An ambitious and imaginative take on Earth’s past and future, in which magic and art shade into one another as the characters come into their own
A Dawn Obsolete, the first “folio” of debut author Jaseon R. G. B.’s planned seven-installment series, The Light Apparent, has the potential to become a cult classic. The flipside is that the novel is likely to be divisive; it asks a lot of readers, including a willingness to sit with its ambiguities in anticipation of sequels. Nevertheless, the novel deserves praise for its inventiveness, doing for the sci-fi and fantasy genres something like what Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 House of Leaves did for horror.
That inventiveness is all the more surprising given that the bones of A Dawn Obsolete’s plot are fairly typical speculative fiction fare. The main action unfolds in the year 2236 (teleportation and holograms abound) in a society that is both horizontally and vertically stratified.
The world is divided into Sectors, each of which is organized around a distinct technology and between which travel is essentially impossible. Sector I, in which the majority of the story takes place, is further divided into four sections of varying wealth and privilege. A different sort of division underpins the existence of Agents, government officials who find humans with the ability to perform magic and “purify” them by removing the gene associated with this ability.
Interspersed flashbacks to the 14th century elaborate on the origins of these humans: At one point, Earth was populated by eight sentient races, seven of which possessed various forms of magic. An illness engineered by one of those races—the Magy’cal, later mythologized as “wizards”—killed off virtually everyone but the non-magical humans, but the traits of the seven other races live on in attenuated form in Scions, their part-human descendants. The relationship between these descendants and the rest of their society propels much of the narrative conflict, with many point-of-view characters that are either Scions or Agents. Thus, we witness the contrasting journeys of Skylark, a Scion Magy’cal harnessing her talent for levitation while grieving the purification of her brother, and Eleanor, a Scion Element’r who fears and rejects her affinity with fire.
Simultaneously, the novel follows R’aegoth, a severe and ambitious Agent who is pursuing a group of rebel Scions known as the Furies but who may himself be something other than what he seems. When Skylark meets the mysterious Jaceus, it further emerges that the seven magical races survive in another world—one that a friend stumbles upon due to a teleportation “malfunction.” The worldbuilding is intricate and expansive, but no more so than in many other works of speculative fiction. What distinguishes A Dawn Obsolete is its style and form. The former is grounded in prose that is frequently subjective, abstract, and elliptical. Heavy on metaphor, sentence fragments, and ambiguous antecedents, sometimes dropping into surreal streams of consciousness or riffing phonetically on itself, the writing frequently recalls early 20th-century Modernism more than contemporary speculative fiction:
“His sword is way too strong. Swings through nothing, swings through everything. Fiber glass plastic steel saber alter black, dust electric orchestra carnival golden phantasm spasm spasmic plasmatic. Can’t be pulled out of the stone.”
The nod to Arthurian legend instances a further feature of the novel: a dense web of allusions ranging from science fiction and fantasy mainstays (The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars) to classic literature (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, The Catcher in the Rye) to mythology and religion (the Bible, the Greek and Egyptian pantheons) to popular music (“The Sound of Silence,” “Who Let the Dogs Out”) to philosophy (Hegel, Descartes) and more. Then there is the work’s structure and formatting—the narration that slips between past and present to first and third person (to say nothing of different characters), the presentation of certain episodes in verse or theatrical dialogue, the interspersing of nonlinguistic symbols and colored text, etc. The result is a work that combines the steep learning curve of dense worldbuilding with the challenges of experimental fiction. This is not a critique so much as a warning. A Dawn Obsolete is good at what it does, but what it does will not be to all readers’ taste. The experience of reading the novel is akin to watching a movie in a language one partially understands; there is an impression of overarching harmony, but the details are frequently elusive. That the novel is the first in a planned series compounds the effect, as many questions remain unanswered at the novel’s close (what to make, for example, of the interludes at the mysterious Hotel Trivago?). And it is here, perhaps, that the novel suffers most. Understood as the first act in a much longer narrative, the work’s pacing may be appropriate, but the steady accumulation of characters, settings, and circumstances throughout the novel’s first few hundred pages risks alienating readers new to the fictional world. Much is introduced, but relatively little happens, and still less is explained.That said, A Dawn Obsolete rewards patience. The tempo picks up in the novel’s back half, and if much about the narrative world remains enigmatic, we nevertheless begin to see glimpses of the full picture.
Above all, the stylistic idiosyncrasies come to feel like an extension of the novel’s interest in how individuals and societies grow; the novel itself has a dynamic quality, as though it, too, is evolving. To put it another way, reading A Dawn Obsolete is very much an immersive experience (the lack of page numbers is instructive), and one that calls to mind Arthur C. Clarke’s proclamation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. With technology and magic both modes of self-expression in A Dawn Obsolete, the book adds art as a third prong to this adage and then strives to embody it, presenting readers with something that is at once novel, inscrutable, and, at times, beautiful.
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