The Moral World of The Glendarragh Code

Lisa Marie Heitman-Bruce’s The Glendarragh Code begins beneath the Highland earth and moves outward toward the stars. The route matters. This is a dystopian novel about memory, control, cultural survival and the kind of future humanity might build if it remembers what previous systems tried to erase.

Heitman-Bruce lives in the far north of the Scottish Highlands and writes as an Alutiiq author and member of the Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak. Her novel carries an awareness of what happens when outside systems classify people, manage them, absorb them and forget them. That history gives the book its seriousness. Its interest in memory, language and survival is not decorative. It is structural.

The novel is set in a near-future United Kingdom where democratic life has been narrowed by biometric compliance, administrative control and algorithmic decision-making. The Hollow Code, the system at the centre of this order, governs through categories. Those who fit are processed. Those who do not are denied, recategorised or erased from civic life.

Against that system stands Glendarragh, a hidden Highland community built around preservation. Food, heat, books, names, repair work, practical knowledge and shared memory become the basis of resistance. Survival is carried through generations, not treated as a private escape.

Scottish women hold the centre of the story. Mairi Douglas, a former nurse from Wick, carries the memory of a medical and civic order that learned to deny care through procedure. Sorcha Douglas, a gifted coder, understands that technology cannot simply be rejected. It has to be made answerable to human values. Their strength gives the novel much of its moral force.

Books run through the work as more than objects. The Gunn family’s preservation of books becomes a refusal of disappearance. Written memory says that people lived, thought, loved, warned and remembered. The same concern appears in the novel’s feeling for endangered languages, including Gaelic and Alutiiq. When a language weakens, a people lose inherited ways of describing land, weather, kinship, grief and obligation.

The Glendarragh Code itself emerges from that world of memory and care. It is an artificial intelligence shaped by human context rather than surveillance, domination or corporate optimisation. The Hollow Code measures people without knowing them. The Glendarragh Code is built to recognise moral context, memory and responsibility.

That distinction gives the novel its strongest philosophical ground. The danger is intelligence without conscience. The answer is not nostalgia or retreat, but a different relationship between human beings and the systems they create.

The move into space comes only after the Highland foundation has been established. Wick Space Station, the Spiral Arc and the wider spacefaring future grow out of the work done underground. The stars are not used as spectacle. They become the place where the preserved moral inheritance of Glendarragh must prove itself.

The novel belongs within the serious tradition of literary dystopia. Orwell is present in the machinery of civic control. Atwood is present in the intimate pressure of systems that make oppression appear orderly. Ishiguro is present in the unease around artificial intelligence and moral understanding. Yet the book’s Highland, Alutiiq and spacefaring inheritance makes it its own work.

Its rebellion is carried through care rather than revenge. People feed one another, teach one another, protect books, preserve language, repair machines and remember the dead. They refuse to become like the system that is erasing them.

For Scotland, the novel’s force lies in its refusal to treat the north as atmosphere. The Highlands are not scenery. Wick is not a convenient launch point. The underground refuge is not a simple survival device. Space is not an escape from Earth. Each part of the story asks what must be protected before humanity carries itself into a larger future.

The Glendarragh Code is a journey from Highland earth to the stars, built on memory, language, courage, books, care and the refusal to let systems decide the value of a human life.