The Archivist

Gill Alderman was a microelectronics researcher turned science fiction writer. I have no idea if she’s still around, as that’s about all you can find on her. The Archivist was her debut novel and follows the life of Cal, a pariah who gains notoriety in a sprawling underworld of thieves, artists, prostitutes, and a colorful array of misfits and eccentrics, mainly for his beauty. Cal lives in a matriarchal and brutal city that has lapsed back to feudalism. At the outset, Alderman’s world makes for compelling reading: exotic, drug-laden, and bizarre characters are to be found here that remind one heavily of Delany’s protagonists in Babel-17 and Dhalgren. Cal can be thought of as a Dorian Gray of sorts, whose story really begins when he meets his Lord Henry, Magon Nonpareil, better known as The Archivist.

Magon’s aim is to introduce a new religion recognizing the now-forgotten male population as he aims to undermine the existing gynarchy alongside Cal and a few others in his conspicuous cabal. Alderman’s relationships are complex; emotions are fickle and hard to understand at first glance. Characters orbit each other in patterns of attraction and repulsion that feel alien to conventional narrative romance. This opacity works in the novel’s favor at first, but intriguing complexity devolves into complication.

As a writer, Alderman composes hypnotic passages with the occasional flare of beauty and excitement. But as she takes us through Cal’s journey, the halls of his memory, and yet another yonder vista that needs florid rendering, her writing becomes fatiguing. Her sentences blur and yawn, causing the mind to drift.

The Archivist has insights, but they are buried in a dance of what appear to be arbitrarily chosen symbols and metaphors, making them hard to take with you. Transformations, names, and places are frequently conjured and dropped, which gives the novel’s lore a distancing effect. She is by no means a bad writer, and in fact, scattered pieces of her novel show a propensity toward originality. But perhaps in the hands of an editor who could give her story the dimension it needed, more linear shapes and less curvature, we wouldn’t be left with this aqueous form that can feel like a quest for nowhere when it clearly is not.

In my estimation, Alderman wrote a novel of genuine ambition disrupted by fleetingly composed thoughts and self-indulgence that endlessly peels away layers that never end. A fascinating attempt worth trying if you can tread water for a few days.