Freshly exploring utopian and dystopian themes, Salt contrasts an anarchist community and its statist neighbor on a harsh desert planet.
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Adam Roberts’ science fiction novel illuminates how customs, attitudes and ideologies on both sides spark mutual misunderstandings and accelerating conflicts.
A finalist for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction, Robert’s cautionary tale invites us to question our deepest assumptions about freedom.
ALTERNATING PERSPECTIVES
Set on Salt, a planet covered in sodium chloride and with far less water than its human colonists expected, the story evokes Dune in its vivid depiction of an arid and partly toxic planet whose forbidding environment has constrained human flourishing.
After arriving on the distant planet after a long voyage from Earth, each of the two human colonies has evolved radically different ideas about freedom, property, relationships, sex and parenting.
Told from the alternating perspectives of the statist Senaarians and anarchist Alsists, Roberts builds a sobering drama about how deep-rooted beliefs, amplified by the usual human flaws and passions, can slide tragically towards war.
Through the observations and thoughts of each society’s male leader, whose voices narrate alternate chapters, the unfolding progression of cultural, social, political, psychological and linguistic divides takes on the pathos of a veritable libertarian tragedy.
If only the Alsists and Senaarians could somehow bridge their vast gaps in communications and customs to begin to understand each other – or failing that, perhaps utopian ideal, to at least come to terms enough with their differences to avoid fighting.
Live and let live; that’s the libertarian philosophy in a nutshell. Sadly, as actual human history demonstrates, that’s easier said than done. Most people strive to do what’s good, at least as they see it. Yet, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And in Salt, as in so many countries and cultures in actual history, the leaders and their respective communities believe their way is natural, good and self-evidently best – and are willing to fight to defend it or force it on their enemies.
MUTUAL MISPERCEPTIONS
Petja, who gradually emerges as a leader in his leaderless society, perceives the Senaarians as living “by the hierarchy” – something anathema to the Alsists, so anarchistic in their communalist/communist norms that they have no laws or property.
Petja disdains Barlei, the Senaarian uniformed ruler/general, but also doesn’t really grasp much about a world so foreign to his anarchist attitudes. Barlei, he assumes, “had played their game, whatever their game was, and risen to the top of the hierarchy.”
Barlei, in turn, fails to understand the Alsists, even after Petja visits the Senaarians in a effort to achieve peace. After pondering whether he should have imprisoned Petja or “used him as a pawn to force the Alsists towards reason,” Barlei falsely concludes that in Alsist society, ‘“each individual cares for nobody but himself, and they would in no way be distressed by the loss of another.”
Later, when a female Senaarian emissary leads a mission to the Alsists, Petja is mystified by much of their behavior. “Visitors were sometimes puzzled, and even angered, by the lack of hierarchy or formalized relations,” Petja confides in his diary.
“They expected to be met; they were bothered by the fact that nobody demanded to see passports or threatened to throw them into gaol as illegal immigrants; they disliked the lack of police, the absence of restrictions, all those chains that reinforce in slaves their sense of themselves.”
With such mutual incomprehension, it’s no wonder the two societies end up in conflict.
THE DISPOSSESSED
Roberts’ vivid narrative makes clear that neither society is perfect. Far from it! Certainly, neither society fully respects the individual rights, self-ownership and non-aggression principles that form the foundation of modern libertarianism.
In some ways, the Senaarians mirror the United States at its most statist and hypocritical, employing libertarian rhetoric while practicing government paternalism, prohibitionism, authoritarian progressivism, patriotic nationalism or other variants of interventionist politics in practice.
Although Roberts seems more sympathetic to the Alsists, whose anarchism in some ways evoke some libertarian ideals, Salt doesn’t hide their flaws, either. These anarchists have blind spots, and perhaps most disturbing to modern libertarians, engage in the casual private use of force as an accepted norm, including the use of fisticuffs to resolve differences.
The socioeconomics of Alsist society also seems questionable if not completely unworkable. Everyone takes a turn doing every job, a utopian, radical egalitarian and neo-Marxist rejection of the division of labor (among other realities, such as the fact that people require training and skills to do many jobs competently and that some do their jobs much better than others).
More problematic, odd and arguably inhuman is the Alsist assumption that any property or ownership is anathema – including parental rights to raise their own children. The Alsists reject real intimacy or social bonds between any two people, apparently out of the conviction that such ties would be oppressive. Men and women casually have sex, but there are no lasting couples, and no real families, with men excluded from maternal child-raising. Is any of this an ideal that most people would want to live by in reality?
Overall, however, Roberts asks important questions that provoke thoughts about the possibilities and limits of social organization and the many meanings of freedom. And literarily, his admirable unwillingness to paint a more one-dimensional picture of utopia and/or dystopia helps make his 2000 novel a more compelling drama – partly because of its ambiguity.
If there’s another novel that Salt brings to mind, it’s Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), inducted in 1993 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, and significantly, subtitled “an ambiguous utopia.”
Both Le Guin and Roberts imagine utopian/dystopian societies, each very human and imperfect and in conflict. Like Le Guin’s classic, Salt is structured to balance its alternating perspectives even while its author seems to share the ideals more of one side.
Yet, Roberts puts his own stamp and spin on his vivid world-building, enough to make his vision both distinctive and provocative.
SELF-AWARENESS VS. RATIONALIZATIONS
While Roberts portray the Alsists more sympathetically, his critique of the statists goes farther.
Barlei reveals enough self-aggrandizing behavior and self-justifying rationalizations for his country’s aggression to make readers question his reliability as a narrator. As the Senaarian outlines his patriotic and religious convictions supporting his country’s regimentation and aggression, it becomes clear that he’s justifying and expanding his own power.
By contrast, Petja is more honest in questioning his own impulses, especially the uncomfortable instincts that arise on the battlefield. Even beyond his reluctant to kill people, beyond his disgust at having enjoyed killing, Petja unflinchingly uncovers the roots of his “nameless rage” at himself:
“For an instant, In the belly of the battle, I had wanted other people who were fighting with me to cease to be people, to become instead automata, to become mere extensions of me. I wanted them to do what I told them to do, whether they wished it or not. I wanted, perverse as its seems, to own them, to possess them, to have them,” he admits.
In the context of Alsist culture, those are shockingly honest admissions.
“..Afterwards,.. I dwelt on it… and grew revolted with myself. I decided I had the seed within me to become a rigidist, as the common talk styled me; and worse than that, I had the capacity to become a hierarch,” Petja admits.
While Petja grows in uncomfortable self-awareness, Barlei unrepentantly sticks to his increasingly transparent rationalizations for power, control and war. Here Roberts plausibly plumbs the psychology of a true believer in his statist creed.
Especially in Barlei’s rationalizations, Roberts appears to implicitly draw parallels to our own messy and tragic real-world history of empires and interventionism.
In particular, Salt offers metaphoric commentary on the wars, crusades and aggressive and imperialistic foreign policies that have shaped our own planet over many bloody centuries. Reading Barlei’s rhetoric, to me, brings to mind the realpolitik masked by Wilsonian talk of freedom and making the world “safe for democracy.”
FREEDOM VS. SLAVERY
One of the most poignant chapters focuses on the vast gulf between the views of freedom of the two cultures as Petja strives sincerely to communicate with Rhoda, a Seenarian diplomat blinded by misperceptions and panicky fears.
Recognizing the vast gap between them, Petja strives to explain to Rhoda how he sees her culture’s assumptions:
“Because you have a law, you naturally immediately think of breaking that law. You squash that desire deep in your heart, perhaps, because you think it wrong, but you feel it anyway. So then you have the law, and then you need police and army to prevent people breaking the law, and you need prisons and executions to punish those who do, and you need something greater than all this; you need the edifice of thought in which you wish every citizen to live, the prison in which thinking the opposite of the law is forbidden. And what we have chanced upon in Als, is that without the law in the first place you need none of this,” Petja says.
“It seems… that we have different purchases on freedom. From this bunk, the view is of Senaar as a nation of slavery.”
Rhoda’s reaction is indignant and passionate, while revealing her very different and collectivist understanding of freedom.
“But it is Als that is enslaved… to savagery. To your own primitive lusts and urges. To the ego and monstrousness inside each person,” she says.
“None of you comprehend the beauty, the liberty of service: of feeling something larger than yourself, of gladly worshipping God. Freedom for you is always freedom to, but there are other freedoms, and the freedom from the self is the greatest.”
THE MEANING OF FREEDOM
Ultimately, Salt offers perspective on how the idea of freedom and other core human constructs has varied and evolved throughout history – often amid conflicts and war.
At its best, Roberts’ novel brings to poignant life people struggling with very different worldviews and ultimately suffering greatly because of their mutual incomprehension and inability to live and let live in peace and freedom.
Now 25 years old, Salt made a splash as Roberts’ first novel, bringing wide attention and acclaim to the British sf/fantasy writer. Since then, Roberts has written 24 novels (including Purgatory Mount, nominated in 2022 for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel), won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) Award for Best Novel, and has been nominated three times for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the first time, for Salt).
Such recognition shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s read Salt, which arguably ranks among the more impressive debut sf novels in this century.
Special Note: Thanks to Tom Jackson for nominating Salt for the Prometheus Hall of Fame and for his thoughts and input helping to shape this review.
THE PROMETHEUS HALL OF FAME FINALISTS
Along with Adam Roberts’ Salt, four other works have been selected this year by LFS judges as finalists for the 2026 Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction: The Star Dwellers, a 1961 novel by James Blish; Brave New World, a 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley; That Hideous Strength, a 1945 novel by C.S. Lewis, and Singularity Sky, a 2003 novel by Charles Stross.
Reviews of four finalists have now been published on the Prometheus Blog, with a review of That Hideous Strength in the works. So stay tuned.
Meanwhile, capsule descriptions of each finalist are included in the LFS Hall of Fame finalist press release, which was announced on File 770.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
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