The Domes of Calrathia
An astronomer in exile at the frozen and faithless end of time
Banished for the murder of his master, a lone Astronomer has set out to deliver a written history of his School to the ancient city of Calrathia, home of all knowledge. None have attempted to cross the frozen wastes in three centuries. And in the bitter cold, worse things than scavengers haunt the desolate trek.
It isn’t often that a book’s description grabs my attention and makes me want to drop whatever else I’m reading to pick it up. The blurb for Isaac Young’s sophomore science-fantasy The Domes of Calrathia did just that, and sure enough I couldn’t put it down. The novel is short, under 200 pages, and I finished it quickly; just last night, in fact.
I’ve been aware of Young for a while, mostly via his presence on Twitter where he goes back and forth between cultural and political commentary and shamelessly shilling his books. The latter is no knock on him, it’s just what writers have to do in a publishing environment in which the large publishing houses expect you to do your own marketing ... assuming they’re even willing to sign you, which if you’re a young white male Christian writer like Isaac, they aren’t. Indeed, it was precisely this that tipped me over into picking up The Domes of Calrathia (along with his first novel The Matrioshka Divide, which I haven’t read yet). During the furor that followed Jacob Savage’s viral essay The Lost Generation, Young offered his own absolutely scathing thoughts on the matter, which I encourage you to click through and read in full:
Of course, the world of indie publishing is full of wannabe writers who aren’t actually any good. The industry is gatekept by gay race commissars who insist that every work of imaginative fiction be a thinly veiled allegory for the gay immigrant experience, a girl-boss power fantasy, or straight-up werewolf porn romantasy, but it doesn’t follow from this that every single writer exiled to the chilly wastes of self-publishing is an overlooked Robert A. Heilein or Jack Vance. Now as ever, most aspiring novelists are talentless hacks, and from the reader’s perspective the world of self-publishing is largely a dismal one. The works on offer at Amazon overwhelmingly consist of what editors refer to as the slush pile: the swamp of unsolicited manuscripts which are as a rule quite terrible. Part of an editor’s job used to be to sift through the slush pile, identify the small number of gems, and polish them up for presentation to the public, who for their part could be assured that almost everything they’d be shown would be pretty good, and that much of it would be excellent. That system worked well, until it became corrupted by a new generation of editors who conceived of their jobs as selecting writers based on identifiable demographic characteristics and ensuring that their navel-gazing diversity sermons were rendered into unobjectionable mush by sensitivity readers. As a result of this cultural collapse readers have to wade through the slush pile themselves, guided by nothing much more than Amazon reviews (and these days, hoping that neither reviews nor the book itself were written by ChatGPT, which has made the situation far worse). Speaking of Amazon ratings, by the way, The Domes of Calrathia has racked up an impressive 4.8 stars across 49 reviews.
For writers, it’s a tough nut to crack. You need readers to write reviews to get readers, and getting readers when you don’t have any means shouting until you’re hoarse in order to try and rise above the cacophony of other writers trying to shill their novels to an audience which is largely inured to yet another plea to Buy My Book. A writer telling you that his book is very good and worth reading carries as much weight in people’s minds as a mother insisting that her son is very smart and handsome.
This is why third-party reviews are so important to this literary ecosystem. They’re essential for social proof. Unfortunately for an online political dissident network which is largely a literary and intellectual community, review culture in our sphere is a rather haphazard affair; we really need something like a New Right Review of Books to act as a tastemaker and help promote the best of the burgeoning literary output that we are beginning to produce. There’s an empty niche there for someone with time on their hands, good literary taste, and a desire to perform a valuable service to the community. But I digress.
The point of the preceding is largely this: it is simply criminal that Isaac Young toils in obscurity. If there were any justice in the world, Young would have a book deal with a major publisher, the support of a professional editor, and a marketing team that would ensure copies of his work were available in every brick and mortar book store in the country.
The Domes of Calrathia opens in media res, grabbing you right from the first words with a deft world-building sketch and an introduction to the protagonist, his predicament, and the immediate problem of a wolf snapping at his throat:
Of the men who inhabit the strange lands south of the Great Ice Plain, I was told there are three varieties: the maddened cannibals whose heads are cut in the shape of their hallowed obelisk, the wandering ghost-men who eat nothing and yet still live, and the men of Calrathia, sat huddled in their great domes that are said to be wide enough to encompass cities.
I, the Astronomer Sirius, having been so recently exiled from my home, belonged to none. Although, it then presently seemed I would die long before encountering any of them.
The wolf’s jaws splayed open in front of me, snapping with hungry impatience. Saliva and blood and I believe tattered flesh from my leg dribbled out of its sharp teeth. I had my hand around its neck, keeping its snout from sinking into my flesh. Its front paw clawed at my green leather jacket. The other leg was thankfully still, being a stump from some old forgotten injury.
That’s excellent writing: tight, fast, exactly as descriptive as it needs to be, offering up only those details that the story requires, performing precisely the functions that it needs to exactly where they need to be performed. Young is an accomplished prose stylist, an absolute joy to read.
The Astronomer Sirius inhabits a dying world at the end of time. The frozen environment is sprinkled with the remnants of high technology: vast ruined cities; rusted starships long since grounded from their voyages through the ‘empty sea’; broken old fortresses; titanic statues to gods and heroes long forgotten. The world’s inhabitants are not precisely savages: much has been forgotten, but while decadence and decay have pulled them far down from the dizzying heights they once knew, they know that the world they live in was created by science and technology, not by magic. For all that, however, the world often feels quite magical.
Sirius’ order of Astronomers are not simple academic scientists. Although their discipline involves to a large degree mastery of light in order to draw knowledge from the universe, they also serve as explorers and missionaries for the Potentate and His Son, the Sovran. They are men of science, men of action, and men of faith: a martial, intellectual, technical, and spiritual elite. Sirius is an exemplar of his order. As the story unfolds, he proves himself to be competent, dangerous, and knowledgeable, as well as honourable, prudent, and faithful: a profoundly virtuous man in every sense of the word.
Sirius’ virtue sets him apart as an anachronism in this dying world, a man out of time at the end of time. Sirius takes his vows seriously, when those around him – very much including the other members of the School who trained him – do not. The central purpose of the Astronomers is to gather knowledge of the universe, but in this distant future the universe has been fully explored; everything that can be learned, has been; there is nothing more for them to do, and they are despised by the other Schools as a useless appendage. They therefore treat their oaths as formalities which they do not even pretend to keep, attend to their duties as to empty rituals whose purpose has long since passed, and lose themselves in the luxuries made available by their position at the warm centre of an expiring world. It is of course Sirius’ refusal to accommodate this corruption that first gets him into trouble.
Thematically, this is a book about keeping faith when all hope for reward is gone. Sirius has been charged with delivering the history of his School to a distant city which was ordained in the dimly remembered past as the final repository for the world’s knowledge. This journey was easy when the world was young and warm, and the arts of men made travel fast and secure, but in Sirius’ time it is quite explicitly a death sentence. No one, including himself, expects him to survive the journey and complete the quest. He is the first to attempt the journey in centuries, and he will certainly be the last. Despite this, no one cares: not the corrupted School that sent him, and not any of the people he encounters along the way.
Along the way Sirius is tempted multiple times with offers to abandon his mission. If he does, no one will know. There will be no punishment. Sirius is tempted in other ways: to abandon his vow of celibacy, to lie not only for his own benefit but for the benefit of others, to break his word to faithless men who would certainly betray him were the tables turned, to take easy shortcuts, to withhold his assistance, to abandon the innocent to their fate when intervening means almost certain death for no gain. Against all reason, and at great physical and emotional cost, he resists all of these temptations, staying true to his oaths for no other reason than that he made them, striving to be a good man for no other reward than that.
There are very clear similarities between The Domes of Calrathia and Gene Wolfe’s classic Book of the New Sun. I’m quite certain that Young composed this tale of a journey through a dying world by an adept of an ancient order as an homage, and there are a few moments where it runs the risk of pastiche, as for instance the chapter in which Sirius comes across a cyclopean statue on the Great Ice Plain, a scene reminiscent of Severian’s exploration of the gargantuan statue of the mad tyrant-god Typhon carved out of a mountain; or his brief encounter with the mysterious deity of the deep ocean, whose sympathies towards mankind are questionable, and whose inscrutable aims are his own. There’s no question that the Book of the New Sun is the superior work in terms of detail and depth of worldbuilding, and I hope Young will not take offence at my saying so: after all, Young is a new writer at the beginning of his career, while Wolfe composed the BotNS as a mature novelist with many long years of writing under his belt (to say nothing of having the support of an editor and a publishing house).
All that said, The Domes of Calrathia is very much its own work. The plot structure is far from identical: Severian’s wanderings across the dying Earth were rather aimless, whereas Sirius has a clear direction and purpose to his travels; Severian was a torturer, trained in excruciation, to whom the world is largely a mystery, while Sirius is an explorer and a scientist by trade, who understands (or thinks he understands) his world quite well; Severian grew up in a fortress whose towers were built from decommissioned rockets, while Sirius, we eventually discover from a few details that Young artfully lets slip, hails from an ancient orbital ring, whose mysteries are hinted at in the most intriguing fashion.
Moreover, The Domes of Calrathia is obviously incomplete. It’s a short book, and before I was even half-way through I found myself wondering how Young would possibly get his hero to his goal without rushing. As it turns out, he does not: the book ends on a cliffhanger, at the point at which the most dangerous part of Sirius’ journey is about to begin. While Young hasn’t explicitly said that this will be Book One of N, it certainly has that feel, and I hope he returns to it in the future (though for now he seems to be focused on his new project The Last Human, which has also managed to catch my attention; I’m eagerly awaiting publication of the paperback). There are a number of questions that Young sets up but leaves unresolved, for example the purpose of the glass balls that Sirius is given by a delphic glassmaker who has mastered an arcane technique of trapping the light from distant worlds in his glass spheres, the flaming sword which Young dangles in front of us throughout but which we never get to see in operation, or the alien creatures whose existence is hinted at from the very beginning but which are never shown. This was indeed my greatest frustration with The Domes of Calrathia: that it ended so soon, with so much still undone, when I would happily have kept reading it for several hundred more pages.
Given how short the book is, it’s a remarkable achievement that Young manages to pack so much variety into it. There are deftly written combat scenes; imprisonment; a courtroom case; a seduction; wilderness survival; private philosophical ruminations; encounters and conversations with strange and haunting characters; damnation and redemption; exploration; side quests; dreams and visions; recollections of the hero’s pre-exile life. Each chapter presents something new and fascinating, like an unexpected bauble being drawn from an enchanted sack that is larger on the inside than it appears on the outside, which he flashes before your eyes just long enough to excite your imagination before palming it again to draw out another treasure. The images I’ve illustrated this review with are all from Young’s Substack, which I assume he made himself with AI to help illustrate the novel; they give some idea, really just a very rough hint, of the richness of the story’s scenery, plot, and characters.
Young makes all of his work available online, for free. You can find every chapter of The Domes of Calrathia on his Substack (along with every chapter of The Last Human), but of course, you don’t want to read fiction on Substack. No one does. Substack is a terrible medium for fiction. You can’t get comfortable with a laptop, and phones are simply too distracting to permit the full immersion and absolute focus that fiction demands. You want to read the actual book, either the Kindle edition or, better yet, the paperback, both of which are available on Amazon. There’s also an audiobook available at Amazon, if you prefer. You can also find the audiobook serialized, for free, at Young’s YouTube channel. There is absolutely no requirement to pay Young for access to his writing: his writing is its own advertisement. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to support him.
But once you read him, I’m sure that you will.
While we’re on the subject of support, I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you for supporting me. It amazes and humbles me that so many of you not only think enough of my writing to take the time to read it, but to offer me the generosity of your patronage. Just like Isaac, everything (with the exception of a couple of short stories I’ve written) is out in front of the paywall, available for anyone to read for free, and if you count yourself among the supporters of Postcards From Barsoom, you’re one of the few and the proud who make that possible.
Thank you so much for the review! Words cannot express my gratitude! The Domes of Calrathia will get its sequel in 2026. It got chopped in half due to my intense desire to get something physically published last year. I actually completely forgot the Substack pages were still up. The manuscript went through several major revisions. The one I know is current is available on Royal Road, link below. Though it might be interesting to keep it up for comparison, as there are different interpretations, plot elements, etc.
I am so glad that you enjoyed the story! It was something highly experimental freshly coming off BOTNS. That was my first book I ever wrote in the first person alongside implementing a huge number of literary devices. It was me iterating on how I told stories.
The first chapter of the sequel is already up on the link, and I intend to begin work once Dead Men Running is published at the end of January.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/77974/the-domes-of-calrathia
Unless I'm mistaken, I've seen you mention one of my favorite contemporary writers, John Michael Greer, at least once before here. Well, just this past week, he posted this:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-rowling-effect/
It's quite an optimistic take on the prospects for decent independent writers, sci-fi in particular. I think you'd enjoy it. (A key point is that major publishers barely matter any longer, due to multiple self-inflicted wounds. There's a thriving ecosystem of smaller publishers.)