The Hair-Carpet Weavers, which one could call either a mosaic novel or a collection of closely-linked short stories, was originally published in German in 1995 as Die Haarteppichknüpfer, and then by Tor in 2005 as The Carpet Makers. This Penguin Classics edition presents the same Doryl Jensen translation, but drops the Orson Scott Card introduction and restores the hair (and thus some strangeness) to the title; perhaps UK readers are thought to be less squeamish. It is part of a very welcome new range of science fiction Penguin Classics, on which Adam Roberts consulted in the early planning stages. It also includes work by Angélica Gorodischer, the Strugatskys, Stanislaw Lem and Robert Sheckley, with books by Kobo Abe and more to come in 2021.
The book begins with an elderly man, Ostvan, who has spent his adult life weaving an intricate rug from the hair of his wives and daughters. He barely leaves the house now. His wives were selected in part for their hair colour, to provide a variety of threads for the rug. On a good day Ostvan might complete a piece as big as a fingernail. When the rug is complete, he will sell it, to be taken offworld to the the palace of the Emperor, and then that money will support his son while the boy works on his own rug. This system would collapse if a weaver had more than one son, and so additional male babies are put to death. One of Ostvan’s wives is currently pregnant. The son he already has doesn’t want to be a weaver…
This first episode appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2001, and is typical of what makes the book so good: an excellent short story in its own right, but also a fingernail-sized piece of the overall mystery. When you think back to it, knowing all that you know by the end of the book, it becomes even better.
From there the book unfolds very deliberately, moving from one key moment in someone’s life to another, like a dot-to-dot puzzle, to thoroughly satisfying, revelatory effect as the picture starts to emerge. Subsequent stories show us what happens to the rugs after they are sold, how they are transported, what happens to weavers who lose their rugs in a fire, and so on. There is a gap of years between some stories, none at all between others, and some take us back to see previous events from a different point of view.
And just at the point where it starts to feel unbearably grim, because this can be a profoundly miserable world, the book shows us a glimpse of the wider tapestry, by way of two visiting space travellers.
Although I liked the book very much, the huge timescale of its backstory creates some credibility problems: I was not at all convinced that such artificial social structures could have been self-sustaining on so many worlds for such a long time. Would fathers really go on killing their second sons for 80,000 years, for the sake of tradition and money? We see how it devastates families; people would surely have revolted against such cruelty long before the space travellers arrived.
A similar issue applies to the physical structures some characters encounter, such as the imperial archives, where they see signs and artefacts that are over 100,000 years old. This seems to be a universe where entropy and decay barely exist, nor does evolution, physical or social: the empire stood for 250,000 years and yet its people seem indistinguishable from those of our own time. This may ruin the book for some readers; for me it was a forgivable conceit.
Very few episodes are from a woman’s point of view, a shame given that so much of it takes place on a profoundly sexist world, where a single woman who leaves her father’s trade caravan has no option but to become a junior wife in the first household she visits. At the opposite end of the book, the final chapter focuses on a woman, Lamita, but has her fretting about romantic interests and musing on her “long, blond hair and incredibly long legs” just as some of the book’s biggest surprises are being revealed.
An unfortunate misstep for a book that up until that point had been so sure-footed. The ISFDB lists a follow-up from 2001, Quest, which so far remains untranslated into English. I hope that changes, because despite those flaws I thought the book was very good, and I’d love to see what else the author could do with this concept and these techniques. Stephen Theaker ****
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