Beneath Ceaseless Skies #415, September 5th, 2024

“From Each One, the Strength-of-All” by Timothy Mudie

“Joy, or A Humble Orbit Through the Celestial City” by Will McMahon

Reviewed by Geoff Houghton

First in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #415 is “From Each One, the Strength-of-All” by Timothy Mundie. This story of resistance against a dictatorial theocracy is unusual in that there is not the slightest doubt on either side that the object of worship actually exists. The entire story takes place inside a city built upon the physical body of the god himself. The issue is whether the service of the glorious “Strength-of-All” is a good thing when that worship requires regular blood-letting, including mass human sacrifice, to maintain their living god’s well-being.

The narrator starts his first person chronicle as a loyal believer in the Theocracy’s insistence that they fully understand exactly what it is that their silent god requires and desires. Our storyteller accepts that not only is the human sacrifice necessary, it is a holy duty and any objection to that received wisdom is the most hideous blasphemy. It is only when our narrator gets to know one of the chosen sacrifices and interacts with one of the rare disbelievers that the first seeds of doubt begin to creep into a troubled brain.

This fictional world calls to mind the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg’s famous pronouncement: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”

In the finale, our narrator’s love for the blasphemer and admiration for one of the human sacrifices is pitted against a lifetime of obedient worship. You must read the story yourself to discover which will prevail.

The second story in this issue is “Joy, or A Humble Orbit Through the Celestial City” by Will McMahon. The physical location of the Celestial City is never revealed and the reader is even left uncertain whether the narrator is human or another species entirely. Whichever is true, the world portrayed is a deeply unpleasant, hierarchical state in which unjustified and violent cruelty on the part of the rulers is an established norm in the lives of the oppressed minions who serve them so abjectly. Our narrator appears to be a natural product of this forbidding world, self-obsessed and wholly deluded. His blind acceptance of the way things are shows many parallels to the religious fervour exhibited by the chronicler in the first story in this issue of BCS. However, the differences rapidly pile up to a really disquieting finale.

When you note that the author is a Union Organiser in real life, many readers may assume that the finale will involve the hoisting of a red flag and the downtrodden minions finally pouring from their slave-barracks to storm the gilded palaces of their despotic oppressors. The author achieves a much more surprising and viscerally impactful culmination. Readers of a nervous disposition are advised to approach this story cautiously, and preferably early in the morning with the lights fully on and a soothing beverage close to hand.

Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.