A- #BookReview: One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson

One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction
Pages: 196
Published by Tachyon Publications on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Trapped in a child’s body, a resourceful woman risks death by deletion from a simulated world. With her debut novella for adults, Mary G. Thompson (Wuftoom) has crafted a taut, ultimately hopeful story that deftly explores identity and autonomy.
“Brilliant and beautiful! One Level Down is a perfectly executed gem of a book. Deeply satisfying and completely mesmerizing, it’s full of depth, heart, and thought. A remarkable achievement!”—Sarah Beth Durst, New York Times bestselling author of The Spellshop
Ella is the oldest five-year-old in the universe. For fifty-eight years, the founder of a simulated colony-planet has forced her to pretend to be his daughter. Her “Daddy” has absolute power over all elements of reality, which keeps the colonists in line even when their needs are not met. But his failing experiments and despotic need for absolute control are increasingly dangerous.
Ella’s very life depends on her performance as a child. She has watched Daddy delete her stepmother and the loved ones of anyone who helps her.
But every sixty years, a Technician comes from the world above. Ella has been watching and working and biding her time. Because if she cannot make the technician help her, the only solution is a desperate measure that could lead to consequences for the entire universe.

My Review:

For a rather short book, One Level Down tackles some really huge questions about the nature of reality.

The stage in which those questions play out is a tiny human colony in a not too distant future far from Earth. Or so it seems.

Because the colony of Bella Inizio both is and isn’t what it seems – and neither is founder Philip Harkin’s five year old daughter Ella. Come to think of it, Harkin isn’t exactly what he seems, either.

There’s a lot of that going around, like Russian nesting dolls, because that’s what Harkin’s Bella Inizio is, the smallest doll in a nest of simulated worlds built and maintained by Clawhammer Corporation and their rival, Pocket Parts.

As has been seen in plenty of SF stories, colonization is not easy. Golden worlds turn out to be tarnished, Class M planets turn out to have predatory inhabitants, worlds that looked perfect from light years away are discovered to contain deadly pathogens that can’t be seen from space.

That’s the case of the original Bella Inizio. The rich veins of precious minerals combined with a pristine ecology drew the colonists in – and the deadly gastrointestinal disease killed them off. Then Clawhammer swept in – as they did on so many other colony worlds – and made a deal with the remaining inhabitants. They bought the mineral rights to the planet, and in return set the colony up in a pocket universe, created to match the colonists’ requirements, safe from the disease that nearly wiped them out but locked away forever in a microcosm of the universe they once explored.

Except that Bella Inizio was owned in its entirely by one single homesteader – Philip Harkin. And his requirements for the pocket world were specially weighted in his favor and under his control – especially control of his daughter Ella, who had remained trapped, under his thumb, at the mercy of his fists, and perpetually five years old in body but not in mind – for the entire 58 years of the pocket world’s existence.

While she watched her father exert his life and death power over anyone who defied him in any way – but especially over anyone who questioned his treatment of Ella herself.

But Ella had plans and dreams of her own – plans that did not include staying trapped. And she had managed to gain just enough knowledge of the world outside to know that her opportunity was coming – if she could just figure out a way to seize it – and be free.

Escape Rating A-: There are not one but two really big questions that get tackled in this tiny novel. The larger – and more SFnal question – is the one about the nature of reality. The smaller but entirely too real question is about collaboration, and I don’t mean the good, cooperative kind. I mean the traitorous kind that leads to leaving one miserable and desperate little girl in the hands of a monster so that everyone else can have a happy life.

The universe of Harkin’s Bella Inizio is based on a conceptual framework that the universe is a seemingly vast simulation – a ginormous pocket world that is nested within an even bigger pocket world and could conceivably have an infinite number of small pocket worlds nested within it.

This idea gets played with from an entirely different angle in Brenda Peynado’s recent novella, Time’s Agent – but those pocket dimensions are discovered and not made-to-order. It could also be imagined as the kind of holodeck bubble that Moriarty is trapped in in the Star Trek Next Gen episode Ship in a Bottle. Or perhaps the computer simulation that is utilized in the Doctor Who episode Forest of the Dead.

In other words, this concept has been played with before, this time combined with more than a bit of corporate greed and an even more SFnal solution to the dangers of colonization than was faced in Mickey7.

What tips this particular story over the edge into both WOW and SCARY at the same time is the human dimension. Harkin is abusive to both his daughter and to the other colonists, who are, in their turn, abusing Ella as well so as not to upset their own personal applecarts. Or, to be more charitable – for certainly really awful definitions of charitable – are making the best of their own terrible situation by leaving her to suffer in worse. The way that the reader’s sympathy for them is stripped away at the end was rather breathtaking in its audacity.

As is Ella’s righteous takedown of the whole big ball of wrong in the surprising – but absolutely justified – conclusion.

Related Posts