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In the spring of 2022, Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star joined a very short list of books that I checked out of the library, got about halfway through, then RAN to the bookstore to buy the hardcover. Because I had to own it. Imperatively, HAD to own it.
There are time jumps, historic interpretations, language exploration, technology, an entirely original take on the Earth’s (and humanity’s) fate, all within rich world-building around captivating characters. Honestly, it has reframed my entire context of both history and what the future could be. How reading it transformed me is why The Actual Star is easily on my shortlist of favorite novels of all time, and why I recommend you read it, too.
Housekeeping & Spoilers Ahead!
I am not a professional literary critic, but this is a type of review.
This is not a total recap, but there will be spoilers.
The Actual Star is 593 pages long with a 17 page glossary at the back. When you read, use two bookmarks. One for your reading place and the other for the glossary. Trust me.
There are taboos. Lots of them. Face them as your first act of rebellion.
The Age of Emergency
Climate change’s threats are made good as the dual realities of sea-level rise are drowning communities and drought-fueling heat waves are burning other communities into dead zones. The chasm of disparities wrought by late-capitalism has more people than ever sick and poor and has weaponized the people doing just barely better to punch downward. Stunning advances in technology disguise agendas of unchecked greed carried out by the unfathomably wealthy.
Yet, people still vacation on tropical beaches.
Did you think I was talking about our world?
The Age of Emergency is the early/mid-21st century as described by the novel’s characters living in the 31st century, one thousand years into our future. Kind of like we call long past eras the Bronze and Iron Ages (3000-500 BCE), the Middle Ages (500-1450 CE), Age of Exploration (1400-1700s), Age of Enlightenment (1685-1815), Age of Revolutions (late-18th through 19th centuries), and the Industrial Age (late-18th through late 20th centuries) (funny how those last two overlap).
The Actual Star’s three plotlines take place over separate eras:
The Year 1012 – In Tzyona, an ancient Maya city-state located in what is now modern day Belize.
The Year 2012 – In Belize and in a suburb of St. Cloud, Minnesota (where, as I type this, ICE is surging and conducting door-to-door raids).
The Year 3012 – Multiple global locations, converging on the Central American isthmus where was once Belize and Tzyona.
The Actual Star (TAS) covers environmental justice, geopolitical intrigue, colonialism, tourism as indigenous exploitation, post-capitalism, global networks of mutual aid, materialism, ableism, and futurism.
There’s also reincarnation, human sacrifice, good old-fashioned romance, mysticism, psychedelics, entire passages in Spanish and Belizean Kriol, plenty of sex/sex positivity, sexual taboos, body positivity, body autonomy, gender fluidity, and some truly inspiring visions for technology.
Honestly, all things you should bring to a rebellion.
Side Notes on the Author and the Genre
Are you still reading? Good, because talking about a nearly 600 page book that takes place over 3,000 years and can at some points feel like a fever dream needs a lot of set up.
And there’s a little more set up, because understanding about the author, Monica Byrne, is essential to understanding this novel as an act of resistance.
- She is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter.
- Since 2022, she has lived as a global nomad.
- She wrote The Actual Star in part to process the 2016 election.
Reading the last page of TAS left me stunned and teary-eyed, overwhelmed by the culmination of the story and what it could mean. This was no ordinary work of fiction. A re-read last year was no less exhilarating for already knowing the plot(s); I once again tore through the last few chapters and skidded into the final paragraph, cracked wide open, as breathless and lightheaded as the first time I read it. It feels like a knowing, but of a thing you cannot name.
I have always thought that the best science fiction shows us who we were, who we are, and who we can become. The most impactful sci-fi contains a kernel of truth; it is prescient. TAS accomplishes all of this.
So, it’s no wonder that the other novels I can think of on my shortlist are also handbooks for resistance disguised as speculative sci-fi.
Rebirth Requires Death
Tzoyna, December 1012 A.D.
Before the conquistadores stumbled ashore in what is now southern Mexico and Central America, bringing rape, disease, and genocide, there existed long-established advanced cultures in thriving cities inhabited by complex people. They had festivals, religion, art, literature, technology, culinary traditions, political intrigue, and even a celebrated stadium sport. But colonialism ruined all that.
(To be clear, those people, the Maya, and their culture did not one day vanish into the jungle. Yes, their populations and cities were devastated. But, like indigenous people displaced by colonialism all over the world, they endured and are here living alongside us, in their westernized countries where their ancestral lands are often tourist fetishes.)
How’s that for setting the scene? Anyway!
This third of TAS takes place long before any of that happened. And it opens with a seven-year-old preparing to cut herself with an obsidian blade and go on a mushroom trip.
The trip is entirely on the up-and-up and entirely entrancing to experience as a reader, even as Ket’s time down this rabbit hole is a tame toe-dip into the full, worlds-uniting, reality-bending, experience to come.
Ket is the youngest of three siblings; her older siblings are fraternal twins, the Prince Ajul and Princess Ixul. There is a frequent comparison to the Hero Twins (actual Mayan mythological figures), who in the royal siblings’ time were ancestors of the royal family and credited with bringing balance to humanity. With the mysterious unexplained absence of their parents, Ajul and Ixul are hosting a festival necessary to connect both with their gods and with the people of theirs and surrounding communities as they prepare for their coronation.
Things are tense and are about to get very messy.
“It’s easier to exist here.”
Minnesota and Belize, December 2012 A.D.
It’s just a few days before the solstice (12/21/2012) in snowy Minnesota as Leah Oliveri tells her mother and soon-to-be stepfather and stepsiblings that she’s flying out to Belize in the morning. It’s kind of a bucket list trip, and she assures them she’ll be back in time for the Christmas day wedding.
Leah is, what another character will later call her, a ‘souvenir’ of her mother’s Catholic missionary trip to Belize nearly 20 years prior (she’s also been slut-shamed by her peers, will be dismissed as a tourist, and I honestly wonder when she’s going to just belong to herself). She is a brown woman who was raised by a white mother in suburban Minnesota, with a longing to connect with her Mayan heritage; as a child she even felt a connection with a statue at the town’s only Mexican restaurant, of the Blood Maiden, who happens to be the mother of the mythological Hero Twins.
The moment Leah steps off the plane and breathes in the air of Belize, she feels simultaneously energized and at peace. At home. A door cracks open to where she belongs.
Leah’s first tour of the famous Actun Tunichil Muknal (Crystal) Cave yanks her door of belonging wide open. She feels unable to leave Belize without another guided visit to ATM. During her second cave tour, Leah walks through the door.
Along the way, she meets twin brothers Xander and Javier, who work for rival companies that guide tourists through the ATM cave. The brothers are also longtime rivals, and not just for Leah’s sexual attention.
Oh, Leah has a brain tumor and might be pregnant (the first one for sure, the second just an inkling I have).
Things are tense and are about to get very messy.
The Future is Female
Multiple Global Locations, January, 3012 A.D.
Niloux deCayo, a futuristic academic living in a nomadic utopia, messages the world community’s seat of authority (insofar as this world accepts a centralized authority) from Yazd, Persia. In our time, Yazd is a World Heritage site with centuries-old buildings in an area that has been continuously inhabited for 5,000 years. Yazd is also a city in present-day Iran where, as I write, the population is protesting the deeply repressive government and an economic crisis in what might be the country’s largest uprising since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The murder of Iranian protestors is so bad that another repressive authoritarian, in particularly rich irony, is threatening to swoop in with the largest military on the planet to rescue them.
But that’s a thousand years behind Niloux’s story.
Here’ something cool: Niloux sends her message by merely thinking into a free, global, wireless system where your inbox is basically in your brain, and your brain can ‘read’ anything ever digitized and watch anything ever uploaded. (Posting on the internet is forever, right?). This is kind of a Borg situation, but in the best possible way. Technology in Byrne’s 3012 is fully in service to protecting and extending human life. It is like how white-hat crowd-sourced freeware can evolve. With not a single greedy tech bro dirty fingerprint in sight.
So, back to Niloux’s message, which posits that as the last of the planet’s ice has finally melted, maybe it’s time to rethink the religion, La Viaja, that has shaped every aspect of life for the last 1,000 years.
Even for this evolved, egalitarian time, it’s quite the bold, polarizing statement. Niloux is about to find out just how tough it is to be a change agent.
Eleven months away, in December 3012, is a gathering at the birthplace of their religion and where the question will be considered. Or, rather, whether Niloux’s heresy is to be tolerated or… not.
The big gathering is primarily to commemorate Saint Leah’s passage to Xibalba. Saint Leah is said to have entered the underworld, which was originally tamed into a paradise by the Hero Twins and believed, by this religion, to be a physical a place where a very real, solid human can enter if they find just the right inch of geography to cross over. Like Saint Leah did, on December 21, 2012, when she disappeared into the Crystal Cave. Or possibly through a rip in space-time.
Everyone who is going travels on foot, from all points on the globe, over vast, ice-melt fed seas. Even Niloux’s arch enemy in this heretical question, Tanaaj deCayo (a common last name for the time), a performance artist who passes for a celebrity in this equal society, will be there.
Things are tense and are about to get very messy.
La Viaja, Rule of Saint Leah
- Help the one you’re with.
- This child is your child.
- No more than nine (family members, days in one place, etc.), except in December.
- The pluripotent survive. (genetically and organically, and those of many capabilities).
- The beloved always returns.
- The strangest stranger is your sister.
- Disperse all things.
- Own only what you can carry.
- You know not the inch where your cortada (doorway to Xibalba) lies.
- Be present to the god of the place.
- The gift must move.
- Be not particular.
- Blood belongs only to Xibalba. (no murdering!)
Yep, an entire religion was founded on Leah Oliveri’s bucket list trip and mysterious disappearance. One person at the center of something inexplicable, terrifying, and extraordinary, and how the people who crossed paths with her were fundamentally changed. With such an altered worldview, they just had to organize it and share it.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that TAS the novel could be a new kind of cultural guiding document.
An epic, multi-era, made up story containing a set of guidelines for a better way, birthed by and offered up to a very fractured world. Read between the lines for how it can work and save us all, but also how it can unravel and backfire. A bit subversive for our time. A bit brilliant for all time.
You know, like a bible.
Things are tense and are about to get very messy.
More Things You Might Not Like
“I don’t know WTF I just read.”
Human beings in Byrne’s 31st century have enjoyed centuries without capitalism. It crashed, burned, and the fire went out completely long before we meet Niloux. Material objects are not valued. Traveling and meeting new people are highly valued. Everyone has enough to eat, and animals have agency and voices, so they are no longer considered food.
The majority of the remains of a humanity devasted by disease and climate catastrophe are nomads traveling the world by foot—in hopes that one day they’ll slip through their own cortada (rip or cut) to Xibalba. Everyone, as a committed La Viajera, is prepared to give mutual aid to anyone in need at any time, by way of food, medical attention, or simple companionship. Sex is a choice people can make together at any time. Gender is a choice people can make at any time, and their bodies have been consciously evolved to actualize that choice at will. These evolved bodies can also secrete LSD-like and Cannabis-like substances on demand.
Everyone’s pronouns are She/Her, regardless of their bodies’ current gender expressions. It also honors St. Leah.
Everything is equity-based. No one goes hungry or lacks access to shelter or healthcare.
However, even in this enlightened equal society, there are whispers of practices that are less than utopian. Privacy no longer being a thing, really, means you can be watched through the mind-connected world wide web anytime. (Our thirst for reality t.v. will apparently never wane). There are still slur words. Despite divisions being thought of as a thing of the far past, there remain hierarchies. People still experience loneliness, disconnection, anger, fear, and rejection.
Reminder: Rebirth Requires Death
One of my favorite aspects of TAS is how philosophical conversations are woven throughout the stories.
One is what it means to be a man. Another (and not mutually exclusive) is the concept of entropy. The dictionary definition of entropy is very science-y and something about energy exchange, but for our (and Byrne’s) purposes, it is simply that nothing can last forever unchanged.
Everything, good or bad, will by necessity unravel, falter, fragment, and come to an end. And, presumably, be remade. The entire universe, theoretically, but lots of little energy cycles along the way.
Things that end in TAS:
- Property ownership
- Capitalism
- Money
- Borders
- Space exploration
- Authoritarianism
- Poverty
- Preventable death
- The gender binary
- Monogamy
- Carnivorism
- The ‘nuclear’ family structure
All these concepts ending by the 31st century in TAS represent the solving of many of our 21st century problems. Energy must be continually exchanged for something else until it all dissolves into nothing. At least nothing as we currently comprehend it.
Is the inevitability of entropy at odds with the force of life itself? Is that duality part of the equation? Is duality the point of it ALL?
Day and night. The Hero Twins. Past and present. Izul and Ajul. Present and future. Xander and Javier. Love and hate. Niloux and Tanaaj. Life and death.
What IS The Actual Star?
Reading The Actual Star destroyed me and remade me (both times I read it). That is the stuff of hope. Facing inevitabilities, destruction, and, nevertheless, opening your eyes the next day.
In the novel, the ‘actual star’ is a point of light piercing the darkness. Perhaps the planet Venus, which, depending on your cultural heritage and where you are on the planet, is called the “morning star” or “the evening star.” Venus is also called “Earth’s twin.”
Niloux’s message is one that, in part, asks whether it is time for humans to leave everything behind, and leave Earth altogether. The ultimate La Viajera move, maybe. This supposes an acceptance that Xibalba is not a real place anyone can pass into, evidenced by the millions of people who never tripped over their cortada.
In the end, we don’t know what happens with that question.
But the energies exchange. Things end. Things begin. Over and over. Maybe we are always who we are throughout everything changing around us, one foot in navigating the tense and messy present, and one foot in imagining a better future.
And that is an act of rebellion.
Check out The Actual Star from your public library, buy it from your local independent bookseller, or order it online from bookshop.org.
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