Culture Corner: Telluria

During one of my many traipses through Wikipedia, I came across the biography of Russian science fiction author Vladimir Sorokin. His work interested me, so I decided to read Telluria, a collection of short stories written in 2013 and translated by Max Lawton into English in 2022. Telluria sketches out a near-future world where humans have differentiated into various subspecies and political conflict has caused the nations of Eurasia to fracture into something reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire. As the story's title might suggest, the central plot device is the metal tellurium: when a tellurium nail is hammered through a person's cranium and into his brain, it will result either in a euphoric, transcendental experience, or instant death. Administering such a powerful substance has become a fully fledged craft, practiced by 'carpenters' who travel across the war-torn continent performing high-tech trepanations.

The story doesn't have an overarching plot, or at least no obvious one; instead, each chapter reveals a different facet of near-future Eurasia, leaving the reader as a kind of historian piecing together the nature of Sorokin's fictional civilization. The writing style varies based on perspective: some chapters are conventional, while others are more avant-garde. For example, one of the last chapters is told from the perspective of a centaur who thinks in a quasi-middle English dialect. It would be interesting to see how certain chapters were written in the original Russian.

The narrative of Telluria spans nations and classes, including crusaders of Languedoc, steppe nomads, traveling carpenters, German royalty, human-animal hybrids, Spanish youths, Moscovian tellurium junkies, etc. Although the style isn't exactly realist, it did remind me of Chekhov's writing. Perhaps it's because both authors tend to focus on the rougher elements of life to depict the nature of civilizations rather than specific people or archetypes.

In the anglosphere, Telluria remains little known, perhaps because the English translation was published during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Were circumstances more favorable, I believe Telluria could have received the same sort of acclaim that Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem did: like the latter novel, Telluria presents fresh, exciting ideas to an anglophone audience. The contemporary English SF works I've read, including a number of Nebula award recipients, tend to focus on transgressive ideas regarding the self and suffer from a heavy-handed political bent. In contrast, Telluria concerns civilization itself, which has gone out of fashion in our part of the world, but used to be a central topic in the days of Asimov and Le Guin.

Almost every form of government exists in Sorokin's world, from Orthodox communism to reactionary monarchism, Christian and Islamic theocracy, and ultra-Stalinism. There's a sense that none of these ideologies matter, though, because all forms of politics ultimately revolve around tellurium: who gets to use it, how it's used, diplomacy with the state that produces it, are the central issues of every government. Also, the story is called Telluria as if the entire setting comprises a single place--'Telluria'--defined by its usage of tellurium.

Something I believe is implicit in the world of Telluria is that technology has advanced to a point beyond which further development is useless or unfeasible. The two most important technologies besides tellurium are genetic engineering and the 'smartypants', which is basically a super-smartphone. Genetic engineering resulted in the stratification of humanity, and certain animals like horses, into "littluns" (tiny, fairy-like people), "biguns" (giants), and normal-size people. There are also sentient animal-human hybrids, originally engineered as playthings for the ultra-wealthy, and even standalone instances of what Russians call the половой член. In spite of all these advancements, most people are the kind of peasants that Chekhov wrote about: poorly educated, superstitious, and impoverished. Taken all together, this reveals a pessimistic view of technology--it doesn't advance ad infinitum, and certainly doesn't uplift humanity.

Tellurium can be seen as the ultimate technology. What lies beyond it? Maybe it will bring an end to civilization, and humans will fully return to shamanic practices; or maybe its power to extend consciousness will bring civilization to a higher state outside of our physical reality.

To further complicate things, we should take into account the relationship of tellurium to Christianity. Nails driven into the flesh are a symbol of the crucifixion, and the fact that nail-drivers are called 'carpenters' mirrors how Jesus is called τέκτων (carpenter) in Mark 6:3 and various apocryphal sources. Christian symbolism can wind up unintentionally in works of western art since it's so deeply ingrained in our culture, but since Sorokin is described on Wikipedia as a devout Christian (and because it makes analysis more interesting) I'll assume the symbolism was intentional. So what does all this suggest about the world of Telluria?

The name of tellurium comes from tellūs, the Latin term for Earth, which in metaphysical contexts can refer to "earthliness", i.e. base animality. And indeed we see in Sorokin's novel that humans have begun a literal descent back into the animal form. The transcendence that tellurium offers has destroyed the order of our contemporary civilization, and in spite of its nature as an elaborate, high-tech innovation, it only accelerates the triumph of entropy. Tellurium is a solvent rather than a solution.

The final story in Telluria is the most unusual, because it has nothing to do with tellurium: it's about a carpenter (the kind that works with wood) building himself a log cabin. This last vignette isn't exactly primitivist, because the carpenter still uses modern technology (self-generating material) but it seems a deliberate counterpoint to the 49 previous chapters about "carpenters" with their tellurium nails. Among the many factions, stories, and people swirling around the landscape of Telluria, there are those who do not seek to escape (neither ascending nor descending) from their humanity.

One of the silent influences upon modern thought is the idea of inexorable progress. Adherents to Whig history believe in political progress; Marxists and the like in economic progress; and many people now have faith in technological progress. It does appear as if technology has a mind of its own or a predetermined course, developing irreversibly, each new discovery reiterating the myth of Pandora's box. I interpret Telluria as an investigation of this latter kind of progress. Tellurium is the endpoint of technology and represents a transformation of human civilization: by destroying all that remains of advanced society and driving many of its human elements back into the earth, there's a sense in which it redeems humanity of technology. The survivors, like the man in the final chapter, will have lived through the chronological megastructure spanning obsidian arrowheads, steam engines, and psychotropic nails. Like Pandora's box, the transformation that tellurium brings upon the world cannot be undone. But what comes afterwards?

That's just some armchair analysis, anyway. I struggle with this kind of thing because my reflex is to treat literary devices as mathematical objects, constructing thematic proofs from small and perhaps irrelevant details. It's bad form and I'm surprised I got through college without fixing it; I struggle to see the bigger picture.

You can take or leave the analysis, but I hope I've convinced you that Telluria is a thought-provoking novel that deserves to be read and discussed more. It's at the forefront of science fiction right now, and I hope it inspires more great literature in the coming years.