Keith Roberts
Kiteworld

The first publication of this novel by Keith Roberts, a British author born in 1935 and passed away in 2000, dates back to 1966. Yet considering its style and the depth of the themes addressed, it could be viewed if not as a more recent work, then as a novel that is timeless. Just like the settings of the story itself indeed, lost in a literally timeless era.

‘Kiteworld’ is a planet where the human race, having survived a terrible holocaust, has laboriously reorganized into a caste system and is conditioned by rigid cults and religious beliefs laden with superstitions. The planet is most likely Earth, but the author does not say so, and anyway, this is irrelevant to the content of the story told in the novel. Just like the religion is probably in some way inspired by the Catholic religion (but could indeed be inspired by any of the religious denominations derived from Judaism) and the structure of society as a whole is very similar to that of the medieval era. Even though there are clearly traces of the world before the end of the world, such as the presence of cars.

In a decaying reality described with great skill by Roberts, we follow the stories of young characters who for one reason or another choose to pursue a military career and become aviators. This roughly explains the subtitle in the Italian version which is ‘The World of Kites,’ a novel that I believe was first proposed by Urania in Italy in the eighties and then re-published several times over the years up to present day.

The flight system occurs on highly sophisticated gliders, which are actually ecological planes, and their operation is described with a great exercise in technical detail in every single phase of the processes required by the author, who around the so-called ‘Cody’ wanted to focus the stories of different characters that intertwine and chase each other until the end of the novel.

What role do the Cody play? They indeed are not specifically transportation means but exclusively a military aviation system aimed at the main activity of surveilling the inhabited world, flying over that border dividing it from the so-called ‘badlands’ populated by unspecified mutants that the leaders of this new religion—mostly gray eminences typical of dark ages, who have a decisive specific weight in Kiteworld’s increasingly precarious social order—call monsters and claim are demons, creatures that come from the fires of hell and as such should be annihilated or at least prevented from having contact with the ‘civilized’ world. It should be said, however, that the more skeptical do not believe in their existence at all and consider these as mere hallucinations. But their thought is minority and nevertheless considered blasphemous.

The crux of the matter is, however, how the concept of ‘monster’ is, as one might imagine, not only mutable but particularly subtle, and this ideal boundary in such a backward society, attached to inviolable schemes and rules, is practically non-existent and in any case, can be ‘shifted’ at any moment by those at the top, determining thus the lives of all others. The stories told will all collide with this reality, and the protagonists will bitterly pay the consequences up until a finale with significant symbolic content and the realization that probably the Cody, which appeared to them as instruments for flying and soaring in the air seeking some kind of freedom and as a getaway from such a rigid society, are instead instruments of power that like giant shadows fly continuously over their heads, deciding their destiny.

A novel with contents ‘stronger’ rather than strictly fanciful, so much so that I would define the science fiction setting as merely contextual, at most instrumental, and one that talks about youth and freedom and love in the truest sense of the word and how concretely difficult it is to love in a world filled with uncertainties, violence, and prejudices.