Illuminae

While Illuminae is a work of science fiction, it also falls into another genre category that is critical to understanding it: It is ergodic fiction, meaning it is composed of miscellaneous documents that resist traditional narrative form individually, but cohesively come together to create a complete story if the reader works to understand and connect the disparate parts. Ergodic fiction typically asks a greater commitment of its audience in that not only are they being asked to give the story their full attention, but also to uncover the story itself. This genre often works well for speculative works and mysteries.

Illuminae’s science fiction bent borrows elements from horror and mystery to create reader engagement, and it also falls into the ergodic fiction category and asks a lot of its audience.

According to the professor who coined the term, ergodic fiction is defined by the:

…nontrivial effort…required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.” (Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print.)

Ergodic fiction could be presented in chronological or linear order, but the way the reader is forced to interact with it requires a special type of engagement that doesn’t involve just sitting down and allowing their eyes to scroll predictably across the page, one page to the next until the end.

Illuminae may look like an ordinary book on the outside, but it is important to understand the journey readers must embark on to fully grasp the story. Not only is it challenging thematically and a long space opera, but it also poses a challenge to its audience, because flying through the pages won’t leave readers with a coherent narrative. They’ll have to weave threads and evidence together to build the story with the documents Illuminae presents. It is almost like reading a video game in print due to its level of interactivity.

This concept of nontraditional story structures is also covered in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, which suggests the traditional hero’s journey and plot mountain are only a small sliver of narrative possibility shaped around Western ideals and the male idea of climax. While such an assertion may seem radical, Alison presents evidence that fiction can take many forms, blooming from one central point for example, or dots that need to be connected. Illuminae acts as another example of Alison’s assertion. While a more traditional plot arc can be mapped, the way the story is told resists traditional form and consists of multiple climaxes.