Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson’s second novel, can be read as a standalone, or you can read it as a followup that’s something of a mirror image to The Space Between Worlds, her 2020 debut. Space was set mostly inside the walls of Wiley City, where an unlikely survivor named Cara found an unusual way to make a life among the privileged. Beyond is set in the nearby desert community of Ashtown, under the sometimes-deadly glare of the sun. That sun is far from the only deadly thing in Ashtown.
Both places are changed by a technological innovation that allows people to move between worlds. Each person exists, or existed, in every world, though their lives are different—sometimes more different, sometimes less. There are catches, because there are always catches. It’s not an easy experience, seeing the other yous that might have been.
This book isn’t about technology, though. (Johnson is very aware of the fine line between magic and science.) It’s about revolution, and it’s about Mr. Scales, one of the many runners who serve Nik Nik, the emperor of Ashtown. Technically, Scales is a mechanic, but like her fellows, she’s also a killer. She has been other things, and lived other lives, but at this moment, in this life, everything goes to hell when she watches a friend die horribly. There is no killer. Helene X just folds in on herself, bones breaking and reversing, as Scales tries to hold her together.
The threat that causes these terrible deaths—because of course there are more—affects primarily people in Wiley, but trouble in Wiley quickly becomes trouble for Ashtown. In the city, a scientist named Adam Bosch understands better than most what is happening. When Scales and her colleagues bring him to their emperor, a whole host of events are set in motion.
The question of who is killing the mangled dead is less of an issue than the matter of how to stop it. This is the catalyst for Johnson’s story, but its engine, its heart, is Scales, who gradually turns her attention to the pre-existing, systemic issues that affect everyone in Ashtown. The people of this world need to put a wall between themselves and the entitled, brazen enemy that would destroy them. But there is an existing wall that isn’t doing Ashtowners any good.
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Those Beyond the Wall
Those Beyond the Wall is billed as a standalone tale set in the same world as The Space Between Worlds; I took that to heart, and read it first. It was impossible to not immediately go back and read The Space Between Worlds; the two books nest together improbably and elegantly. Space’s Cara wants to find a way to stay safe inside Wiley, taken care of by the city’s strong social services, safe from the sun, and safe from the desert and its violent leader, who she knows all too well.
Scales doesn’t dream of the city, or of leaving the desert. Scales has had it with the system, would prefer to take it down, and is capable of every terrible, difficult, brutal, loving thing that needs to happen before this might become possible.
(What they have in common is a fierce and understandable defensiveness that comes from moving through a world that seems determined to crush them at all times. And in both characters, that leaves them likely to misunderstand the intentions, and the hearts, of someone right in front of them.)
Scales is an incredible narrator, prone to hinting at secrets she holds tightly to, inclined toward self-mythologizing, and vividly, painfully self-aware. She isn’t just the protagonist of this story; she is telling it, and storyteller is just one of several things she never expected or wanted to be. She knows what she’s good at; she knows what her value is to the emperor; she knows she will never have the man she loves; and she knows what it means to be part of Ashtown, to bleed for it, and love in it, and accept its violence and brutality along with its love and support.
Space was an excellent book. Beyond is on another level. Beautifully, wisely, Johnson handles moral and narrative complexity on every front. She illustrates the privilege of Wiley with ease—there’s a repeated story about a family that dies on the city’s doorstep—but digs into the brutal structure of Ashtown, where the emperor’s will is everything. Runner-on-runner violence terrible, but there is also community support, and there is also the House, which offers every kind of care a body and mind might need, from therapy to sex work. The community takes care of itself, and the community inflicts violence on itself, but there is absolutely an argument to be made that the worst runner beatdown is still not as fucked up as Wiley’s willingness to let everyone outside its walls die. One is bloody, vivid, and intimately detailed. The other exists over there, in a space Wiley doesn’t have to look at. But Johnson will make you look.
As Scales thinks, near the end: “This is how we can peacefully coexist, the only way, when one entity doesn’t hold the existence of the other in its first grasp.”
Those Beyond the Walls is a rich, difficult story about sacrifice in the name of community, and of a better world. It’s also an incredible character study, as we’re with Scales through it all: death, violence, secrets, lies, revelations, more secrets, multiverses, and knowledge too difficult to bear. It’s a book about refusing to accept that things have to be the way they are—and a book that understands that change will never come easily, or happen just because someone says so. Here, change comes in the wake of an incredible set-piece that—with its sand and chrome and vehicles and fighting—calls to mind Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s terrible, it’s beautiful, and even amid the violence, there are moments of brightness, of hope, and a reminder that it is possible to choose to be on the right side of history, no matter on which Earth you live.
To be plain, to be gushy: I wish there were more books like this. And there are some. Those Beyond the Wall joins a solid number of excellent recent books about terrible systems that need breaking and changing, and about the work required to bring about that change—books ranging from The Spear Cuts Through Water to Some Desperate Glory to The Saint of Bright Doors. None of these books are like each other, exactly, but the through-line is there, in their revolutionary hearts and unforgettable main characters.
To wrap a character as rich as Scales in a tale this powerful and thought-provoking is a monumental act of storytelling. I hope Johnson returns to this world—one character’s realization near the end certainly suggests there are more stories for her to tell—but even if she doesn’t, this one will reward rereading. I want to read essays about this book. I want to go to book groups about this book. I want us all to talk about it for years to come. It’s just that good.
Those Beyond the Wall is published by Del Rey.
