The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years

4 ideas

1. Funeral procession blocked at cosmodrome fence

   When his old friend Kazangap dies at the remote Boranly-Burannyi rail junction, Edigei insists on burying him at the ancestral Ana-Beiit cemetery, a day's journey across the Sarozek steppe. He leads the procession on his camel Karanar, followed by a tractor carrying the body, but finds the cemetery enclosed by the barbed wire of a closed cosmodrome, where guards turn them away for lack of a permit. The mourners bury Kazangap on the steppe outside the fence, and Edigei resolves to appeal to the cosmodrome's commanders just as a rocket launch fills the sky.

2. The mankurt: memory destroyed to make slaves

   In the legend, the Juan-Juan nomads shave a captive's head, bind it in fresh camel hide and leave him in the sun. As the hide dries it tightens and crushes his memory, producing a mankurt who knows neither his name nor his parents and so obeys his master perfectly. His mother, Naiman-Ana, finds him and pleads 'Remember whose son you are', but on his owner's order he shoots her with an arrow. The lesson is that erasing a person's past makes him easier to control than chains would.

3. Modern mankurts made by institutions

   Read against the legend, a person can become a mankurt without violence, through careers and ideologies that reward cutting ties to lineage and rite. Kazangap's educated son Sabitzhan treats his father's burial as a chore to finish fast and talks of people controlled by radio. This shows him obeying new masters in the same way the legend's captive obeyed his. The test for mankurtism is whether a person can still feel what his ancestors and dead are owed, not whether he is educated.

4. Power seals off the past and the future

   The same kind of security reasoning that fences the ancestral cemetery inside a cosmodrome also drives the space subplot. After the joint Soviet-American Paritet station makes contact with an advanced alien civilization, both superpowers enclose Earth in a ring of combat rockets, the 'Hoop', to block that contact. The novel argues that states which treat everything they cannot control as a threat end up cutting people off from their dead and from any new future.

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