In The Common Wind (2018), his history of the Haitian Revolution and its “Afro-American Currents,” Julius S. Scott set out to show how the memory of Toussaint Louverture and the rest inspired contemporaries—and kindled the hopes of “Afro-North Americans” well into the twenty-first century. Half-way through Countess, Suzan Palumbo’s space-operatic retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-6), we learn how this remains true well into the spacefaring future: “Toussard’s failed rebellion on the planet Bequia … spoke of the Haitian revolution long ago on Terra, and of the legacy of a man named Toussaint” (pp. 17, 78). In a novel with the epigraph “There is horror here, but there is also always hope,” this echo, once sounded, reverberates: not only because it spurs the central character forward in her search for revenge, but because she learns from the history of Haiti, too, and offers not just a repetition of its successes but a roadmap to expand upon them.
The novel begins with that protagonist, Virika Samaroo [1], in command of the Oestra, a vessel of the capitalistic Æcerbot Empire transporting invaluable iridium to its governing world, Invicta. [2] She has taken command in the absence of the ship’s assigned captain, who has fallen ill with a mysterious but violent sickness. Returning the shipment safely to the metropole, she is greeted as a hero—an almost improbable one, in fact, since cargoes of this metal, which enables the interstellar empire’s jump technology (or “skipgates”), are routinely attacked by pirates. To command as a first lieutenant so successful a mission is almost unheard of—especially given that her de facto first officer, Lieutenant Lyric, disputed the incapacitated captain’s wish that Samaroo assume command.
So far, so Star Trek. But what disrupts the schematic outlines of these opening pages is Samaroo’s identity: she is the child of Antillean immigrants to the capital world, the child of indentured labourers on the mining world of Orinoco. [3] She is the first of her people ever to take the helm of an Æcerbot merchant vessel. We meet her as she “kept her face as implacable as ice” (p. 9), acutely aware of the need to command every element of her self-presentation if she is to be even accepted, much less respected. At the end of that first chapter, “[o]nly once she’d slipped out of her uniform did she feel the cares of the mission fall from her”—that is, she has in some ways become the uniform, taken it on as the foremost element not just of her presentation to the world but of her own interiority. Alone in the privacy of her quarters, “she could not stop herself from crying”: her true self, her real feelings, are carefully private, isolated, hidden (p. 18).
Inevitably, we come to see—should we need reminding—why an unusually competent officer nevertheless feels this pressure. In his fevered rages, even Samaroo’s supportive captain grasps for racial epithets—“Shut up, you ungrateful coolie bitch!”(p. 21). Only in the immigrant subdivision of the empire’s capital city can Samaroo “melt into the crowd” (p. 26). And her great success is quickly turned against her, the unmolested nature of her return to base used as evidence that she must be in league with pirates—and responsible herself for the poisoning experienced by her commanding officer. She is arrested and forcibly restrained by military police: “They were crushing her chest,” we read (p. 34), in uncomfortable echo of the police brutality against oppressed communities we see in societies far removed from the Æcerbot.
There is admittedly something a little programmatic about these early chapters. Readers of The Count of Monte Cristo will know where it’s going: Samaroo is sent to an isolated prison from which it is impossible to escape, the innocent victim of a conspiracy whose outlines remain to maddeningly obscure to her when compared with the unrelenting injustice of the legal system. The substance of Countess, as in Dumas’s original, comes only when this setup is out of the way. Consequently, the initial chapters can whizz by in, if not quite an instrumental rush, then certainly at pace. This is a novella, and brevity is part of the form’s effect; but at times I felt I wanted to dwell on elements—Samaroo’s love of Antillean art, life in the immigrant enclave, the economics of interstellar empire (“[s]pace colonization had not been the great equalizer the capitalist billionaires had advertised” [p. 26])—that were offered instead as ways to reach the early denouement: “she let them lead her from the court-room into the temporary holding cells as meek as a lamb in spring” (p. 45).
Yet all this is by deft design. Two elements are smartly introduced in these opening three chapters which prove increasingly important to the novella and its particular successes: first, its drawing out of the way racism is simultaneously activated and hidden within a society, the way “Invictans could—and would—pretend a thing didn’t exist by not speaking about it;” and, secondly, how it offers a specific history of this society’s particular racisms, in which the Antillean people who provide the labour that enables Æcerbot luxury “could be traced from those mining and agricultural planets on the edges of the empire all the way back centuries ago to the old British colonies on Terra” (p. 26). That is, Countess reads outwards from our present moment to a society that seeks to forget that history of racial inequity in order to continue to enforce it, for untold centuries. Samaroo’s people are descended from those of Cuba and Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico—and she, in the far future, suffers in much the way they did back then, do today, may still tomorrow.
On one level, this conceit reminded me of nothing more than Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath (2022), in which a future spacefaring humanity contrives not just to continue but to consolidate the racial segregations of the modern-day USA. But Countess isn’t as fatalistic as that other novel: as per its epigraph, it finds hope, too, in the future—because it finds inspiration as well as anger in the past.
Years go by on the prison planet of Tintaris (we later learn that Samaroo has spent a decade in her cell). The guards tell their prisoner that she “has no dignity here;” they “shave off [the] thick black hair” that she had been permitted to retain as a commissioned officer (p. 54), and they serve her flavourless gruel for sustenance. Amid this grind, the setup of those early chapters rapidly begins to pay off: Samaroo’s love of art comes to be her hiding place in prison, where she finds stones in the gravel yard with which over months she etches in her cell an elaborate piece of Antillean art. When, once discovered, her work is violently erased by the guards, one of their number, Kamilla, breaks with the system to assist Samaroo. She does so because she, too, is descended from colonised subjects of the once-and-future British Empire. “You aren’t the first Antillean to be imprisoned here,” Kamilla tells Samaroo. “Richard Toussard was locked in the cell across the hall before you” (p. 76). When Samaroo finally escapes, she understands the message of Toussant-via-Toussard-via-Kamilla, the message of the centuries to the people of her time: “That’s what Antilleans need—indomitable hope” (p. 82).
The novella passes into the next phase of the scheme set for it by Dumas’s original: revenge. But here Countess becomes the book it has been moving towards being, begins to tell the story it was aiming at—so swiftly, so smartly—all along. When she comes across pirates who offer her a home, she is asked, “how is your allegiance to the Æcerbot Empire now? How do you like their civilized justice and order” (p. 94)—and this hits home:
She took in everything, including the struggle, poverty, and ill health, the constant physical work in the fields or mines wreaked on the Antilleans. Despite the joys they’d carved out for themselves, they were not free. They lived and died producing what the empires needed at subsistence wages. She wanted to remain among them. (p. 106)
In The Count of Monte Cristo, the revenge of the protagonist is personal: He seeks out those responsible for his incarceration and punishes them. In Countess, we certainly discover which individuals are responsible—and the answers are no surprise, almost incidental. Samaroo’s focus is not on achieving personal justice; she is more or less uninterested in wreaking restorative action on mere individuals. She sets about almost immediately on a wider quest: to achieve systemic change, to have her revenge not on evil persons … but on the processes that they and their like have built. Alongside the pirate-woman with whom she falls in love, Dominique, [4] she gathers to herself not just a fortune but a fleet, a network of allies who can join together to bring the entire civilisation that has betrayed her and all Antilleans.
“You must be unified in your economic resistance if you are to secure a better life for your people,” Samaroo—now identifying herself as the Countess [5]—tells her followers. Now, Scott’s reading of the Haitian Revolution was not that it failed to produce wider change due to active or passive betrayal by those who should have rallied to it, but that it provided real and meaningful succour to liberation movements across the Caribbean and North America, requiring huge efforts on the parts of the colonisers to suppress it. Scott does not suggest that alternative ends were possible if only more had rallied to Toussaint’s flag. In Countess, though, Samaroo tells her followers to “[t]hrow off [the] subsidized protection [of the empire]”: what is needed is not merely the resolve to stand together, but the opportunities to do so. The Countess’s real success here is in community-building—a task she achieves by embracing not the respectability of the merchant navy but the masterless anarchism of piracy.
What leavens this hope—what runs against its grain of too-easy solution—is that the Countess emerges not as the Edmond Dantès of this story but as its Moses: The promised land is not achieved by the story’s end. “There will be more cruel hardship ahead,” Dominique realises in the novella's final pages. “They will try to starve and kill us. But we will be free” (p. 161). In other words, the events of Countess are another episode in the long story of Antillean resistance: Toussaint has become Toussard has become Kalima has become the Countess. These stories of hope are passed through time, generation to generation, and each time, a step further is made, contingently but never tentatively.
Countess joins a fresh stirring of space opera towards contemporary ends. From Lina Rather to Emily Tesh, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson to the stories collected in Jonathan Strahan’s New Adventures in Space Opera (2024), a new vitality seems evident in a subgenre that—in an era of hard-bitten realism about the cosmos and humanity’s place within it—had been seen by some to have left its best days behind. With its own retooling of interstellar derring-do, its open setting of Galactic colonialism and interplanetary revolt, Countess easily begs a sequel. But, with its rare historical sensibility and canny self-questioning, it is in truth its own call, and its own response.
Endnotes
[1] Samaroo is a name of Bhojpuri origin with specifically Trinidadian connections, brought to the island by indentured Indians in the nineteenth century. Alongside the name Virika, rooted in a Sanskrit word for “bravery,” Countess in this way embeds in its protagonist the varied and multiethnic inheritances of the Antillean peoples. [return]
[2] It's impossible not to note the literal Anglo-Saxon root of the name Æcerbot. (It is the name of a barely Christianized fertility charm, intended—ironically, given this empire's reliance on indentured labour—to ensure crop yields.) In an Ozymandian touch, “invicta” is a Latin word meaning “invincible.” [return]
[3] The planet shares its name, of course, with a river that forms the northern boundary of the Guianas region of northern South America. Often considered as part of the Caribbean, this territory was variously colonised by successive European powers from the sixteenth century onwards. One relatively short-lived such colony—English Surinam, the pet project of the crown's Governor of Barbados at that time, Lord Francis Willoughby, where thousands of enslaved Africans and indentured indigenous people were forced to work on sugar plantations—was reputedly visited in the 1650s by the British writer Aphra Behn, and is the setting for her influential fiction of the “noble savage,” Oroonoko (1688). This narrative, too, features a slave revolt. Many scholars contend that Behn was married to a slave trader, Johan. [return]
[4] The first recorded slave revolt in the Caribbean took place in 1521 in the Spanish colony named Santo Domingo, in the present-day Dominican Republic. Its territory overlapped with but was separate to the French colony of Saint-Domingue where Toussaint Louverture was born two centuries later. [return]
[5] There’s a great naming scene in which the Countess is brought face-to-face once more with Lieutenant—now Commander—Lyric, the scion of the Æcerbot elite who resented her assumption of command on the Oestra. “You may refer to me as the Countess of Sando or Countess,” she tells him. “Virika,” Lyric responds, “You look the same” (p. 145). This moment of recognition is immediately undercut—the Countess insists that Virika Samaroo died in prison—but the sudden effect of eschewing the unlikely mystery of the Countess’s identity provides the novella with a rare and welcome moment of wry humour. [return]