Book Review: Brute Orbits

George Zebrowski
1998
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Brute Orbits is set in the near future, in the middle of the 21st century. Beset by global warming, overpopulation, and rampant criminality, the governments of Earth have come up with a solution to their problems: they capture nearby asteroids, hollow them out, fill them with criminals, and use them as flying prisons.

It seems to be the perfect answer. As each rock is filled with prisoners, it is sent out on a long elliptical orbit timed to return that batch of convicts to Earth at the end of their sentences. The habitats are self-servicing and don’t need wardens, or guards, or maintenance staff, so they are worry-free and much cheaper than the existing supermax penitentiaries.

And if a rock is accidentally sent into an orbit that is longer than it was supposed to be, so that it has no chance of coming back before all its inhabitants are dead, so much the better. And if, among the rapists and murderers and thieves, there are also some political prisoners--insurgents and radicals whose only crime was advocating for alternatives to the governing regime--so much the better.

It is pretty clear that Zebrowski wrote Brute Orbits primarily as a vehicle for expressing his (legitimate) frustration with our current prison system. He was writing during the 1990s, but the problems he illustrates through his book are similar to those we have today. The majority of the book consists of not of plot or character development, but of exposition and backstory, which explain the history of the asteroid capture program, the thinking of the leaders who implemented it, and its failings.

There are a few characters whose narratives we follow loosely here and there. The one we follow most consistently is Yevgeny Tasarov, career criminal, political agitator, and philosopher. He is famous on Earth for masterminding the semi-successful Dannemora prison break, during which he escaped; after the breakout, he lived under a false ID for a while until authorities caught up with him and put him into rock #1. We also follow (very briefly) a couple of small-time crooks on some of the other rocks, and Abebe Chou, a political agitator on rock #3--the first one to allow women. (Chou is raped by a circle of high-minded intellectuals during a blackout, in what must be some kind of horrible statement on intellectualism.)

For the most part, however, the characters are incidental and irrelevant, except insofar as they further Zebrowski’s polemicizing. The themes that Zebrowski keeps coming back to--sometimes repeating in the exact same words, through the mouths or pens of different characters--are these: that ruling aristocracies think that they can perfect society by simply physically removing undesirable elements. That they think that by eliminating the criminals, there will be peace and safety for the perfect citizens remaining. But that it is impossible to separate criminality from humanity; it is inherent to who we are. And that even if you remove the most obvious criminals, more will invent themselves--whether overtly or more discreetly violent.

And, further, by treating criminals with incivility, as if they were less than other humans--such as sending them into unending orbits with no chance to connect to those back home, no chance of parole, and no chance of redemption--society is committing an irredeemable crime against the criminal, and become criminals ourselves. A true justice system, he says, is one where the criminal is tried and sentenced and then allowed to serve that sentence without the system perpetuating additional crimes against them.

Tasarov, the person who comes the closest to being the main character in this novel, is also undoubtedly Zebrowski’s representative in fictional form, since he is preoccupied with the same themes that recur in the exposition. As Tasarov writes in his journal:

“The arrogance of the Earth that had sent them out continued to astonish him. It worked its criminal justice systems with the illusion of clean hands, but they were not even moderately clean hands. The Earth was a mosaic of interlocking corporate societies and extortionist governments, where criminality was in fact the legal way of things. The system in fact created most criminals and then sought to punish them. For most of the human history he knew, social systems were the criminal’s true parents, whelping lawbreakers uncontrollably like the mythical salt mill which could not stop making salt. Certain kinds of criminality could be prevented, and that would eliminate most crime. But he was certain that even a very advanced social system, one that gave its citizens nearly everything they needed, leaving them nothing to covet, might still harbor the creative criminal, one who would undertake special projects simply because they were possible. Could that kind of enterprise be socially engineered out of human beings?

“It had always been clear to him that a sane criminal justice system was possible: one that would try the criminal, assess the prince he must pay, short of death, and strive to commit no crimes of its own against the criminal.”

I happen to think Zebrowski is right on about all of these criticisms. The problem is that it is all done as exposition, not embedded into the plot as it unfolds. The themes and how we’re supposed to feel about them are explicitly explained to us, rather than us being made to learn them or feel them ourselves. It is far too polemical and too didactic to make it a really readable story. And his points are repeated so often, in his own words and in those of his characters’, it reaches the point where even those who most agree with him may start getting a little tired of it.

Gradually, over the decades, Earthbound society does improve in Brute Orbits, mainly because humans hand over their governments to artificial intelligences who do all the planning and make all the tough decisions. Scarcity becomes relatively unknown on Earth, leading to plummeting crime rates.

Eventually, the first prison asteroid makes its way back to the vicinity of Earth, many decades after its promised thirty-year return. Two historians whose job it is to document all of humanity’s history (and seemingly drawn straight from Asimov’s Foundation series) go out to near-Earth space to investigate it. There they find Tasarov’s diary and read about the injustices he and the other criminals experienced.

It hits their consciences hard. “For thousands of years,” Justine the historian says, “we lacked the tools and knowledge to deal with social evils, so in place of tools and knowledge we applied religiously derived exhortations and enforced them as best we could with police forces.” They are so appalled by the asteroid strategy developed by primitive Earth that they decide that, in the name of justice, they must investigate all the other rocks as well.

What they discover is somewhat surprising. Some of the asteroids contained both men and women, which means that, even though the original prisoners are almost entirely long since dead, their descendents live on. And, after all the lectures Zebrowski has given us about how violence will only beget more violence, and how criminality is inherent in humanity, the space-traveling penal colonies that still house living humans have created their own peace out of necessity. What started out as ruthless gladiator arenas have all eventually settled into a curious, sustainable equilibrium of nonviolence.

And, in an ironic sort of fulfillment of the original plan, once they are contacted and given the option to decide their own fate, all of the rocks decide to break permanently from Earth. 

This ending feels abrupt, and maybe a bit naive, and entirely contradictory to the bulk of the rest of the book. But it is at least a lot less depressing than an ending in which they just lived in unremitting violence until their supplies ran out. It could be that Zebrowski was at last trying to give the prisoners some sort of final victory over the crimes committed against them.