A. D. Sui’s The Iron Garden Sutra is a religious and existential exploration wrapped in a sci-fi murder mystery. Iris is a death monk of the Starlit Order, a religion that worships an all-encompassing force known as the Infinite Light. Starlit scripture teaches that, since the Infinite Light is everything, it is indifferent to the activities of humans. Even death is neutral from the perspective of a light that does not love. Monks of the Starlit Order thus travel the cosmos to put souls to rest as they rejoin the Infinite Light.
One of the Order’s number, Iris, is summoned, along with the AI implanted in his brainstem that serves as his constant companion, to put to rest the souls of an ancient generation ship called the Nicaea that has recently docked at a space station. When he boards, though, he finds more life than death—both in the form of a sprawling forest that has exploded across the ship, and in academics who are already beginning to pull the ship apart to study it further. A scholarly curiosity becomes a deathtrap when everyone aboard the ship discovers they are trapped, cut off from the station, and that someone (or something) is slowly killing them off. Iris is used to handling the dead, but nothing has equipped him to see his new friends dying all around him. While unraveling the mystery of the ancient ship, then, he must reckon with a crisis of faith. How can he preach the virtues of stoicism when he himself cares too much?
The Iron Garden Sutra is a complex examination of trauma, grief, and spirituality. For Iris, the scripture of the Starlit Order has been a comfort because it allowed him to make peace with the deaths he’s faced. Now that he’s confronted with the living, he discovers that his empathy is also his foible—he cares too deeply about the people around him to claim indifference when they die. While the sutras were a comfort to him in his healing process, meanwhile, not everyone on the ship processes trauma in the same way. Dealing with death in real time, the characters demonstrate a wide gamut of coping mechanisms, ranging from rage, attempts at being useful, and falling back on faith to intellectualization and utter nihilism. The novel is not afraid to grapple with the reality of grief and trauma: there are no neat “five phases” here, but rather a mess of emotion, memory, and pain. In the face of so much violence, Iris must confront the paradox of his religion: His objective is to care for others, but in order to do so effectively he must hold his own emotions at bay, meaning he can’t truly care—a sacrifice he isn’t willing to let himself make.
Furthermore, while for Iris and some of the other occupants of the ship religion is a comfort, religion also serves as a source of tension—not just between the academics, but for the former occupants of the ship. As the characters unravel the mystery of the malevolent force attacking them, they also unearth records of past holy wars on the Nicaea, forcing them to reckon with the ways in which faith can turn from something that preserves to something that destroys.
The heart of this novel lives in the relationships between its characters, and especially in the tension between Iris and Yan, the head engineer and leader of the academic party. From the outset, Yan is resentful of Iris’s order, dismissing and belittling Iris every chance he gets. Iris tries and fails to keep himself from reciprocating in kind. The major source of friction between them is that Iris strives to be useful, and Yan is convinced that he is useless. This conflict dances around a crucial question: What does it mean to be useful in times of crisis? What are the myriad forms that caring for others might take? It’s not always as straightforward as protecting them from harm and providing comforting words. In fact, Iris often allows himself to be the target of blame simply because he knows that giving others an emotional outlet is an act of service.
The forced proximity of the setting takes all these character relationships and amps up the stakes. The Nicaea, however, is not the only thing keeping the characters in close quarters: Iris lives with another person in the confines of his own mind. All monks of Iris’s order have sentient AI constructs implanted in their brain at a young age, and Iris has named his VIFAI (Vessel Iris’s Friendly AI) because it refused to have a name of its own. The novel doesn’t shy away from engaging with the ethics of an AI implant. While some of the academics are appalled by the notion that Iris has a conscious passenger trapped in his mind, Iris has grown accustomed to the fact that another person is constantly party to his thoughts, feelings, and physical sensation. The power dynamic is a complex one—VIFAI has a level of privacy that Iris doesn’t, but Iris has the ability to accidentally injure VIFAI if he loses control of his emotions. The repercussions of Iris’s previous fits of rage are evident in the ways that VIFAI falters and lags. The AI, too, experiences its own form of trauma, just by virtue of being attached to the emotional experiences of someone else. The effect of their close but strained relationship is a second source of tension: There’s friction between the academics on the ship and tension within Iris’s head. Still, the latter two depend on each other. VIFAI challenges Iris without being adversarial, and Iris shows VIFAI the same compassion that he shows the humans around him.
By contrast, the Nicaea’s AI was developed long before conscious constructs like VIFAI existed, so it has developed just like the greenery on the ship—wild and unrestrained by human input. Not only has it discovered abilities that the humans thought were impossible, but it’s also grown a peculiar kind of cognition that is alien to the main cast of characters. The Nicaea’s logic, as well as its ethics and values, are like a puzzle that the humans must sort out. This exploration of alternative cognition is particularly relevant in an age during which machine learning is always turning up unexpected results. It’s important now more than ever to imagine the ways that emergent properties of AI might have unexpected—and potentially dangerous—consequences.
The richness of the characters’ relationships makes the novel’s discussion of trauma all the more poignant. From the start of the novel, Iris hints at a childhood tragedy that pushed him into the hands of the Starlit Order. Becoming a monk of the Order, and serving those who saved him, was his way of finding meaning after a disaster that took everything from him. In subtle ways, he tries to exert control over a life that he knows is largely out of his control. His relationship with food, sleep, and pain all suggest a desire to exert control. Though it’s never outright stated that Iris struggles with disordered eating or self-harm, the narrative alludes to these issues in such a way that anyone who has dealt with them can see themselves reflected in Iris without it becoming the focal point of the story. Instead of focusing on one particular manifestation of PTSD, the novel is a nuanced examination of the various ways in which trauma affects how people perceive and respond to the world around them.
The Iron Garden Sutra is, then, tender and deeply meditative—not adjectives one would expect to attached to a murder mystery, and yet the novel manages to weave poignant relationships and psychological realism into a gripping thriller. Rarely is a murder mystery brave enough to grapple with the real-life implications of being faced with mortality; Iron Garden Sutra, however, not only embraces death, but pulls it into an intimate and intricate dance.