The Practice, the Horizon,and the Chain
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes—literally—when he is yanked “upstairs” and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as “the professor,” a weary idealist and descendent of the Chained who has spent her career striving for validation from her more senior colleagues, only to fall short at every turn.
Together, the boy and the woman will embark on a transformative journey to grasp the design of the chains that fetter them both—and are the key to breaking free.
A New York Times Notable Book
Washington Post, Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2024
Esquire, Best Science Fiction Books of 2024
Slate, The Ten Best Books of 2024
“Breaks your heart from the very start, and then proceeds to slowly shatter all your delusions about the possibility of reforming oppressive institutions. Ursula Le Guin is the only possible point of comparison for the rich humanity and boundless imagination on display in The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, but Sofia Samatar has no peer.”
— Sam J. Miller, author of Blackfish City
“Fierce and unique, Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is an offworld allegory that reflects our imperfect world through a perfect speculative lens.”
— Tananarive Due, author of The Living Blood
“It is a beautifully crafted narrative, grappling with class as so little SF does—even when it seems so relevant. Likewise, she has infused the cold clarity of space with the necessary breath of spirituality as a component of human experience. This is not only a story of ideas, but one of humanity, distilled into some of its purest, yet most complex forms, revealed with dazzling and efficient grace.”
— Roseanna Pendlebury, Ancillary Review of Books
“Samatar unfurls worldbuilding details with masterful subtlety, making each shocking reveal all the more potent. Through what amounts to a meditative far-future allegory, Samatar highlights the power of collective action in the face of oppression. This packs a punch.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Full of spirit and heart, razor critique and compassionate insight, riveting mystery and compelling drama. Sofia Samatar shakes up what we accept as normal, inevitable, and fixed. She is a poetic seer, a prophet of human possibility. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain challenges us to envision the world we want and bring it forth!”
— Andrea Hairston, author of Redwood and Wildfire
“The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain brilliantly explores how the mechanisms of shared oppression can furnish shared liberation—because a chain can bind, but it can also connect people.”
— Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post
“This book has sharp, beautiful teeth—some of us will find catharsis in the bite, and some of us may come out bloody and ashamed, but The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain demands honesty, most of all with ourselves. No matter who you are, you'll find a lesson here—not a cautionary tale about how we ‘should’ or ‘should not’ live, but the hopeful possibility of how we could live. One day. Maybe.”
— C. L. Clark, author of The Unbroken
“Samatar has far more on her mind than generation starships, and the novella has as much in common with a kind of narrative much rarer in SFF: the academic novel. In addition to presenting a brutally dehumanizing social structure, Samatar's characteristically gorgeous prose also carries the undertone of someone who has sat through plenty of frustrating committee meetings . . . In fact, the key words in her tripartite title can all be read as metaphors of the promises and challenges facing educators.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
“You can read it in one sitting; you will think about it forever.”
— Dan Kois, Slate, The 10 Best Books of 2024
“I am in love with Sofia Samatar’s lyricism and the haunting beauty of her imagination. Her stories linger, like the memory of a sumptuous feast.”
— N. K. Jemisin
“As both an unabashed fan of Samatar’s writing and a spiteful ex-academic, I am trash for this . . . The Practice is a small but perfectly formed addition to Samatar’s oeuvre, a thesis statement leading into her wider body of work.”
— Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times
“[A] breathtaking novella that resonates like a new myth made of familiar materials . . . This story has its roots in academia, but it’s about any organization built to sustain itself at the expense of those who toil within it. Samatar’s gorgeous prose rings clear as a bell.”
— Molly Templeton, Esquire
“In The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar has given us a wonderful bit of science fiction that rewards close reading—lyric and mythic, but also densely realized. Compassionate, engaging, and slyly funny, the novella is also a resounding parable on oppression, the thin fiction of the middle class, and the ties that do—or at least could—unite us.”
— Jake Casella Brookins, Chicago Review of Books
“Barbed, but with precision and vision, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is a sci-fi manifesto of admirable vigor.”
— Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle
“Deceptively easy to read, simple and pure as radiation’s shortest waves, Samatar’s translucent prose shows her audience our very bones as she brings us to bathe in the source of her story’s light. Out of the future’s neglected shadows she summons the secrets which are so often used to humble and oppress us. Then she reveals to us something better than those secrets, for in The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Samatar’s instantly appealing characters—students, prisoners, guards, and professors—spin shining webs of connection out of the breath we share and the endlessness with which all are surrounded. These are webs of truth and love.”
— Nisi Shawl, author of Everfair
“The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain does what only Samatar can do: cut to the bone, but with a loving hand. It’s a hopeful, humane, and bruisingly perceptive fable about the chains we build, and what it takes to break them.”
— Alix E. Harrow, author of The Once and Future Witches
“An extraordinarily moving tale of power, connection, and community, and a thought experiment perfectly designed to meet our times. Here Samatar’s precise moral clarity is both a beacon and a provocation, inviting you into an emotional and philosophical encounter you won’t soon forget.”
— Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
“The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain thus asks if a world of non-domination is possible—in both material and intellectual domains—and what it might look like. Its answer does not involve revolutions or an overthrowing of the existing order (for better or for worse), but in the spaces that the professor and the boy create . . . we have a glimpse of what anarchist thinkers call prefiguration: building the new within the shell of the old. Perhaps—because Samatar’s work defies all other labels—we could think of it as a prefigurative work of science fiction.”
— Gautam Bhatia, Interzone