Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini is a weird science fiction novel, really pushing hard into the weirdness. This is his second published novel in the Fractalverse, his adult science fiction universe, following his epic standalone space-opera, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, which was reviewed upon release four years ago on this blog.
This review won’t be as in-depth because it’s been many months since I’ve read Fractal Noise. However, the book really left an impression on me, and I’ve been meaning to share my thoughts about it in at least a cursory blog post.
Fractal Noise is a better, tighter, and more streamlined novel than To Sleep. To Sleep was the first foray into the Fractalverse, and Paolini made sure to make it worth the universe’s debut. It is chock-full of world-building, truly ripening the epic space-opera format. It also carries a strong philosophical message of optimism and weirdness that Paolini has worked to define his Fractalverse, both on the page and in public, through his online marketing and discussions of optimistic space exploration and the scientific and anthropological zeal behind it.
Fractal Noise is not an epic. While To Sleep clocks in at a whopping 880 pages, Fractal Noise is just 250. Tonally, it is quite the contrast from To Sleep, which is heavily imbued with a Golden Age/Star Trek-styled optimism for the future—specifically, a future of humanity among the stars.
Fractal Noise takes this universe to a different facet. The main character, burdened by the loss of his fiancée, is part of a xenobiology expedition crew. Alex, a talented xenobiologist, is isolated on the crew’s ship, utilizing whatever chemically-induced products he can find to manipulate his depressed nervous system, physiology, and mind into feeling more alert, stable, and able to sleep.
From the get-go, the novel turns into a first contact story, but of a wholly different kind than To Sleep. The first contact in To Sleep spurs a tragic loss akin to one at the start of a hero/heroine’s journey and bursts into a rollicking space opera akin to Asimov, Niven, and the James S.A. Corey folks behind The Expanse. However, Fractal Noise is a first contact story more in the vein of the zany Stanislaw Lem and his psychologically morbid and tormented classic novel Solaris.
In fact, Fractal Noise seems to mine a lot of thematic, tonal, and aesthetic influence from Solaris. Both share a protagonist who is a younger man still reeling from the loss of a female lover. Both books are first contact stories. Both first contact experiences engage the protagonists’ psychological states of depressed stasis and provoke the roots of their depressions. Both use the space-exploration premise and aesthetic of far-future interplanetary space exploration to induce a deep interrogation of the state of the human mind. It’s like an Arthur C. Clarke story, but instead of falling into a scientific anomaly that opens up a spiritual mystery, the mystery is a Lovecraftian, existentially horrifying nature of the universe and man within it.
While To Sleep was a celebration of science and scientific speculation, Fractal Noise depicts a crew of highly educated individuals who are burnt out from their objective and their Enlightenment worldview of productivity and scientific advancement.
Alex is introduced to us as a skilled biologist who is finding himself at a loss to make sense of his feeling stuck in life, with his exclusively STEM-oriented education. The loss of his fiancée seems to serve as a metaphor for the loss of his relationship with humanism and the greater aspects of life beyond the objective and scientific.
This allows the first contact to become a way for Alex to find an alien form of life at a time when he’s struggling to find life within himself—his career, lifestyle, and routine. Addled by melatonin to sleep and a commonly used drug called AcuWake to stay alert on low sleep, he is struck by an opportunity that he knows his fiancée would have been smitten with and loved to jump on.
The novel feels in a lot of ways like a pandemic novel. By that, I mean it’s a creative work that struck in me many of the feelings of malaise and digital overindulgence experienced during the COVID pandemic. This blog was created at the start of the pandemic, and it feels, in a way, like coming full circle to be publishing a review of the first book I would describe that way.
When we meet Alex, he’s barely getting through his work and struggling to find motivation to stick to a routine. He spends time messing around with holograms and holographic feeds to procrastinate. When he’s trekking on the planet emitting the strange pulse alongside his crew, his HUD (Heads-Up Display) in his EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) suit is basically a smartphone or laptop with access to numerous apps, files, and entertainment media, alongside the features he needs for his work.
The novel jumps between two timelines: one of him and his crew discovering the alien pulse and engaging in the first contact mission, and the second of Alex’s relationship with his fiancée leading up to the tragic end. The second storyline is given extra weight when it’s revealed that Alex carries with him a digitally replicated file of all of her memories. During the course of the story, he is tempted to access that file and watch her life experiences, especially the ones with him, to relive what he has lost.
Fractal Noise tells a story of how an individual relates to life when experiences, autonomy, pleasure, and interconnectivity are ubiquitous thanks to technology. It portrays the mundane and meaningless sludge of existence that we’ve all felt when mindlessly scrolling and consuming digital content. It captures an isolated autonomy and weakened spiritual agency in the face of drugs and technology that give us virtual control over the contents of the past, the preservation of the present, and our productivity. When you take drugs to sleep, drugs to wake up, and can superficially preserve the past and superficially engage yourself digitally, you create a cocoon or prison for the mind.
In this way, the typical first contact premise is given its own unique spin through the cyberpunk-infused themes that Paolini injects into the writing. Finding alien life becomes about finding your own life. Finding your own humanity amidst the search for alien consciousness becomes about waking up from your own artificially induced drudgery.
Fractal Noise‘s crisp and lean world-building plays into this, depicting a spaceship, technologies, and character backgrounds that create a vivid interplay of a sterilized hub for scientific advancement. It’s the opposite of To Sleep in many ways. But the balance between world-building and plot feels much more refined and streamlined than it did in To Sleep. Paolini’s science fiction writing is more vividly literary than the stories of Arthur C. Clarke, but it certainly shares the smoothly woven science fiction and scientific world-building of Clarke’s work. Paolini has upped his game for this swing at the science fiction bat.
This dark, dour book is one that I highly recommend, and I promise that it still holds an optimism of the spirit. It’s often the case that science fiction stories portraying how technology has perverted human agency and experience have the most optimistic takes on human spiritual potential. Fractal Noise is definitely not the most optimistic, but there’s still enough optimism to go around.
G.R. Nanda 