By Stephen Joyce
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that Greek tragedy arose from the clash between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, “the art of the shaper…and the non-plastic art of music,” or, put another way, “the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness.” Seb Doubinsky’s City-States Cycle dramatizes this same clash in a futuristic dreamscape where a fragile order simultaneously hopes and fears for the Dionysian chaos offered by a mysterious drug called synth. This drug provides its users not with narcotic relief but with freedom, “not as in a symbolic or recreational freedom, but as a hardcore real thing.” Each novel in the City-States Cycle stands on its own, but what unifies them is the persistent quest for freedom of thought, feeling, and expression that the various city-states repress in their own ways.
The City-States Cycle is set in an unstable future in which nation-states have collapsed and power is divided among an unstable network of competing cities. There are hints of various disasters, but the setting is not post-apocalyptic; like his illustrious predecessor Philip K. Dick, Doubinsky is alert to the atavistic potential of history, the possibility that “progress” will actually lead to regression. Much like the ancient Greek world in The Iliad or The Odyssey, the different city-states are never fully mapped and their histories never explained in full. Newcomers to the Cycle do not have to worry about learning an elaborate backstory or joining a serial narrative midway through. Each city-state is more like a concept or mythical archetype that allows Doubinsky to explore different ideas about order and freedom.
The Sum of All Things is mostly set in New Samarqand, a city-state poised between the Western Alliance and the Chinese Confederation and trying to chart its own course. As well as external threats, New Samarqand is also riven by internal divisions between powerful conservative forces and a rising liberal generation, all clustering around a looming monarchical succession and an important new exhibition at the National Museum.
A wide cast of characters converge on New Samarqand in short, vivid chapters. Thomas is a political refugee now running a bookstore. Hokki is a museum curator from Viborg City invited to organise an important new exhibition but increasingly out of place in a society he doesn’t understand. Kassandra is a celebrated avant-garde poet charged with writing a national epic to celebrate New Samarqand, a task she finds both dull and burdensome. Naila is her personal assistant and lover, and also a spy for the government. Vita claims to be an alien engaged in a cosmic struggle against the Subliminal Empire, with Earth as just another unwitting battleground. Their stories ricochet off each other, then gradually converge as we learn about the exhibition’s role in New Samarqand’s internal politics and the explosive information that threatens to trigger a civil war. Yet the politicking is less important than the exploration of the relationship between individualism, order, and liberty.
Early in the novel, we are introduced to the secretive Egregorian Society, which is:
dedicated to fight intolerance in all its cultural forms. An égrégore was the spiritual and carnal manifestation of the common desire of a community, becoming an extremely powerful negative entity. It was, in short, a political monster. For them, Nazism was an égrégore, announced by the cultural wave of antisemitism that had preceded it. The same was true for Stalinism and any totalitarian movement that suddenly seized power through a revolution, be it political or religious.
The passage is typical of Doubinsky’s style, mixing a playful blend of alternate history and fantasy with serious ideas. Yet Doubinsky’s concept is not simply a plucky band of rebels fighting a totalitarian empire. The Society itself is a community bound by a common desire—the desire to defend individual freedom. To what extent must those involved subordinate their individual desires to this common goal?
In Nietzsche’s formulation, “the state-forming Apollo is also the genius of the principium individuationis, and that the state and domestic sentiment cannot live without an assertion of individual personality.” Rather than juxtaposing the individual to the State, he views the Apollonian spirit as crucial to both, because it creates recognizable, articulated forms. The Dionysian spirit, in contrast, sublimates the individual into an orgiastic universality. Throughout the City-States Cycle, Doubinsky grapples with this tension. Synth is the Dionysian spirit in drug form, but Doubinsky is hesitant to endorse any form of universality, which would then threaten to become an égrégore. In its place, he imagines a Dionysian multiplicity. Users of synth can experience “a universe that was simultaneous with the reality surrounding you.” Rather than dissolving into a formless universality, synth offers everyone to chance to live in multiple realities simultaneously and without contradiction.
The novel’s form reflects this philosophy. Each character is not only fully realized but often has their own unique narrative style. Naila’s chapters are a conflicted, poetic interior monologue about her multiple roles, which Kassandra is oblivious to: “Every night, I am saving your life and you just snore, smelling slightly of tobacco.” Hokki’s chapters are comedic in his general befuddlement. Vita’s chapters are the most conspiratorial. One simply reads:
Rule number one:
Never trust anyone.
Rule number two:
There is no rule number two.
These narratives and realities overlap but are not forced to coincide in a rigorous order. Is Vita’s story about the Subliminal Empire true or is she an unhinged conspiracy theorist? If you want definite answers to such questions, then you’re looking in the wrong place. Multiplicity is essential to freedom. It’s not clear how much the other characters believe her, but they learn to accept that we can live in multiple realities. They don’t have to coincide at every point in order for a community of individuals to exist.
Doubinsky’s reformulation of the Apollonian-Dionysian conflict is not just true of the characters in this novel but the City-States Cycle as a whole. Like Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, they don’t have to be read in a linear order and they don’t have to coincide perfectly at every point. They are individual works linked into a community that was never intended to be a unified whole but is comfortable with its own multiplicity. The Cycle as a whole is synth: a network of diverse universes that exist simultaneously with reality. In its profound treatment of form and theme, The Sum of All Things is not just a great novel in its own right but a worthy culmination of Doubinsky’s City-States Cycle.