Dark Universe

Dark Universe by Dan Galouye

The inhabitants of the eponymnous Dark Universe live in underground world where all light has long since been extinguished, and the inhabitants eke out a miserable living by touch and sound. They remember light from an ancestral viewpoint, but with no frame of reference, they can't really work out what it is and have deified it to some extent.

All aspects and ramifications of this are well thought out, from the explanation of cooking without fire (and thus light), to the language, with the replacement of hearing for seeing in phrases like "I've been hearing for you everywhere!", and the 'monsters' roaming the upper levels. A great section is their attitude to light when they do finally see it, having no framework in which to place their experiences.

"And how would you describe these - sensations?" Elder Averyman completed the question.

"It was alike a lot of crazy shouts that kept bouncing against my face. And then when I put my hands over my ears I kept on hearing them"

.... The boy was an open-eyed type. Jared, himself, was open-eyed. Three other witnesses had fallen into the same category. And all of them had felt the strange sensations!" (p. 62)

Writing these reviews has made me aware of some of the motifs of what I like from fiction. This novel made me realise I like the following motif: "The protagonist(s) walk(s) around a strange environment trying to figure out what's going on. (S)H(h)e seems to be at the mercy of strange forces and ends up realising what he first thought about the whole situation was false." This motif is called CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH in my SF encylcopedia. Read the entry for that and you'll see that a lot of those books will end up here at some point. It's certainly reminiscent of the Generational Starship theme of books like Aldiss' Non-Stop and Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky (in fact the writing style is a lot like Heinlein's, without the annoying militarism and sexism however).

My only complaint is the author's name. His surname has every vowel in it bar 'i'. You'd think his parents would have called him Tim or something.