Neatorama’s Bitlit Launches The Cube: A Novel by Nat Karody
Today, Neatorama’s literature blog Bitlit is proud to introduce a new science fiction novel: The Cube by Nat Karody. Were you disappointed by the ending to the series Lost? What follows is a story with as intricate a mythology as Lost’s but with an important difference: in the end it is all explained mechanistically, without resort to mysticism or religion. At the conclusion of the novel, the following summary of the core mystery, taken from the opening chapter, will be perfectly sensible: The Oopsah told a story, a majestic, exalted, beatific story of the coming of the end times and the rise of the Controller.
He learned how the world would end, who would destroy it, and how he, Zranga, could prevent it. He learned that he had been appointed by destiny – by the Controller himself – to carry out this mission. But above all he learned of the existence of a perfect being, the demigod Celeste, trapped beyond time in a cycle of eternal death. Only Zranga could rescue her, and to do this he had to place a giant door on the bottom of the Silent Sea, and kill the Great Man. Read on to found out how far Ivy Morven will go to stop Tobor Zranga from realizing his destiny, and how this alternative universe is bizarrely structured so that the most rational acts are the most extreme.
What I love most about The Cube is the fact that it’s phenomenally well written and has great character development. Although clearly a science fiction narrative, The Cube also transcends its genre, to attract a broad audience. It tells the Romeo and Juliet story of a young couple from adjacent sides of a cubic planet who meet at an edge and develop a relationship in the midst of a war that threatens to destroy the planet. The story is unique in creating an alternative universe from first principles: all matter is oriented in one of the six Euclidian directions.
This simple deviation from our own universe leads to the creation of cubic celestial bodies and allows a reimagination of transportation, power generation, warfare, architecture, and lovemaking, among other things. As an example, the political conflict leading to war is that both inhabited sides of the planet generate hydroelectric power by draining a large body of water on one side through edge sluices, a cheap and easy source of energy that will ultimately destroy the planet if the water is drained too far.
What drives this story is the relationship of the two main characters, a girl escaping from a classified weapons facility with terrible secrets she refuses to share, and a rural boy who literally catches her when she leaps over the edge and soon learns he is the target of international espionage. The novel is organized around a series of revelations of the girl’s secrets culminating with an answer to the ultimate question — who is Celeste?
As you can probably tell even from my brief description, The Cube is a multidimensional narrative (pun intended!) that could simultaneously described as a science fiction novel as well as a moving love story and a dystopic utopia fiction, similar to George Orwell’s 1984. You can discover this alternative universe, governed by different laws of physics but similar political motivations and machinations for power as in our world, on the links below:
http://www.neatorama.com/bitlit/category/the-cube/ http://www.youtube.com/user/ClaudiaMoscovici?feature=mhum#p/a/u/0/BXP7xYtrVeU
Claudia Moscovici, literaturesalon