“Capitalism has made us think of everything as a resource to be exploited, but nature is not a resource, and it aches as it suffers. Everything in your environment changes how you come out as a person, so take care of your world.” - from Inertia
Inertia is Mark Everglade’s sequel to Hemispheres. We return to Evig Natt and Dayburn and find that not everyone is happy with a world where everyone experiences day and night, and for good reason. The new cycle has messed with the rhythms of life. Cultures and economies reflect the patterns in a region. But in Gliese 581g, where the planet’s rotation is changed after generations, this has radically altered life, and not everyone wants the alteration. On the night side, light was once a form of currency but that system is now thrown in disarray, a way of life is lost.
Inertia follows Severum Rivenshear as he tries to reconnect with his family and stop a plan to mess up the planet’s rotation, causing a public outcry due to instability and environmental disaster, resulting in a call to once again lock the planet’s rotation. Severum is not the young man he once was. Now he relies on the wisdom borne of experience as well as a variety of mods and a titanium hand. But he is better for his age. The younger Severum would not have listened to his daughter. He wouldn’t have tried to make peace. The loss of a hand puts him in the company of Allen Limmit from K. W. Jeter’s Dr. Adder, who has a flashglove installed in place of a hand, a dangerous weapon, and Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, who becomes more like his father, Darth Vader, once the hand Vader sliced off is replaced with a prosthetic hand. The grab for power in these texts results in a loss of power. But the prosthetic replacement marks an increase in power that symbolizes the gaining of wisdom.
Inertia is concerned with environmental stability. Gliese 581g, populated with fantastical beings like the crystal golems, stands in for the Earth and its diversity of life. On both planets, corporations put the bottom line ahead of the environment, sending the planets to a dangerous inflection point. Because of capitalism’s ability to let a very few in the upper class control wealth and resources, the environment is readily destroyed, sacrificed to create unchecked wealth.
Where Hemispheres was divided between a world of darkness and a world of light, Inertia is divided between a natural world full of untapped beauty and wonder and a bureaucratized and dangerous corporate world full of greed. Yet even our hero Severum is positioned as a critique of our vision of a neat split between nature and corporate existence with his artificial longevity attained by transgressing the natural law. But the logic here is that there is no return to a natural world for humanity after progressing to ever higher states of technological development and social complexity. Like an aging human body, the planet will have to be altered continually. Terraforming is the future. Everglade points to the complexity of systems and inherent flaws in them, whether of planetary, human, or economic systems and says, ‘These can be improved, so let’s do it.’
The other important theme present in the book is corruption and a population’s ability to seemingly not see through the trick of con-men and grifters. Maybe a decent test to discover if someone has self-interest and is corrupt is their position on the environment. To the degree that a corporation or politician is fine with the destruction of biomes, habitats, and wildlife, even to the point of environmental collapse, we can agree that they are a bad actor, corrupt and unfit for leadership of whatever kind.
But at least on Gliese, poetic justice is an operation. A spiritual logic exists for overcoming conflict in Inertia. A Buddhist denial of desire creates the path for overcoming. Severum must deny himself and take on humility to restore the relationship with his daughter, Ash. The result is that for the first time he’s called dad. When a prostitute no older than Ash wraps herself around him and calls him daddy, Severum rejects his desire and instead focuses on his newfound role of protector and spiritual father. Severum is not here to father a new child or create a new order like his role in Hemispheres, he’s here to ensure that his children are supported, that they are cared for, whether flesh and blood or the figurative child of the rotationist movement.