Book Review: Probability Sun

Nancy Kress
2001
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – – 

Probability Sun starts three years after the end of Probability Moon. After losing three members of the original team that investigated the planet World in Probability Moon, Drs. Dieter Grüber and Anne Sikorski have convinced the Solar System’s governing body, the Solar Alliance Defense Network (SADN), to go back to World to investigate the “device” they discovered buried deep in the Neury Mountains.

Grüber wants to go for scientific curiosity. Sikorski wants to go for the natives, who she feels responsible for protecting from SADN. And SADN wants to for military reasons; they’re hoping the “device” will turn out to be a weapon that will help them win humanity’s war against the Fallers.

SADN Major Lyle Kaufman, a consummate diplomat, is chosen to lead the mission. Grüber convinces Kaufman to include the world’s greatest physicist and radical crank, Dr. Tom Capelo, who insists on bringing his two young daughters and their nanny. And the military insists on including Marbet Grant, a “sensitive,” who is so skilled at reading body language that her insights are often confused with telepathy. Capelo’s job will be to figure out how the device works. Grant’s job will be to interpret, in the event a Faller is captured alive for the first time.

Which, in fact, happens. While Kaufman’s team is in transit to World, another SADN ship captures a Faller, and it is transferred to the brig in Kaufman’s ship. There, Grant begins learning the Faller’s body language in unorthodox and controversial but effective ways.

While Grant is learning to communicate with the Faller, the ship arrives at World. Because of what happened during the humans’ first mission to the planet, the team is worried that the natives will view them as “unreal,” or not a part of the shared reality that all the natives feel, and thereby condemned to death. What they don’t realize is that because of the unintentionally self-sacrificing, life-saving actions of a deceased schizophrenic crew member from the last mission, the natives now think humans are “real,” and that they share reality. They are therefore surprised when they are welcomed and treated hospitably—and they are glad to be reunited with Enli, a native who they worked with on the original mission, and one who was unusually open to their ideas, even to her own acute distress.

Grüber, Capelo, and a small team spelunk through the caves under the Neury Mountains to examine the device in situ. Soon, the spelunking team runs into a problem: they learn that the buried artifact in the Neury Mountains (a) is probably a particle destabilizer; (b) could probably be made into a quantum weapon; and (c) is also probably responsible for the quantum changes in the Worlders’ brains that give them their shared reality, upon which their entire civilization is based. So they have to wonder: will happen to the Worlders when the Terran crew removes the device to make their weapon?

What happens, of course, is that the Terran military does remove it, and the Worlders experience an absence of shared reality. For most, it is terrifying; for some, it is liberating. And its removal is going to bring transformative change to Worlders’ society, whether for good or for ill, whether they want it or not.

In the end, Sikorski and Grüber decide to stay on the planet permanently—to be with each other, and to help guide the people of World through their societal transition. Capelo figures out how the artifact works, and the result brings terrible, potentially civilization-destroying capabilities to the humans. Practically everyone is thrown in the brig. And the reader is left with an extremely shaky detente between Earth, World, and the Fallers, setting us up for the final installment in the trilogy.

The implications of the ideas introduced in Probability Moon come to full fruition in Probability Sun. Sun allows Kress to explore the ways in which having an enforced shared reality enables a society to be cooperative, pleasant, and peaceful but, at the same time, limits and represses people who otherwise would be curious, creative, and different. The absence of shared reality means that violence, deceit, and crime are all possible. But it also means that for those who want to engage in it, so is independent thought. 

Enli is a case in point. In the absence of the device, and shared reality, Enli begins to realize that reality is subjective; that people can have different realities from each other, and that all of those realities may be true in their own way. But it is difficult for those Enli loves to cope with these new ideas, much less embrace them—or to embrace the new Enli. Shared reality has swaddled her in a blanket of comfort and protection. But as soon as she begins to question that shared reality, she suffers oppression and brutality. 

Enli’s struggles after the loss of shared reality, the implications of what the device on World can do, and, to a lesser extent, Grant’s attempts to communicate with the captured Faller are really where the action is in Probability Sun. These scenes have more dramatic tension in them than any of the actual action scenes in the book, like the space battles with the Fallers or the societal fallout after the removal of the device from World. In this, Kress’s writing reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s, in that the real focus of her books is not shootouts or chases or romance, but rather puzzles of logic and morality.

In Probability Moon, Enli has to go through a major, painful change in her perception of both herself and her people. She has to decide whether it is worth voluntarily accepting repression of thought in order to have peace; and if it is worth breaking away from those she loves, or possibly from the only planet she has ever known, in order to satisfy intellectual curiosity. And the Terran crew has to answer an array of similarly weighty questions, like: how can we communicate with a race wildly different from ourselves? How does the artifact work? What are our responsibilities towards others when we have the power to destroy them completely? Should we destroy their culture to save ours? The book’s drama is there, in the puzzle-solving, the logical dilemmas, the internal arguments.And, in general, because of this, Kress’s books are appealing in the same way that Asimov’s are. (Even if Probability Sun does suffer a bit with the absence of my favorite character, Dr. Ahmed Bazargan.)

Another aspect of Kress’s writing that is appealing—and also similar to Asimov’s—is that she is really good at looking through alien eyes. A sizeable chunk of the book, for example, is spent on Grant’s struggle to achieve some kind of connection with the incredibly peculiar Fallers. And Kress has a talent for explaining the things the Terrans do on World using concepts the Worlders understand. To the Worlders, the Terran spaceships are flying boats; elevators are carts with no one to pull them; almost any vehicle of any kind is a bicycle, and when a spaceship takes off, it makes a noise like “a hundred bicycle wheels grinding.” 

Kress is almost always sympathetic to the Fallers’ and Worlders’ feelings and reactions, even when they do terrible things out of ignorance or fear. She presents it all to us such that we are sympathetic to them, too. And maybe this is her central aim, in the end: to have us understand even those most alien to us.