts how her achievements are confined to bureaucratic inflections. She realizes that while she argued passionately at committees, people lived chained below. It is an uncomfortable recognition that what she crafted so diligently—clever departmental titles, minor scholarships—barely touches the system’s cold core. The demands of a new reality press in: to act meaningfully, she must move beyond cosmetic adjustments, and that terrifies her.

The Prophet’s Conceptual Infusions

Beneath these interactions lies the prophet’s influence. Though chained and aging, he wields intangible power: stories and metaphors that erode complacency. He speaks of a River that is also a Sea, of bones waiting in a valley, of a star called Wormwood and bitter waters. These fragments enter the boy’s drawings, enter the boy’s silence as he steps upstairs, enter the professor’s mind as she tries to understand what has been lost. The prophet’s voice, carried and reshaped by hundreds of mouths in the hangar during feast days, spreads quietly, forging a loose collective awareness. Even guards eye him with bemusement and hint of respect, uneasy before the gravity of his words.

The prophet’s myths function like a slow chemical reaction, dissolving the neat categories that justify exploitation. They remind characters that their ship, their world, is not the only possible configuration. The prophet teaches that every bolt and chain can be reimagined, that there are stories older than the ship’s corridors, that the idea of a “Practice”—breathing, drawing, storytelling—can be a form of dissent. These concepts infiltrate without overt resistance. While the professor had spent years reshuffling academic departments, and the boy learned to scratch lines on walls, the prophet worked on a conceptual level, seeding questions no one can fully banish. When the boy recalls the prophet’s gentle voice as he tries to acclimate to upper deck life, or when the professor senses a gap between what is taught and what is lived, we witness how intangible narrative might lend agency. Without naming it as such, the prophet offers a wakeful lens on a system that tries to pretend its hierarchies are natural and absolute.

In “The Chain,” Threads Intertwine

By the time we reach “The Chain,” these three arcs begin to intersect more directly. The boy, now navigating classrooms and orchards, encounters other ankleted students who empathize with him, asking if he has Meet Rooms in the Hold. He misunderstands their jokes—“Meat Rooms” versus “Meet Rooms”—and their laughter stings. But he also senses that not all students wear the same masks as the professors. He notices how some classmates long for more meaningful engagement, their private fears echoing his. Meanwhile, the professor’s illusions continue to fracture. She tries to help the boy in ways that are clumsy but sincere. She sits outside his dorm room, offering small comforts and brackish Hold water he might remember. Even the university’s elders—some worn down by decades of unremarked service—cast sidelong glances that suggest complexity in their roles.

The prophet’s legacy endures as the boy and the professor descend again to the Hold, this time to reconnect with the prophet’s child. A cycle completes itself. There is no grand liberation scene, no final revolt. Instead, an extraordinary subtlety emerges when chain and anklet become not just markers of bondage but conduits of a strange new solidarity. The professor and the boy, once divided by multiple floors and mindsets, join efforts to seek the prophet’s child, to confirm that the seeds of possibility exist in the cramped darkness below. Contact with the prophet’s child reveals another layer: the prophet’s stories did not vanish; they traveled, mutated, took on new shapes across Ships, linking people who have never met.

In these final movements, the chain’s symbolism shifts. Chains and anklets remain instruments of control, but they also serve as physical links that draw characters into mutual awareness. The professor and the boy feel each other’s presence as a faint buzz, the prophet’s child stands now in dialogue with a once-lost father’s legacy, and a new pattern of understanding forms. The characters learn that systems of oppression can also be read as inadvertent networks, that enforced proximity might yield unexpected empathy. This does not redeem the system, but it suggests that within its rigid architecture, subtle forms of agency can unfold when characters learn to see each other beyond their assigned roles.

Embodying the Material: Scenes and Rituals Across the Parts

Throughout, Samatar’s attention to detail—light, texture, breath—never wavers. In “The Practice,” blood glistens when the Doctor applies the Mallet; “The Horizon” brings damp air and algae-thick windows; “The Chain” reveals barnacled complexities of memory and touch. The professor’s taped-up computer cord, the steamy showers that fail to wash away the ship’s tension, the orchard’s quiet rows of fruit trees grown in hydroponic chambers—all create a layered sense of setting that doubles as commentary. These sensory anchors prevent the story from drifting into abstract allegory. Instead, they show how narrative worlds are built from substances that shape characters’ choices.

In one scene, the professor orders special Hold water for the boy, hoping to comfort him with something familiar. He sips it, recalling his father’s gentle hush. This simple gesture encapsulates the uneven agency both share: the professor can order this water, but it tastes like soap to her daughter. The boy, though trapped by social scripts upstairs, finds momentary grounding in that “brackish taste.” Such scenes point to how even small exchanges can carry deep significance, illustrating that agency emerges in the interplay of bodies, memories, and gestures. The orchard trip, where the professor’s students cluster around the boy, reveals how knowledge—design, chemistry, and environmental engineering—coexist uneasily with human cost. The orchard might feed them, but it also stands upon invisible labor and drowned histories.

Uneasy Kinships: Controlling Narratives in Half-Light

The novella suggests that narrative form itself can be an apparatus of agency or control. The prophet’s stories, the boy’s drawings, the professor’s carefully chosen words in committees—these are all narrative acts. Who controls the story matters. The professors upstairs think they control the narrative by defining knowledge, departmental structures, and who counts as worthy of scholarships. Downstairs, the prophet and boy rework these narratives, embedding alternate visions in whispered tales and etched murals.

This interplay resonates with the notion that oppressive structures might endure, but they are never total, never immune to reframing. The prophet’s mythic language, the boy’s images of drowned men, and the professor’s slow realization that scholarship cannot remain sealed off from lived suffering—all these narrative cracks offer readers a sense that no system is monolithic. Instead, it trembles under the cumulative pressure of quiet creativity and re-interpretation.

At the end, we find no triumphant climax. The fleet still drifts, and the systems remain. Yet something fundamental has shifted in how these three characters see and relate to their world. The professor can no longer imagine she’s done enough by adjusting departmental titles. The boy knows now that “up” does not equal freedom, and that anklets can hum with ironic intimacy. The prophet’s words, carried through multiple voices, prove that belief, memory, and imagination can traverse decks and holds, undermining the pretense that what is must always be.

Sketching Partial Liberation: Toward an Unwritten Future

The novella’s quiet conclusion suggests that agency often manifests as partial liberation, incremental shifts rather than sweeping reforms. This is not pessimism but recognition that in layered power systems, change percolates through unforeseen interactions. One might recall the reviewer’s praise for how the text “rewards close reading,” its “lyric and mythic” quality grounded in concrete atmospheres. Indeed, the story encourages us to think about how, in a space that seems sterile or set in stone, characters carve out small but meaningful differences in their fates.

What emerges is a model for writing character arcs that illuminate complexity without falling into despair or hollow optimism. By attending to the interplay of environment, social custom, and private longing, Samatar shows that each character’s agency is contingent and evolving. The boy’s micro-acts of drawing, the professor’s belated attempts at genuine engagement, and the prophet’s persistent conceptual frameworks all demonstrate that even where oppression prevails, people find ways to reimagine their conditions. The narrative does not pretend these gestures suffice to dismantle the structure; it simply insists that, through them, a kind of hopeful restlessness takes hold.

If the professor once read theory and believed naming a department differently might humanize space, now she understands that real humanization requires listening to those forced into silence, embracing discomfort, and acknowledging that liberation’s first step might be to see the chains anew. The prophet’s memory hovers, reminding everyone that today’s brutal arithmetic of chains and bolts is not timeless fate. Even if no one escapes, they now carry a new sense of possibility, a horizon that, like a river morphing into a sea, can hold multiple truths.

Arman Chowdhury