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Posted by Roseanna

https://readerofelse.wordpress.com/2026/03/10/on-the-calculation-of-volume-iii-solvej-balle-tr-sophia-hersi-smith-and-jennifer-russell/

http://readerofelse.wordpress.com/?p=11205

Recently, Ada Palmer had an essay published in Strange Horizons, talking about how writers within SF are also historians. I disagreed with several things in the essay¹, but have to admit it has been a great conversation starter. Especially as some of the conversation it started was entirely inside my own head, while reading this book. In talking about the particularities of SF and SF writers, she naturally needs to draw upon counterexamples from other genres against which to make comparison, and one of the ones most prominently held up in contrast is litfic.

She asserts that:

The historian’s craft aims to show how our world changes, and who or what has the power to change it.

Followed by:

In SFF, the world usually changes. It may be saved, destroyed, discovered, overrun by zombies, driven mad by faeries, terraformed, irradiated, touched by strangers, or saved from tyrants, but it changes. Often, the story focuses on characters who shape or initiate the change for good and/or ill: plucky rebels, unlikely saviors, shadowy conspirators, ruthless dictators, the king seeking to rule wisely, the king in exile seeking to return, the faithful followers of the king in exile who make it happen. Live on the page, characters win battles, achieve regime changes, create disruptive technologies, release then battle pathogens, found world-shaping institutions, make passionate arguments in the room where it happens, or are placed by fate in the right place at the right time. If it’s a cozy fantasy, they may even popularize a new kind of bread.

All such stories advance claims about who and what has the power to change the world.

And conversely:

one nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. It may be a journey of finding joy or finding despair, but the world is the challenge, and whether it’s static or changing is despite the characters, not because of them. Lit fic thus does not teach any models of how the world changes or how history works, other than the powerlessness model of the individual being ground along by progress, like Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of Modern Times.

So SF and litfic are, in this schema, oppositional, yes? Each defined by its approach to and thesis on change within the world.

Which is a very interesting framework through which to view On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle. Volumes I and II (reviews here and here respectively) show a character trapped within a timeloop, forever reliving the 18th of November, unable to make her way into the 19th, but predominantly concerned with her experience of it, how she processes and reacts to this state of affairs. While I reject Palmer’s definition of litfic in a general sense – I think it’s a reductive hand wave at a varied and multifaceted genre – one could easily argue that the first two volumes of this series absolutely fit it. Tara Selter, writing her diary entries, grappling over and over again with her situation and its unchanging nature, and finding ways to cope with it. In a world that stagnates around her, she finds ways to impose movement and change, cycling through ever-shifting passions, moving around her geography to make her own “seasons”, but always finding herself back in the same place. They feel, at times, like a very close window into the mind of someone’s gently marinating insanity (a condition I imagine I would share in her position²), precisely at times because she is powerless.

But here, in volume III, that changes. It turns out there are others just as unmoored from time as she is. First, she meets Henry, a sociology academic whose reaction to the eternal 18th of November was first to try to catch up on work, and then to seek out his son, and then to grapple with the problem of fatherhood across the Atlantic with a son who doesn’t age day after day. Henry and Tara are quite different people – their early interactions are full of frictions as their different worldviews skim past one another – but for all their differences, they occupy the same genre with regard to their problems, in Palmer’s scheme. Whether they hope or not that the situation will change (which shifts from time to time, as their despair waxes and wanes), it is still a case of how to cope with it, not how to change it, or effect change within it. Indeed, Tara is far more concerned with minimising her impact on the world than the reverse.

The latter part of volume III introduces two further characters. First the seventeen year old Olga, followed by the older Ralf, both of whom have a drastically different approach to the timeloop in which they find themselves. They both seek to enact change upon their frozen world, and see their place within it as being for the purpose of doing that – they assume their own agency within the situation, and act accordingly.

Coming two and a half books into a series, this is such a sea change. And coming that far into a series which has been – and remains – firmly ensconced within the perspective and narration of a character who holds a different mindset entirely, it presents a unique circumstance of genre. Because it does feel, in the moment, like Olga and Ralf are an intrusion of the science fictional into this previously literary story. They change the pace, they change the stakes – they want to use their position trapped in the eighteenth to gather information and solve the problems of the world, preventing accidents, injuries and disasters by discovering their causes and providing the information to the right people to prevent them. This may look like a phonecall to say “drive safe” just before someone is involved in a car accident, for instance. Indeed, Olga seems to assume that this fixing of problems the purpose of them being trapped there in the first place, which is a wild contrast with Tara’s assumption of perverse serendipity. She would rather they focus on bigger, more systemic issues even than these, but this is the compromise starting position brought about by Ralf. By their words, actions and beliefs, they both do seem to come from an SF book, imposing dynamism into the more staid plot of this previously literary novel.

It’s an easy thing to see, in this change in story, a pleasing narrative to impose on the way these two characters change the plot and the tone. But that simplicity is, I believe, a lie. If anything, their seeming SFnality is a tool to examine how that division of genre has never actually been applicable to the book at all (just as I think it cannot be applied to literature generally³).

My belief is that this book, just as the two before it in the series have been, is simultaneously an SF book and a litfic book. I think it is, in many ways, the perfect example of the two cohabiting, and making each other better by the provision of different tools and perspectives. The timeloop concept is not a new one to SF, but viewing it through the severe introspection that is far more part of the literary arsenal brings something new to the party. Just as Tara’s introspection and response to her stagnant life is enhanced by that stagnation being SFnal in nature, demanding a more dramatic, more interesting and more engaging approach than might be available were it a more humdrum sort of inertia⁴.

Moreover, I think that, in a less obvious way, the story has always been about both enacting change upon the world and coming to terms with it. The two do not sit in opposition, and can be present in a single story.

Through all three volumes, but particularly the second, there has always been a tension between Tara’s need for change of some sort vs the inherent fixity of the world. The most compelling version of this is in book II, where she embarks upon her journey to create seasons – she moves north steadily to make herself a winter out of nordic weather, the back south and west for spring, and further south yet for summer, before heading back northward to Germany for autumn again. She craves the cycle of the year that she cannot have, and so uses the world as it exists – fixed and yet changeable – to enact that change upon her own perspective. And then, by changing her own perspective, by coming to terms with what is, she creates change for herself. That change/powerlessness dynamic has always been present.

And yet further, the book being so heavily mired in her viewpoint adds an extra layer. One of the most compelling features of the story has always been her narration, the way that this imposed solitude reduces the available narrative down to the smallest things, the details of life around her and her response to it, and her own internal thoughts. They are the novels which feel like they have brought me closest to seeing genuinely into someone else’s mind, in the absurd idiosyncracies of private thought that one would never share with someone else. But because she has no one, because she has nothing more dynamic to concern herself with, that is what she puts on the paper. And because our experience of the world and situation in which she is trapped comes only through that focus on her thoughts, on her reckoning with the situation, well… Tara and Tara’s mind become the world of the story. I would argue that the crafting of the specifics of her changing mindset through the three volumes is exactly the sort of worldbuilding that SF typically excels at, just turned inward, into a more typically literary direction. And so, when Tara comes to terms with her situation (or fails to do so), when she meets others trapped in here with her who hold different views and force her to rethink her assumptions about the situation, when she changes her mind – she is changing the world. Because of the stakes and framework that Balle has set up, change of self and change of world are inextricable in this specific situation. In a world that resets every day, where any change on the environment is erased, the only canvas left for it is the self.

As with the previous volumes, much of this succeeds through Balle and the translators’ wonderful use of language. Between volumes II and III, the translator has shifted from Barbara Haveland to a joint effort from Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. I am slightly stunned how seamless this change is. I don’t think I would have noticed had I not seen the names on the cover, even. All four of them, then, use a combination of relatively plain language and lingering metaphor – Tara loves a big comparison, especially an abstract one that is clung to over several pages – to put the reader inside the headspace of a woman adrift. Tara herself is both entirely unremarkable – she’s no chosen one, no scientist – and yet, as every person is inside, entirely singular. And she is made so by that careful use of metaphor, the choice of which parts of the world she will focus on or ignore. In this volume, it is the extended section on noises which sticks out, where the soundscape of her current home becomes suddenly oppressive and painfully nostalgic. For reasons unclear to Tara or the reader, something about the choir of everyday sounds suddenly reminds her of what she is missing – the husband back in France whom she could not take with her through her ever-repeating day. The plausibility comes from that fixation. Tara often turns to extended lists when something is preoccupying her thoughts, and it’s a very deft thing to make a list as artful as Balle and the translators do, but those lists do have impact. They’re not deployed often enough to grate, but when they come, they are moments of immersive worldbuilding on a very specific axis.

Even when not preoccupied with noise, Tara is firmly grounded in the sensory – the feeling of sun, the taste of food, the texture of objects, the weight of a Roman coin in the hand – and that grounds the reader too in the realism of her perspective. She is preoccupied with the details of the world, and Balle uses that as a way of sharing the world with us, a bridge into familiarity through simple things.

Which is cumulative. Three novels in, the sense of Tara and her mindscape has become very clear. And so, introducing new people into the story – seen through her eyes as all things in this are – is both unsettling, because it upends the stability that has been in place until now, and also reinforcing. It is a test of our understanding of Tara – a test of the worldbuilding of this mind in which the story is set – and for me, a test passed beautifully. Tara now exists in stark contrast to people who want to move through the world differently, and whose inner worlds are very clearly of vastly different construction to her own. But the process of her encountering and responding to those different people, even as it brings change to her internal life, demonstrates the consistency of her worldbuilding, as her response is exactly as I expected. She is unsettled by Olga just as I am and the difference between them makes clear that Tara is a peculiarly introspective person. Balle’s construction was sturdy all along.

So far, in these three volumes, Solvej Balle has used the idea of a timeloop, a tool that reduces the scope of external change, to enforce a particularly deeply introspective narrative, and project out onto a series length scale the image of the inside of a person’s mind. We experience the world as Tara sees it, but moreover, experience Tara as a world. Change and stagnation go hand in hand, and an SF idea marries beautifully with a literary writing style and focus. This novel, just as the other two in the series, is a perfect example of fusion at its finest. It is a wonderful science fiction novel and it is a fabulous literary fiction novel, harmoniously in chorus. The two are not contradictory, and never have been.

1. Initially the pieces I speak about in the bsky thread, but as time passes, I think increasingly with the fundamental premise also. ︎
2. There are moments, in fact, where Tara’s predicament and reaction to it bring me horribly close to my own experience during furlough in 2020, in which I discovered quite how badly I cope when unmoored from the structure and rhythm of daily life. Where she gets hung up on sounds, stars and the containers of the Roman Empire, however, I developed an unhealthy relationship with the Dragon Age franchise and wrote some very bad Stardew Valley fanfic. She makes a better novel protagonist than I would. ︎
3. It’s very convenient to have just read a book that proves my point, isn’t it? This definitely isn’t contrived at all, and just a product of the two things that are rattling around in my brain at the same time. I mean… ok I joke, and I think there’s some of that, but it is interesting that Olga turns up in the story and does immediately use the phrasing “change the world”. I’m not pulling this totally out of nowhere. ︎
4. Though to be clear, I would probably read that book too. I just like the prose and Tara’s particular perspective. ︎

https://readerofelse.wordpress.com/2026/03/10/on-the-calculation-of-volume-iii-solvej-balle-tr-sophia-hersi-smith-and-jennifer-russell/

http://readerofelse.wordpress.com/?p=11205