Vinge posits a universe in which the physics of relativity vary according to one’s proximity to the galactic core. The Earth is in the “Slow Zone” where nothing moves faster than the speed of light, placing harsh limits on travel and computational complexity. In the “Unthinking Depths” even closer to the core, even computation of the sort performed by the human brain becomes impossible. But in the “Beyond” on the fringe of the galaxy, starships can cross between stars in days while weak AI, nanotechnology, and antigravity all become feasible. It’s only in the “Transcend” between galaxies, however, that the limits on computational complexity allow for the creation of the superintelligence discussed in Singularity theory. While the Beyond is home to many human and alien civilizations, the Transcend is an almost divine place, populated by, well, transcendent entities that are the creation or sometimes descendants of civilizations from the Beyond. It’s the realm of gods, alluring but extremely dangerous.

The story begins when a human civilization in the Beyond discover a long-forgotten ancient archive just across the border in the Transcend and end up accidentally releasing a malevolent superintelligence, a demon instead of a god. Whereas typical Transcend entities mostly ignore the Beyond and evolve so quickly they are gone in less than ten years, what the humans found is a “Blight” that is not only obsessed with dominating all life the Transcend and the Beyond, but one obsessed in a stable, long-lasting way.

From there the story plays out in two arenas. A single family, the lone survivors of the ill-fated investigators, flees the Blight down into the slower depths of the Beyond, almost into the Slow Zone, eventually crash landing on an uncharted planet populated by aliens with only medieval technology. Meanwhile, in the middle Beyond, a human librarian named Ravna teams up with two plantlike aliens and Pham Nuwen, a human who is some sort of reconstruction of a Slow Zone interstellar trader, on a desperate mission to recover the crashed ship in hopes that their escape preserved some weapon the embattled civilizations of the Beyond can use against the seemingly unstoppable Blight.

One might think that the story taking place on the backwater alien world would be dull compared to the epic space opera of the story’s other strand, but in fact this turns out to be the more interesting of the two. The aliens, eventually called Tines, are pack intelligences whose single mind is comprised of several individuals whose thoughts are linked by constant sonic communication. Although psychologically the Tines are similar to humans in desires and motivations, this difference in their nature has a number of interesting effects that make them seem convincingly alien no matter how familiar their thoughts might be. For example, two packs can’t come closer than a few meters to each other before the crosstalk of their thoughts makes it hard for either to think, meaning Tines live in a sort of physical isolation, almost never drawing close to anyone else. More significantly, while individual members have limited lifespans, each overall pack can take in new members to replace those that die and thus can theoretically live forever, though each change in members alters pack’s personality to some degree. Traditional Tine societies have allowed this process to occur more or less at random, but the ship fleeing the Blight crashes near the frontier kingdom led by Woodcarver, who has spent centuries working toward a rational approach to self-improvement. Woodcarver’s rationalism makes her ready to accept the opportunity for technological change offered by the arrival of a starship, but perhaps even more ready are the followers of Flenser, her former student. Flenser, feeling that while Woodcarver had the right idea her ethics were slowing her down, created a society that worships mental discipline and cultivates it through the most ruthless of means. If his followers can control the starship’s technology, they’ll have the means to dominate their world.

I’ve spent more time than usual describing the novel’s setting because the setting is a lot more interesting than most. Both the Zones of Thought space civilization and the Tines’ pack psychology could easily serve as the foundation for an entire novel by themselves, so taken together they provide a formidable array of situations and ideas, formidable enough to carry a novel with mediocre characters and plot. And so it proves, for although Vinge’s writing in Fire Upon the Deep is much improved from his earlier week, it was the novel’s ideas that won it enough votes to tie for the 1992 Hugo for Best Novel.

That’s not to say the plot and the characters are bad, exactly. The book’s “good guys” are pleasant-enough company, with the exception of Pham Nuwen, who displays none of the charisma the narrative imputes to his character (and which Vinge would more convincingly render in 1999′s sort-of prequel Deepness in the Sky). Vinge takes his characters to interesting places, forcing them to try to work out who they can trust and how far while under the greatest possible stress, but their reactions to the unprecedented events of the narrative (the destruction of multiple stellar civilizations for the Beyonders, the arrival of aliens for the Tines) are often less than convincing. As for the plot, it’s a widescreen adventure yarn that’s a good deal less exhilarating than it ought to be due to some awkward pacing and an ending that needed some better setup to be truly satisfying. It’s a good novel, but its parts are greater than their sum.

One of these great parts is the principal antagonist, Lord Steel, who at first seems to be a laughably cardboard villain. Like a Nazi in an Indiana Jones movie, he’s willing to kill anyone who gets between him and the power offered by the crashed starship, and do it in the name of a poisonous ideology. Although the Flenserist philosophy’s rejection of empathy and worship of cold-blooded rationality could have been used to satirize or otherwise comment on the excesses of techno-futurism, Vinge never seriously explores their ideas. Lord Steel is just a Bad Guy, the sort of Bad Guy who is fully aware and totally comfortable with the fact he is a Bad Guy, which is disappointing and fairly boring.

Except Vinge takes boring Lord Steel and throughout the novel puts him in situations that force him to play against type. Lord Steel wants nothing more out of life than to be the boring Bad Guy, but the only way he can harness the power of offworld technology for world domination is by convincing a young human boy he’s actually a good guy. Rather than twirling his metaphorical mustache, he has to endure hugs and act as a surrogate parent for both the human boy and a young Tine. Worst of all, he has to do this under the gaze of his feared master, Flenser…kind of. If Flenser was really present, he’d be in charge and Steel would be comfortable in the familiar role of chief minion, but Flenser is only kind of present. Trapped by traditionalist enemies before the novel began, Flenser took the radical step of breaking his six member pack into three pairs that were forced into three other packs. Avoiding detection, one of these packs, originally a schoolteacher named Tyrathect, returned to Flenser’s stronghold as the starship crashed. But the others did not survive, which means Lord Steel is still in charge, struggling to play the part of gentle father figure while someone who is two thirds schoolteacher and one third history’s greatest monster watches and critiques his performance.

The Lord Steel character is a fun element in what is overall a fun and idea-filled book, but I suspect readers who prefer character-driven narratives or stylish prose will find the novel unsatisfying. Judged on its ideas, it still stands out from the science fiction crowd, and (no doubt in part due to Vinge’s computer science background) has held up surprisingly well for a twenty-year old book. It’s been too long since I’ve read Deepness in the Sky to compare them, but Fire is easily the best of Vinge’s other novels, including the recent sequel, which will soon be reviewed in this space.

Unfortunately, on the most recent reread I liked it less. Oh, it’s a good book all right, but great? The writing seemed creaky in places, especially near the beginning, and the seams in the story were more obvious to me, giving the novel a texture like premodern writings assembled from divergent sources. Dianora’s story is a tragedy that owes a great deal to Hamlet (though it hides it well enough I didn’t notice until just now) whereas Devin and his happy-go-lucky musician revolutionaries are upbeat and optimistic despite dangerous setbacks and bloody battles. The Ember Nights and Castle Borso segments feel like they are from still a third and perhaps fourth source.

But while I don’t like Tigana as much as I used to, I find it more interesting than ever. It’s a useful book for thinking about the fantasy genre in general because it stands with one foot in the Tolkienian tradition and one foot in the modern world (and occupies a similar position in Kay’s career, between the Tolkien/Lewis derivative Finovar Tapestry and his almost completely mundane historical fantasies).

Prince Alessan certainly feels like an old-fashioned character. Much like Tolkien’s Aragorn, he’s a hero who risks his life for the common good. Not only is he intended to be a role model for readers, within the story he’s a role model for the regular-guy-turned-hero protagonist Devin. This is old-fashioned because in what I would call a modern fantasy novel, characters like this are not allowed to succeed. His closest analogue in A Song of Ice and Fire is Eddard Stark, whose sense of honor and even mercy lead to disaster both for him personally and his entire nation. In Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy the equivalent character is the wizard Bayaz, for whom virtue is a cloak for his ruthlessly self-interested motives. In Tigana, no one comes out and says that Alessan is a good person because he’s noble (they don’t even say that as the Prince’s heir he’s the only legitimate ruler of Tigana) but all the characters from the nobility are good and honorable (Alessan, Sandre, and Brandin) whereas the true villain of the novel is a rich man trying to buy his way to power (Alberico).

That much was common in the epic fantasy of the 80s and 90s, but Tigana is also old-fashioned in its strong emphasis on nationalism. The setting is based on medieval Italy and the story is centered on the effort to unite the disparate provinces of the Palm into a single nation that can rule itself rather than be dominated by foreigners. An analysis of the degree to which the modern English-speaking world is post-nationalist is out of the scope of this essay, but I would argue that for all the patriotic symbolism and rhetoric that remain in politics, nationalism is on the way out and has been since World War II. Yet Tigana, published in 1994, is unashamedly a cheerleader for national pride.

But Tigana is also at least in part a modern fantasy novel, and as such it is not at all unaware of the critiques of nationalism. Epic fantasy outside the “gritty realism” brand of Martin and Abercrombie is frequently accused, and often justly, of being counter-revolutionary, where the revolution being referred to is that of France. Whatever the results of the French Revolution specifically, few would argue the revolutionaries weren’t on the right side of history in the debate about the divine right of kings, so the unconscious monarchism of stereotypical epic fantasy tends to inspire ridicule. Anyone who writes such a novel, the thinking goes, is either hopelessly ignorant of the real conditions of life in the middle ages, or else they haven’t thought about it at all and are mindlessly following the tropes of Tolkienian fantasy. The nationalism of Tigana isn’t quite so retrograde, but on the other hand there can be no doubt that within the novel nationalism is consciously espoused, challenged, and defended.

It is a measure of how committed Tigana is to questioning its own nationalist premise that the characters do not agree about the central conflict of the novel. The saintly Prince Alessan is the last Prince of Tigana, which has been under foreign occupation for many years. At the beginning of the novel Alessan recruits the protagonist Devin by a patriotic appeal to Devin’s Tiganan identity. Since many of the other characters are also from Tigana, it would be easy to assume that their goal should be to free Tigana from occupation. Certainly his mother thinks that to work towards anything else isn’t just a bad idea but a betrayal of Tigana’s lost generation.

But that is not Alessan’s goal. He wants to free the entire peninsula from occupation, not just Tigana. Early in the novel he makes his case to men of a different province conspiring against a different foreign occupier:

“Two facts,” the man called Alessan said crisply. “Learn them if you are serious about freedom in the Palm. One: if you oust or slay Alberico you will have Brandin upon you within three months. Two: if Brandin is ousted or slain Alberico will rule this peninsula within that same period of time.

This is a pragmatic argument: the whole Palm must be freed and united or else foreign powers will dominate it. But even here it is couched in ethical language about the “freedom in the Palm”. What Alessan means when he says freedom here, and what everyone means using the word freedom throughout the novel, is different from the modern use of the word. This is not freedom spoken of in the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the freedom to live one’s life without the King or Congress infringing on one’s natural rights. This is a strictly nationalist conception of freedom: freedom from foreign rule.

Typically, modern stories that advocate nationalism will do their best to conflate these two meanings of “freedom” to prevent the audience from questioning the virtue of the protagonist’s cause. For example, in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart the English are shown repeatedly abusing the natural rights of the Scottish, making them unfit rulers by Thomas Jefferson’s definition rather than forcing the audience to consider what might have motivated the historical William Wallace. Tigana doesn’t take this way out and even goes out of its way to show that foreign rule has had many beneficial effects. The presence of the Tyrants has ended the chronic feuding and constant wars of the various Palm provinces, saving countless lives. The Tyrants have also nearly exterminated bandits and brigands, making the roads much safer. Their courts support musicians, poets, and other types of culture, no small concern in a novel where most characters are musicians. Why endure war and all the inevitable suffering that accompanies it just to return to what will likely be less effective rule?

It’s all the more interesting that Tigana introduces these critiques given Kay doesn’t have any intellectual answer to them. That his sympathies lie with Alessan is made clear by the novel’s two sideplots, the Castle Borso scenes and the Ember Night sequence. Alienor and Castle Borso seem to be present in the novel solely to set out an idea (clearly author-endorsed but nevertheless extremely dubious) about the effects of “tyranny” on sexual practices. I put tyranny in scare quotes because the Alienor’s relationship to her foreign overlord seems unlikely to be different in any way to her previous arrangements with the duke of her province. The Ember Night section is an ill-conceived effort to give a political revolution cosmic significance by introducing a metaphysical threat against the whole world (well, it’s a little unclear, so perhaps just the peninsula?) and dispensing with it after about thirty pages. Here again, it is the “tyranny” (i.e. foreign rule, no matter how enlightened) of the Palm that has left it open to cosmic disaster.

All of this comes to a head toward the end of the novel, when love for Dianora and lingering anger at the loss of his son spur Brandin into renouncing his home of Ygrath and acclaims himself King of the Palm. Viewed dispassionately, to modern eyes this represents the fulfillment of everything Alessan has fought for. Brandin has lived on the Palm for twenty years, surely enough time to be considered naturalized, and he’s marrying a native. Moreover, he’s campaigning to defeat Alberico and unite the Palm into a single nation strong enough to resist future invasions. Inspired by this new nationalist platform, the common people rally to his banner, so he even has a democratic mandate (not that any of the novel’s characters ever seem the least interested in democracy). Although Brandin still maintains the spell that prevents people from hearing the name of Tigana, he even removes his punitive taxation on “Lower Corte”, providing them with the same benevolent rule his other provinces enjoyed. Surely this is wonderful!

But this just makes Alessan afraid. This is exactly what he said he wants to happen, but there’s just one problem: Brandin is unacceptable to him as king. The closest thing to an explanation the novel offers for this is the fact that Brandin still maintains the spell suppressing Tigana’s name, yet Alessan previously prioritized the “freedom of the Palm” over the restoration of the word Tigana even to the point of becoming estranged from his mother. If he brings his small force into the final battle on Brandin’s side, the result is sure to be unification of the Palm, but he’s willing to jeopardize the victory over Alberico in a far less likely scheme to defeat Brandin as well. The cynical explanation is that Alessan’s true desire is that he and no one else rule the Palm, but I think the real message is that Brandin is unacceptable because he was born in Ygrath, and that while he may have spent twenty years in the Palm, he’s not a native and never can be.

This isn’t stated, because as I said, Kay doesn’t offer any intellectual defense of the critiques of nationalism. His argument on behalf of nationalism is emotional, something typical of nationalist art but less common in modern fantasy. Characters in most fantasy novels love and hate other people, but few authors are better at showing characters who love their country than Kay. In Lions of Al-Rassan he puts this talent in service of a story that shows how patriotism can put friends on opposite sides of a destructive war, but in Tigana all his efforts are put toward making the reader understand and sympathize with the characters love for the Palm in general and Tigana in particular. It is this patriotism for a province he never knew, for instance, that drives Devin to abandon an increasingly lucrative career as a singer for the life of a revolutionary, a life to which he brings no applicable skills except that same patriotism. While reading the novel, I can almost buy into the idea myself.

But when I put the book down and think about it, nationalism doesn’t seem like such a good thing. I called Tigana a historical fantasy, but it is far less connected with real history than Kay’s later books, and no where more so than the thoroughly ahistorical depiction of nationalism without liberalism. The hero of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was a passionate advocate of universal suffrage, land reform, and the emancipation of women. In this his ambitions were frustrated and none of these things were achieved in the reunified Italy, because the real historical equivalent of Alessan (Victor Emmanuel II) didn’t see any reason to give up the power he had risked so much to obtain. Tigana presents a much more positive and successful version of the Italian reunification (and tells a fun adventure story while doing so), but in the process it purges what to a modern observer seems like the most important goals of the original unification movement in the first place.

This isn’t a review of Time Traveler’s Wife, but bear with me while I assert this is nonsense. Time travel is not a metaphor for anything in Time Traveler’s Wife, it’s just time travel. The thing in itself. Despite its mainstream publication, Time Traveler’s Wife sets out in a very science fictional way to sift through all the ramifications of its particular flavor of time travel. To reduce time travel to being only a metaphor is to ignore the large portions of the novel spent examining the many aspects of the protagonists’ relationship that are unique to their science fictional situation and therefore completely absent from any real world relationship.

That said, it’s very easy to overstate the degree to which modern criticism, mainstream or otherwise, forces science fiction and fantasy into allegorical or metaphorical boxes. Even if it still shows up from time to time in reviews and interviews by mainstream critics and even authors, these days mainstream fiction is full of fantastic and science fictional elements that are mostly played straight. Genre started out as just a marketing category and to a marketing category it has returned.

I feel the best way to understand How to Live Safely in the Science Fictional Universe is to realize that, despite the trend away from the reductive approach to science fiction by the mainstream, this is a novel which is committed like nothing else I’ve ever read to employing science fictional elements for allegory, allusion, metaphor, and symbolism but never, ever for their literal meaning. I just said that today science fiction is just a marketing category, but when people suggest that it is something else, they usually are referring to an approach to fictional speculation. The author posits something that does not currently exist and then works out the implications. Not only is this technique central to most (not all) of what we call science fiction, it’s the foundation for alternate history and even quite a bit of fantasy as well.

But this is not a technique employed by How to Live Safely. It’s true that various science fiction tropes appear. The protagonist has a time machine. He has a job, in fact, as a time machine repairman, journeying to where time travelers have broken down and fixing their machines for them. The fulcrum of the book, as revealed in its opening lines, is the protagonist shooting his future self. You could write a literal science fiction novel about these things, and so many time travel stories have been written I am confident someone has already, perhaps several times over. But right in the opening pages, Charles Yu signals that none of this is to be taken literally. The time machine has a “Tense Operator” and as the book opens it is in “Present-Indefinite”. If that’s not enough, the fourth (or fifth, depending on how one counts) paragraph is as follows:

The base model TM-31 runs on state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology: a six-cylinder grammar drive built on a quad-core physics engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered environment, such as, for instance, a story space and, in particular, a science fictional universe.

That pretty much lays it out there, if the reader actually reads it. That might not happen, for at first glance this looks like technobabble, like Star Trek namedropping tachyons or more recent fiction’s handwaving about string theory or nanotechnology, and thus one’s eyes may skim over it. But it’s not really technobabble, or rather the technobabble is confined to the adjectives “six-cylinder” and “quad-core”. Most people will have to look up the word “diegesis” but otherwise a little scrutiny should reveal that what this paragraph is saying about the TM-31 is that it is a vehicle for navigating a science fiction novel.

I almost feel like that’s a spoiler, but that paragraph really is the fourth one, and that’s really what those words mean. What’s amusing about this is that the typical science fiction reader will assume those sentences are meant to be allusive, not literal. They might think to themselves, as I did when I first read this paragraph, “He’s using language and tenses as a loose metaphor for the physics of time travel…that’s pretty clever!” But no: this paragraph is literally true, and perversely that means that time travel in this novel is not literal time travel at all, but instead a loose metaphor for the way people think about the past and the future.

Consider the matter of the “Present-Indefinite”. This means he’s not in any particular time or place, but rather sitting between universes. He’s been doing so a long time, in fact. If you’re like me, your mind immediately starts trying to massage this into something that’s consistent with the way you think time travel and multiple worlds might work: “Let’s see, so there are multiple universes, and his machine lets him move between them, but in doing so he travels through some sort of intermediate zone, like hyperspace in Star Wars or that business with the tubes in the Bill and Ted movies, but that zone isn’t part of anything we would call a universe, so maybe it’s like the “space” between branes in m-theory, except he’s experiencing linear time while he’s there, which means his time machine is really a sort of pocket universe with its own space-time…”

Were this a typical science fiction novel, further developments would allow me to refine my internal speculations about the nature of this curious between-universes space and lead me through an exploration of the implications this sort of travel has for humanity. But, in fact, it is never developed further, and other revelations about the story’s metaphysics mean all of the Present-Indefinite concept makes progressively less and less sense, not more. My error was trying to apply concepts from (speculative) real world physics. The Present-Indefinite isn’t really the gap between universes, it’s a metaphor for the way an person sometimes feels stuck in their circumstances, unable to progress to something better or even to regress into a worse situation. The genius of the novel is that despite the Present-Indefinite only being a metaphor and not actually making any kind of physical sense, it is still consistent with the story’s metaphysics, because the metaphysical system of the novel is not that of the real world or a supposed physical universe, but that of, well, a novel.

The author has a great deal of fun developing his peculiarly literal metafiction. The protagonist’s name is Charles Yu, just like that of the author. Also like the author, this protagonist writes a book called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and in Escherian fashion this fictional book is literally the same book we are reading. He has a dog that “doesn’t exist” in that it was part of a different story, got retconned out, and then through some physically incoherent process ended up getting taken in by the protagonist. The story takes place in “Minor Universe 31″, which is described as follows:

Thirty-one is a smallish universe, slightly below average in size. On the cosmic scale, somewhere between shoe box and standard aquarium. Not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it. Despite its relatively modest physical dimensions, inhabitants of 31 report a considerable variance in terms of psychological scale, probably owing to the significant inconsistency in conceptual density of the underlying fabric of this region of existence.

Tolkien referred to the building of a fictional world as subcreation, and the here we see a science fictional interpretation of that concept: the novel as a pocket universe. When you translate the terms in the quote above from those describing universes to those describing novels, you get the following accurate description of the novel: “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a smallish novel, slightly below average in length. Not long enough for space opera and anyway shelved with literary fiction. Despite its short length, it intensively develops a few characters, but necessarily this depth comes at the expense of the rest.” Elsewhere, the physics is described as being “only 93 percent installed” by the “builder-developer” of the universe, which I read as a metafictional apology for things like the Present-Indefinite not actually making sense when taken literarlly.

What you think of all these layers of elaborate metafictional artifice is a matter of taste and expectation. If you haven’t read it yet, hopefully reading this review will help you set your expectations properly, but that still leaves us trying to account for taste. It will strike some as too pleased with itself, too distancing, too affected. Others will find it fresh and stimulating. There’s nothing new about metafiction, but rarely is it pursued so exhaustively as it is here. But even though there is no genuine science fiction world underlying all the sly winks and inside jokes, there is a genuine story. All of this material is working in service to a single theme, best summed up in a sentence from relatively early in the book:

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

Once again, interpreted in terms of physical reality, this is nonsense. “Within a science fictional space” it says, again pointing to the fact we are speaking of a story’s reality, not a physical reality. Now, there’s actually a pretty good argument to be made that even on these terms it’s still not true. The thesis of How To Live Safely is that, when given a time machine capable of taking them to any point in all of the universe’s vast history, people use it to relive some unhappy moment of their life, even though they know the metaphysics of time travel prevents them changing it. This strikes me as untrue even (or especially) in stories, where there are plenty of examples of characters using time machines to go to all sorts of places far removed from their own lifespan. But if I can humbly venture a small correction to the text, I would say it would have been true had the sentence instead begun: “Within this science fictional space…” Within this particular novel, time travel is a metaphor for the human memory and imagination. Within the human mind, memory and regret are indeed necessary and sufficient to “time travel” in one’s imagination back to the low points of one’s life. Likewise, the relationship of this metaphorical time travel to paradoxes is clear: you can cry over spilled milk, but you can’t change the fact you’ve spilled it. Thus time travel in the novel must obey the maxim popularized by Lost (“Whatever happened, happened”), even though when considered as a rule of physical reality this concept doesn’t harmonize well with the novel’s assertion of the existence of multiple universes (an assertion made necessary by the conceit that the novel is a pocket universe, seeing as there are, after all, a lot of novels).

The novel’s story is an emotional development of this memory/time travel metaphor. The protagonist grows up in a somewhat unsettled home. His father is obsessed by his conviction that he can invent a time machine and thereby become rich. Too distracted by his hobby to do well at work, his father’s efforts impoverish rather than enrich him, while also robbing him of almost all the time he would otherwise have spent with his wife and child. His wife is deeply unhappy about this but can do nothing to change his mind. His child, the protagonist, does the only thing he can think of to get access to his father and joins his father’s efforts as soon as he’s old enough to help. The father eventually uses his time machine, which may or may not be working correctly, to disappear into the future and leave his family once and for all. The mother, despairing of the present and still longing for family togetherneess, immerses herself in a “time loop”, a sort of virtual reality recreation of a happy family dinner, complete with a young virtual protagonist and his virtual father, that replays again and again for years. As for the protagonist himself, he gets a job as a time machine repairman and eventually goes off to sulk in the Present-Indefinite, the point at which the novel begins. The backstory, then, provides examples of a father whose mind is stuck in a future that may never come, a mother who is pining for a past that may never have happened, and their now grown-up child who is stuck in the present.

All this is established early on, and the rest of the novel simply deepens the portraits of these three characters while constantly elaborating the story’s metafictional architecture with further tricks and jokes. Although the time travel metaphor is the novel’s centerpiece, the narrative never stops referencing scientific concepts and then undermining them via metaphors, like in this passage from the protagonist’s retreat to the Present-Indefinite in the opening of the story:

[The TM-31's door insulates] against temperatures ranging from, at the low end, about half a degree above absolute zero to, at the high end, about a million degrees Kelvin. Hot, cold, people’s opinions. All of it just bounces off. In addition, you can install an aftermarket cloaking device, so that the unit can be made invisible with the flick of a switch. You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you might even forget yourself.

I’ve used a lot of quotes in this review because this is an unusual novel and one that by its nature will spark a wide variety of reactions. The book was very well received when it was released last year, both in mainstream and genre circles, so certainly many people really enjoyed it. Personally, I liked how clever and well-thought out the metafiction was, but my enthusiasm is limited by the nagging feeling that there was too much artifice and not enough story. Your mileage can and will vary. If you go in looking for serious scientific speculation, the story’s habit of introducing scientific concepts only to pivot them into metaphors, demolishing any sense it is describing a functional world in the process, is just going to tease and infuriate you. If you admire clever writing, or at least don’t let it keep you from connecting emotionally with a fairly poignant story about a family that, despite good intentions, doesn’t quite fit together, you might really love it. I’m glad I read the book, but I found myself somewhere between those two camps, enjoying the creativity on display but still wishing the world depicted was internally consistent.

Since I decided early on I would read the novel as soon as it was published in the US, I only skimmed last year’s reviews and didn’t know anything about it.  Fairly or not, however, knowing it had made such a big splash, I couldn’t help but expect a dynamic new voice.  Instead, while reading The Quantum Thief I frequently wondered whether the story reminded me more of William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons.

The male protagonist of Quantum Thief begins the story in bad shape.  At one time he was a player, but now he’s out of the game.  Someone in need of his talents fixes him up and, joined by a female operative and a talking computer, he takes on one last mission.  This describes Quantum Thief‘s Jean le Flambeur, but it also describes Neuromancer‘s Case and Use of Weapons‘ Zakalwe.  The present day story of Quantum Thief sticks fairly close to the Neuromancer template, while Jean le Flambeur’s past is slowly explored much as Zakalwe’s history is the backdrop for Use of Weapons.

I don’t consider this to be a severe criticism.  Originality is overrated, and in my view most SF novels would be improved by a little more similarity to those two books.  Also, when I finished reading the novel and went back to those early reviews I had skimmed before, I found comparisons being made to other novels as well…but different novels.  Rich Horton lists no less than seven authors that he and others saw as influences, but not, alas, Gibson and Banks.  The closest, albeit the most obscure, is John C. Wright, whose Golden Age trilogy also depicts a far future society with a dizzying array of novel technological and social constructs.  Although Wright and Rajaniemi’s stories both begin with the protagonist encumbered with technologically-inflicted amnesia, they are otherwise quite dissimilar.  From early in the trilogy’s first book, it is clear that Wright is chasing some large philosophical questions about reason and human values (and later is willing to subordinate the story to long discussions of same), whereas Quantum Thief is focused on telling an entertaining story.

That’s not to say the novel has nothing on its mind.  In the opening section of the book, the story gestures toward a number of genres and subgenres.  There’s a space battle that suggests we are in for a Peter Hamilton-style space opera, there’s an engaging chapter where a detective solves a mystery and seems to be set up as a foil for le Flambeur (Holmes to his Moriarty, or perhaps Javert to his Jean Valjean), and the description of the Martian city of Oubliette with its use of Time as currency and its citizens’ alternation between slave and master raises the prospect of a Banks-style investigation of life in the far future.  All these prove to be feints.  If the novel has a subgenre within SF it would actually be that of the Big Dumb Object, for Oubliette proves to be an elaborate and intriguing creation, but in the end the novel’s concerns are primarily personal, even psychological, in nature.  Jean le Flambeur has led a long and interesting life, most of which he no longer remembers, but one thing is clear: he is a thief.  Rajaniemi carefully shows us this is not just his profession, but his hobby, and even his personality.

The course of the novel takes us through an exploration both of the Oubliette (the outer world) and Jean le Flambeur’s personality and personal history (the inner world), finally coming to a conclusion that brings the two together very neatly.  A little too neat, actually.  I feel bad criticizing a carefully planned and executed ending when most novels seem to go off the rails in the final third, but I can’t help but feel the unification of the novels’ inner and outer worlds rather cheapens the outer world.  Oubliette is much more interesting, and just plain cooler, when it is a strange future city with bizarre customs, as it is for most of the novel, instead of what it ultimately becomes: a puzzle out of his past for the protagonist to solve, a clockwork nostalgia piece.  This feels like the world of a solipsist, where everything encountered reflects back on the person at its center. This is a convenient device for a novel of psychological discovery, but it makes what otherwise is a huge and wildly diverse solar system seem small and lonely.

The novel has a reputation as hard SF, and depending on your definition it may be, but I think a lot of this stems more from Rajaniemi’s biography (he has a Ph.D. in mathematical physics) than the novel itself.  Though the word “quantum” is in the title and name-dropped in various ways throughout, the novel’s quantum mechanics and nanotechnology are generally indistinguishable from magic. The one exception is the use of entangled particles to communicate.  I am not a physicist but I am given to understand this is, well, nonsense. For some reason it keeps appearing in science fiction anyway.  I am a software engineer, however, so I was pleased to see an interesting use of public key cryptography in the story (though I couldn’t tell you if anyone not already familiar with it will make heads or tails of the presentation).  More unusually and without explanation, the story seems to take a position against strong AI. It’s never mentioned, but in a novel often reminiscent of Banks it is conspicuous in its absence. There are talking computers aplenty, but they all function using “gogols”, which turn out to be uploaded human minds.  Here the worldbuilding did not quite convince me.  Many jobs that seem like they would be automated in the far future, like shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and groundskeepers, are performed by physical human beings working for a paycheck, while gogols are used in ways that seem to belie their software nature.  For example, Oubliette’s automated systems require hundreds of thousands of gogols to operate.  Each of these gogols is the uploaded mind (the soul, really) of a different person.  Unfortunately, this menial labor is boring and even degrading.  So why not just use a single mind (of a particularly loathsome criminal, perhaps, or else a public-spirited volunteer) and copy it?  Some SF stories employ pseudo-scientific explanations to prevent the copying of uploaded minds, but the fact such copying is possible is established in The Quantum Thief‘s opening scene and is a key element in the ending.  Perhaps Oubliette is an unusual case (it is implied that using “real people” to keep the city running has beneficial effects on the psychology of the citizenry) but if so the main characters, most of whom are new to Oubliette, do not find it surprising.

It might not be surprising that a novel so evocative of earlier genre stories isn’t very accessible, but there are far more obstacles to the unschooled reader than just the many tropes and allusions. As someone who loves John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and who liked Neal Stephenson’s Anathem a great deal, I am willing to be patient and learn some vocabulary to read a good book.  But a few chapters into Quantum Thief, I was feeling anxious: I had absolutely no idea what most of the terms being thrown around meant and I was starting to wonder if I ever would. If you find yourself in the same position, take heart and soldier on.  This novel is the product of a decades-long backlash against the infodump, and its merciless barrage of new terms made me start to question my own sympathy for the anti-infodump cause.  Unlike Brunner and Stephenson, Rajaniemi for the most part does not coin neologisms, instead using words from other languages.  Neologisms often sound silly, but at least they carry clues as to their meaning.  Rajaniemi’s terms will prove difficult for all but the most polyglot of readers.  Unlike Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which used latinate words so that his English-speaking readers would glimpse a hazy sense of the meaning but not the specifics, Rajaniemi takes words from modern languages distant from English: gevolut and tzadik from Hebrew, zoku from Japanese,guberniya and sobornost from Russian, and so forth.  There might be a sort of globalist realism in this approach, like the TV show Firefly‘s use of Chinese, but I’m not sure the effect is worth the effort it requires from the reader.  The good news is, once the story settles down into its primary Martian setting the avalanche of new terms ends, allowing the reader to finally get a solid grip on the language through context.  I just hope readers don’t miss out on a good novel because of this learning curve.

And this is a good novel, despite my various complaints.  It’s deep in conversation with past stories to an almost unique degree. I doubt I’ve ever referenced so many other works in a review, and out of ignorance I’m sure I’ve missed plenty more (the protagonist’s name is apparently a reference to a French film, for instance). I should say that although the book has a better and more satisfying ending than many standalone novels, the story is not actually finished, and some number of sequels will be forthcoming. Hopefully these will better explore the colorful solar system Rajaniemi has created and spend more time working out the implications of its societies.

Almost immediately after I found it, the novel was reprinted for the first time in twenty years and it’s still in print today, so for good or ill the rarity is gone.  Does the book itself live up to its reputation?  Reading it a few years ago, I indeed thought it was a masterpiece.  Maybe it’s for the best that I read it during a lapse in this blog, because I was so impressed I doubt I would have had anything intelligible to say.  It’s a complicated book and from the moment I finished it, I was looking forward to reading it a second time, but rather than dive right back in I decided to wait so I’d have a little perspective.

I ended up waiting a little longer than I intended, but I’ve finally reread it, and I think I understand it a lot better now.  I’m afraid it’s not quite as great as I initially thought…that is to say, it’s “only” an extremely good novel.  This time, I was less awed by the setting and the ideas, so I noticed that the characters were thin, the plot was tangled and confusing, and above all the story’s pacing was all over the map.  The Dragon Never Sleeps is an epic space opera story that stretches across many years, and some of them pass in just a few pages.  Some online reviews say that Cook made major cuts to what was originally a much longer manuscript, and while I haven’t seen anything from the author himself confirming this, it certainly reads like this happened.  Genre books are usually accused of being too long, but this is one book that definitely would have benefited from being longer.  There are a number of brilliant scenes, most notably the battle in “end space” midway through the novel, which I think is probably the greatest space battle scene I’ve ever read, but these only make the points where the story suddenly lapses into summary all the more frustrating.

If there are problems with aspects as important as the plot and the characters, you’d be forgiven for wondering if this is really a good novel.  To that I can only say, I read a lot of books with good characters, and…well, somewhat less, but still a fair number, with good plotting and pacing, but books with truly interesting ideas are rare.  The Dragon Never Sleeps has a lot on its mind.  Like most such novels, it’s simultaneously in conversation with the genre’s past while pointing toward the future.  The connection with the past is in the book’s use of tropes from Frank Herbert’s Dune.  Like Dune, this is a novel of squabbling feudal houses who rest uneasily beneath the Imperial yoke and endlessly plot to advance themselves.  As for the future, the novel’s “Artifacts” (human-like people grown in vats with often fanciful physiological alterations) reminded me strongly of China Miéville’s Remade, although this book was so obscure I doubt there was any direct influence.

All that said, the closest association is probably with the fiction of Iain M. Banks.  The Dragon Never Sleeps was originally published in 1988, just a year after Consider Phlebas, so again I don’t think there’s a direct connection, but the two space operas cover a lot of the same ground.  I have purposefully delayed providing any kind of plot summary until now so that you can see how closely it tracks with Banks’ work, particularly Consider Phlebas.  Thousands of years in the future, humanity has spread across a huge span of the galaxy and no longer has a clear idea of its own origins.  Order in Canon space is kept via huge spaceships with idiosyncratic names that house powerful artificial intelligences.  Although billions of beings both human and alien live peacefully in human space, there are powerful alien species who not only do not share the values that animate Canon government, but actually despise them.  Given this antipathy, war is inevitable, a war that spirals into a clash of civilizations spanning many years and countless star systems.

If you changed “Canon” to “Culture” that would be a pretty good start to a summary of Consider Phlebas.  I really enjoy the Culture novels, particularly the early ones, so it’s not surprising I really enjoyed The Dragon Never Sleeps.  I also like Dune and Miéville as well, for that matter.  The Dragon Never Sleeps doesn’t have the elegant plot of Dune, the fantastic imagination of Miéville, or the humor and cynicism of Banks, but it’s at least as well thought out as the rest of them.  What makes it especially interesting is the fact that, once you get past the surface similarities with the Culture I mentioned, the two settings are completely different.  These days the Culture tropes are so strongly identified with Banks’ own thinking that it’s startling to see them deployed for Glen Cook’s very different aims.

I cheated a bit when I said Canon ships have “idiosyncratic names”.  The Culture is rooted in the values of our modern world, so the irreverence and irony of its famous ship names, like So Much For Subtlety or What Are the Civilian Applications, fit perfectly.  In contrast, here are a few names of the Canon’s Guardships: VII Gemina, XII Fulminata, and XXVII Fretensis.  The first time I read the novel I only learned the source of these vaguely familiar-sounding names after I had finished, but I’m sure Glen Cook expected his readers to recognize them as names of Roman legions.  Sure enough, the government of Canon space is rooted not in the modern world but in the declining Roman Empire.  It’s an old system that has outlasted the conditions surrounding its now-mythological founding and expanded with a series of  invasions until it’s overstretched and under significant pressure both from outsiders eager to tap the wealth of Canon space and from the presence of aliens within Canon space itself, where conquest and immigration have brought them in greater and greater numbers until they are now are a majority.

There’s nothing innovative about putting the Roman Empire in space, and indeed Dune did pretty much the same thing (albeit with the Byzantine Empire rather than the original Roman Empire as such).  But this is allusion, not allegory, and the Roman Empire was just the start of Glen Cook’s thinking.  For starters, there’s no Emperor.  At least, we’re never told of one.  There’s talk of a civilian bureaucracy, but the power lies with the legions…in this case, the Guardships…and they don’t pretend to follow any orders but their own.  Cook hasn’t made the mistake of just transplanting a primitive government into space.  The Roman legions were loyal to the person of the Emperor, a crudely effective mechanism but problematic when it came time for succession.  The Guardships’ allegiance is not to an Emperor or even a government, but to Canon law.  Canon law is only a few steps up from the law of the jungle, true, but the Guardships enforcing it are ruthless and, owing to a technological advantage that is enforced as part of that law, nearly invincible.  Warships of any kind besides Guardships are illegal in Canon space, so they have a complete monopoly on violence.  When an entity outside Canon space provokes them, they invade, destroy, and annex the offending civilization.

Since no force internal or external can challenge the might of the Guardships, the resulting system is extremely stable.  A person can be killed, a ship can be destroyed, but no one, whether an alien from outside Canon space, a human citizen, or even a Guardship commander, can change the system.  The dragon of the book’s title is not a real dragon, or even a person.  It’s the Guardships, or to be even more accurate, it’s the procedures the Guardships and their supporting bases follow.  The system is effectively immortal, but in maintaining itself it necessarily must hold the culture it protects in stasis.  Technological progress has been halted lest anyone acquire Guardship-equivalent technology.  Cities on a hundred planets are constructed from the exact same prefabricated habitats.  Power is concentrated in a quasi-feudal commercial nobility so that the only ones with any power have too much to lose to dare crossing the Guardships.

But nothing lasts forever, and Cook shows how the system has drifted over time.  Slowly the aliens outside Canon space are catching up to the Guardships’ technology levels.  When Canon law was written, humans were the vast majority and so were the only ones with citizenship and the franchise.  Now, millennia later, aliens are the majority, with much of the rest made up of Artifacts that by law aren’t considered human either.  Even the Guardships themselves prove not to be immune to the passage of time.  Although each Guardship has an artificial intelligence at its core managing the automated systems, they are commanded by human crews.  When not needed, humans are stored in suspended animation.  When they are killed, they are recreated from vats using brain scans.  This means that even the youngest soldiers were “born” thousands of years ago at the dawn of the Canon era.  Humans who distinguish themselves are “Deified” through personality uploading and serve as a sort of Senate to advise the two Dictats (read: Consuls) who command the ship in a manner reminiscent of the Roman Republic.  These two types of immortality have kept the Guardships from changing the way the outside world has over the long years…in theory at least.  Guardships aren’t often in contact with each other, and ship cultures have diverged.  Worse, the artificial intelligences have grown eccentric.  Most Guardship crew characters in the book are from VII Gemina, a ship that initially seems to have weathered the centuries more or less without major changes, but others are…different.  One character groups the various Guardships into “Normal”, “Strange”, and “Weird and Deadly”.

The Dragon Never Sleeps has a large ensemble cast, but ultimately the narrative is focused on Kez Maefele, who (like the protagonist of Consider Phlebas) is a longstanding enemy of the Canon and therefore gives us a detached perspective.  Most of the those opposing the Guardships do so out of a hunger for wealth or power, but he’s different.  Long ago, an alien species called the Ku fought a long war against the Guardships, and during their war they used increasingly elaborate genetic engineering to improve their soldiers.  Maefele was the culmination of this program, a strategic genius who led the legendary Dire Radiant, a Ku fleet that refused to surrender with the rest of the species.  Born too late to turn the tide in the war, Maefele watched first his species’ government but then his rebel fleet ground into dust by the implacable power of the Guardships.  He escaped the final defeat and has been in hiding for uncounted years, for his engineered genes are not programmed to age.

All that time has led him to question the morality of fighting the Guardships in the first place.  He hates the inequality of Canon society, but he knows that if the Guardships were overthrown, Canon space would be at the mercy of outside powers who would be significantly worse.  But when he is recruited by the latest faction hoping to destroy the Guardships, he finds himself agreeing to help.  Like the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series, he is an individual of such genius he can destroy an otherwise invincible organization, but as someone who was created and not born, he is also a cog in the Ku war machine even a thousand years after their defeat.  Fighting the “dragon” is his purpose in life, something he ultimately can’t turn his back on even if the war will mean the unnecessary deaths of countless innocent people.

Reading Dorothy Dunnett showed me that the proper use of a genius character is not to simply face him off against lesser antagonists (surprise: the genius wins) but to leave the reader wondering if the genius should win.  Kez Maefele has both the desire and the genius to defeat the Guardships, but doing so would mean abandoning his moral principles.  This seems like a contradiction that’s impossible to resolve, but Cook has a solution.  Narratively, the ending to The Dragon Never Sleeps is a mess, but for readers willing to endure a few bumps on the road the underlying story being told is at least the equal of Iain M. Banks’ best works, like Player of Games and Use of Weapons.  The Dragon Never Sleeps is a novel that shows just how great space opera can be, even if in some ways it falls short of its own potential.

But even leaving aside the cliffhanger, I was happy to have read the Chaos Walking trilogy all at once because the second two books turned out to be so different from the first.  Had I read and reviewed Knife separately I would have spent a long time making points that would have been rendered thoroughly obsolete by the second book.  Looking at the trilogy as a whole, I can be a lot more efficient.

Let’s start with the story.  Todd is about to turn thirteen, the youngest boy in his village…  On second thought, let’s skip the summary.  Another benefit of being late to the party is there are literally hundreds of Internet reviews of The Knife of Never Letting Go available if you really don’t know anything about it.  If you haven’t read Knife, I certainly recommend it.  It may be written at a YA level, but there’s plenty here for adults to chew on (I’d hate to think all the chewing I’m about to do is just me being long-winded).

So, with the understanding there will be some spoilers, though I’ll try to avoid anything too blatant, let’s talk instead about what sort of book Knife is.  Viewed dispassionately, it’s a big collection of clichés familiar from genre and YA fiction.  An orphan boy grows up safe but dissatisfied.  He gets forced out into a wide world that he knows little about, and soon he finds what little he knew was wrong anyway.  He meets some friends and makes some enemies.  Like many YA protagonists before him, he learns he can’t trust adults, even well-intentioned ones, and further he is frequently rejected by people who don’t understand him.  Their mistake: not only would it be in their best interest to listen to him, Todd is far from the bad person they think he is.  In fact, he is Special, possessing unique virtues that make him a particular danger to the story’s villains.

I say “viewed dispassionately” but Patrick Ness makes this fiendishly difficult.  The opening chapters of Knife are a textbook example of how to draw the reader into a world.  First there’s Todd’s cute talking dog.  Then there’s Noise, the telepathic broadcast that the men and animals of Todd’s world can’t help but spew into the world around them.  Right after that, there’s the strange and tragic history of Todd’s village, populated only with men because the women died from the same process that brought about Noise.  And then there’s the mystery that awaits Todd in the swamp outside the village.  And so on.  The relentless novelty of the early chapters eventually slows down, as it must, but when it does the narrative has picked up a desperate urgency that propels the story through to the ending without ever stopping for breath.  The combination of the fascinating world with the seductive tropes (they are clichés because they work) would by itself make a fantastic novel, but the whole story is told in a beautiful first person.  I could have done without the misspellings, but otherwise Todd’s voice is a strong asset to what was already a very strong novel.

No wonder, then, that The Knife of Never Letting Go earned acclaim from critics and readers alike.  It received excellent reviews both in major newspapers and genre circles, not to mention a variety of awards.  With the benefit of a certain amount of hindsight, however, there is a little bit of equivocation in some of the book’s reviews.  Everyone agrees it’s a great read, but what exactly is it about?

Many assumed it was about gender relations, and indeed the book won the 2008 Tiptree award.  Certainly the fact that Noise is a gendered phenomenon, affecting men and not women, looms enormously over the book’s conceptual landscape.  But what does it mean?  In her review, Abigail Nussbaum wasn’t impressed by what the book seemed to be saying, but she ultimately concluded that the reason Knife “makes such troubling statements about women and the relationships between men and women is that it isn’t really concerned with either.”

In interviews at the time, the author claimed that Noise was actually a metaphor for the information overload of modern life.  Great novels could be written about this, but Knife is not that novel.  Although animals make a small amount of Noise and population centers make an indistinguishable roar, there really is no connection whatsoever between Noise as depicted and modern information culture.  On the back of the American edition of The Ask and the Answer Ness is quoted as saying “if the Chaos Walking trilogy is about anything, it’s about identity, finding out who you are.” This at least is true, but saying this about a YA novel is close to tautology.  More interesting is the initial clause, which strikes me as rather defensive.

If I were writing after only reading Knife I would be strongly tempted to say that, in view of the cliffhanger ending, the book is really just about getting you to buy the second book in the trilogy.  Reading that second book, however, changed my perspective completely.  The Ask and the Answer is in many ways the complete opposite of The Knife of Never Letting Go.  In Knife Todd and Viola never stopped running, but in Ask they are stuck in place.  They spend Knife together for most of the book, and their mutual struggle is the foundation of the bond between them.  In Ask they spend almost the entire book apart.  Throughout Knife there was a single goal that was constantly at the forefront of their minds, but in Ask they don’t know what to do.

Beyond those differences, The Ask and the Answer almost completely eschewed the tropes and clichés that Knife relied upon.  The attributes I summarized in the previous paragraph sound like the recipe for a frustrating and meandering novel.  Usually weak and passive protagonists, no matter how likeable they are, make for unsatisfying narratives.  But Patrick Ness makes it work.  Because they are separated in difficult circumstances, there are some misunderstandings between Todd and Viola, but instead of taking the usual route of having the relationship fray close to breaking and setting the stage for a big reconciliation in the third novel, Ness lets them patch things up fairly quickly whenever they are together.  This works well because the novel isn’t dependent on relationship drama, even if that relationship is prominently featured. Instead, Ask focuses on its protagonists’ struggle with the world around them.

And what a tough world it is. Knife was a seductive novel to the point of being manipulative of its readers, so I was shocked to find that Ask is brutal and uncompromising.  Todd is forced to work for the Mayor and his bullying son Davy, and although initially what he does is relatively innocuous, before long he finds himself having to do increasingly unethical things while at the same time becoming a symbol of the Mayor’s oppressive regime.  Viola, for her part, ends up with the resistance against the Mayor’s rule, but from the beginning the Answer and its leader Mistress Coyle are presented as ambiguous at best. The safe and manipulative version of this sort of story is Ender’s Game, where Ender is constantly reassured that the bad things he does aren’t in any way his fault, that he shouldn’t feel guilty, and that the fact he does feel guilty when he doesn’t have to proves what a wonderful person he is. When Todd and Viola feel guilty there’s no easy appeal to good intentions and no clear cut absolution. Most readers will instinctively feel that collaborating with the Mayor’s regime is wrong, but we watch Todd making reasonable choices every step of the way, only to find himself doing horrible things.  Seeing the results of this process through Viola’s eyes, we can’t help but wonder: are we sure those choices were really as reasonable as they seemed?

One side effect of this focus on the Mayor’s oppression and the opposition to it is the decline in importance of gender issues.  It’s true that the Answer is mainly women and the Mayor’s army is all men, but Ness makes it clear that this is a tactical choice for both.  Men with Noise can’t sneak up on someone and they can’t hold secrets, making them valuable to the Mayor and generally useless to the Answer.  But nevertheless there are plenty of men who sympathize with the Answer and help support its goals.  Ultimately, gender is eclipsed by colonialism concerns as the novel explores the relationship between the citizens of Haven and the planet’s indigenous aliens, the Spackle.  By the end of the novel it’s clear that while the Mayor is certainly evil, the citizens of Haven he’s oppressing have much to answer for themselves.

While most of the risks The Ask and the Answer takes pay off, there are a few problems.  The first is the incorporation of Viola’s perspective.  While this was both desirable given the importance of her character and necessary due to the structure of the story, Ness is much less successful at giving her a unique voice than he was with Todd in the first novel.  Worse, using very short chapters that go back and forth between Todd and Viola also weakens the effect of Todd’s voice that was such an asset to Knife.  And while I was glad that Ness didn’t make the novel all about artificial obstacles to Todd and Viola’s relationship, constant repetition of “Todd!” and “Viola!” eventually became somewhat tiresome.

The trilogy’s concluding volume, Monsters of Men, introduces war into the equation as the Answer rises up in open rebellion and the Spackle begin a crusade to avenge the atrocities humans have inflicted upon them.  Unfortunately, this is where I thought things started to get away from Ness.  The setting he did such a wonderful job creating in Knife becomes frayed and questions mount.  Even as armies march and forces gather, the story’s scope seems to shrink to a handful of characters and locations.  We never get a very clear idea how many people are with each faction and what they think.  Given the importance of popular opinion to the plot, this is a major weakness.  Ivan, for example, seems to be intended as a sort of proxy for opinion within the army, but this is a poor substitute for the real thing.  Likewise, when her people eventually turn against Mistress Coyle, it seems to come out of nowhere.

Each major plot event left me with questions about numbers.  After the big battle, for instance, how many troops does the Mayor have left?  His army only numbered in the hundreds at the beginning, after all, and they suffer numerous casualties.  How many humans are there outside Haven?  In Knife it was one settlement out of many, even if it was the largest, but in the next two books it seems to be all of human civilization.  And how many Spackle are there?  Sometimes the Spackle army is spoken of as being “all of them” and other times there are references to there being (as you might expect) millions more Spackle all over the planet.

It becomes clear in Monsters of Men that for all its virtues the world of the Chaos Walking trilogy is extremely thin, to the point of sabotaging some of its narrative power.  Much of the confusion over just what the trilogy is about can probably be attributed to this problem.  Looking back over the three books, there are plenty of important issues on which the story seems to have something to say, but almost all of them turn out to be feints.

Take religion.  Early in The Knife of Never Letting Go much is made about the mutually reinforcing nature of the Mayor’s rule and Aaron’s preaching.  Aaron as a villain has such a dominating presence in Knife that it never occurred to me until after I had finished to ask: just what is it he preaches, exactly?  Something hateful, apparently, but the details are never provided.  In fact, religion ought to be really important given New World is a colony founded by religious separatists, but although Christian terminology is occasionally used we never even get confirmation they are Christians, much less what part of that spectrum they might fall into.  Some reviews call them fundamentalists, but while they destroyed much of their technology in pursuit of a simpler life, those aren’t the fundamentals that word refers to.  Perhaps Ness was trying to intimate these are Christians without actually offending anyone, but surely in the post-Pullman era it’s not necessary to pull any punches in this regard?

Then there’s gender.  I’ve already talked about the difficulty in trying to read any kind of gender message into Knife, but the trilogy as whole only minimizes it further.  The fact women have no Noise is never explained and indeed becomes increasingly improbable as the trilogy reaches for universalist interpretations of Noise in the third book.  What’s particularly strange is when I was reading the beginning of Knife there seemed to be an important clue: when Todd first approaches Viola, he starts crying for no reason, and the obvious explanation is he is telepathically receiving Viola’s grief for the loss of her parents.  If that were true, then women would have a different form of Noise, not none at all.  But this is never mentioned again.  Either Ness never intended this reading (but then why the crying?) or else he got cold feet, and rightly so, about the stereotypes he’d be reinforcing by giving women emotional Noise in contrast to men’s analytical variety.

The Ask and the Answer seems to turn the focus to colonialism.  The human settlement on the planet of New World is remarkably similar to European settlement of the, well, new world.  Religious separatists come over, fight with the natives, and ultimately push them out.  But again, unanswered questions prevent any real development here.  What sort of interactions did the initial settlers have with the Spackle?  Who started the war?  Even though most characters except the protagonists lived through this history, we hear almost nothing about it.  Todd and Viola’s difficulty learning a fairly minor detail about this even becomes a plot point in Monsters.  Even worse, the New World settlers seem completely without self-awareness when it comes to their interactions with the Spackle.  No one makes any comparisons with Native Americans, Africans, or any of the other historical precedents.  They don’t even use terminology in common use today.  This seems to have been a deliberate choice by Ness because when characters from Viola’s fleet arrive they seem as astounded by this as I was, but no explanation for the original settlers’ historical blindness is ever presented.  In any event, the colonial metaphor eventually breaks down in Monsters of Men when the Spackle have to decide whether to commit genocide against the human settlers.  Unlike most natives interacting with colonizing Europeans, the Spackle eventually get a military advantage to go with their moral authority, and in their calculations of cultural assimilation they take it for granted that thanks to Noise it’s the humans who will be assimilating into their culture, not vice versa.

Monsters of Men seems to focus on war.  The title is even taken from a quote by Todd’s surrogate father Ben: “War makes monsters of men.” While that’s certainly true, exactly how relevant it is to the story is never clear.  The Mayor and Mistress Coyle are each monsters of a kind, but has war made them that way?  Were they reasonable people when they arrived on New World?  Once again, we don’t know, because no one ever talks about this extremely relevant history.  The Answer is said to have originated in the first Spackle war, for example, but what use would their methods be against the Spackle, who have no cities or infrastructure to blow up and no roads to force troops near bombs?

It’s interesting, by the way, to compare this with a certain other famous YA series.  The Harry Potter books don’t otherwise have very much in common with the Chaos Walking trilogy, but they too eventually thrust their protagonists into a mess created by the older generation.  By the end of the last Harry Potter book, one gets the feeling J.K. Rowling was more interested in the story of Snape, Dumbledore, Harry’s parents, and the original war with Voldemort given the prominence of flashbacks and backstory.  In Chaos Walking Patrick Ness seems determined to keep the focus on his protagonists in the present, but it struck me as being considerably too far toward the other extreme.  If you want tell a story about how the new generation arrives to fix the previous one’s mistakes, you can’t skip over just what those mistakes were and why they made them.

So in the final analysis, what is the Chaos Walking trilogy about?  When I quoted Ness talking about identity, I stopped before he went on to talk about how it depicts identity in the face of conformity.  Well, that’s close, but I don’t think conformity is the right word.  I would say the Chaos Walking trilogy is really about complicity.  In Knife we learn that the men of Prentisstown are bound together by a clever if impractical ritual that ensures they are all complicit in the town’s evil.  Todd is sent away to avoid this loss of innocence and he spends the rest of the book being hounded by Aaron as well as the Mayor’s pursuing army.  Knife gets into some trouble, in my opinion, when it places this at the center of the plot.  In Prentisstown, it is the ability to kill that turns a boy into a man.  Todd, in turns out, is defined by his inability to kill.  Except the Spackle that he kills midway through Knife.  Aliens don’t count, we’re told.  Meanwhile the book does a great job setting up situations where most people, including Todd, would believe it is right to kill someone.  Futhermore, it does conspicuously little to argue the opposite.  Indeed, when the fight with Aaron comes down to kill or be killed, Viola kills him so Todd doesn’t have to.  While this is presented as something of a sacrificial act on her part, ultimately nothing much comes of it.  Has Viola been irrevocably stained by the act of killing?  If she was, why is it never mentioned again?  If not, what would have been so bad about Todd doing it?

More generally, I think this all just falls apart when one stops to think about it.  If killing the Spackle didn’t count, how come Todd felt so guilty about it?  Surely that guilt, that complicity, is what’s so psychologically important about killing?  Yet for the rest of the trilogy people continue to talk about how Todd can’t kill, or perhaps can’t be allowed to kill lest he be changed irrevocably thereby.  This seems to me precisely backwards.  It’s the person being killed who gets changed irrevocably, not the killer.  And is killing really an action that’s distinct from violence, rather than one possible result of violence?

Thankfully, while the Todd’s-not-a-killer business never goes away, it becomes considerably less important in The Ask and the Answer.  The emphasis is still on complicity, but now in the context of immoral organizations like the Mayor’s regime and the Answer.  Except for the Spackle incident, Todd escaped Knife with his hands clean, but almost immediately in Ask he’s trapped into doing all sorts of unpleasant things on behalf of the Mayor.  Other than the over-the-top torture scenes, this never becomes preachy or pat.  Is Todd wrong to “just follow orders”?  The book leaves that to the reader to decide.  A few years ago, Battlestar Galactica tried to do something similar with its occupation storyline, but that was an exercise in moral equivalence.  Look, we’ve made previously sympathetic characters into extremists!  Here, Todd never becomes an extremist and is never sure whether he’s doing the right thing or not.  I think this is a much more honest (not to mention less manipulative) approach: the person being trapped here is the character Todd, not the reader (or viewer).

In Knife I was extremely skeptical that the Mayor was chasing Todd specifically, despite several characters saying that somehow Todd’s evasion of complicity represented a threat to his new order.  Plenty of people had defied the Mayor’s orders in the past, after all.  I assumed it was just a pretext for an invasion.  But in Ask the Mayor turns out to have an Emperor Palpatine complex.  Todd is strong and could be the greatest of the Mayor’s servants, we are told over and over again, although why this is so and where he came by this strength is never stated.  Midichlorians, perhaps.  Somehow the Mayor knew this even before Todd left Prentisstown and he is determined to turn Todd into his apprentice even at the cost of alienating his loyal son Davy.  Star Wars has made this a familiar enough pattern, but I’m not sure it actually exists in the real world.  Dictators like the Mayor, it seems to me, vastly prefer loyalty to ability.  Successful dictators, anyway.  Monsters adds a fairly silly redemption subplot with much back and forth over whether the Mayor, who murdered someone in cold blood at the end of Ask only a few days before, has suddenly become redeemed by his proximity to Todd’s powerful virtue.

This, then, is the one cliché that Ness does not abandon after Knife: Todd is Special.  In Knife he is Special because he cannot kill, then in Ask he is Special because he is unusually strong in the Force, and in Monsters of Men even the Spackle think he is Special.  According to the Return, Todd is the only human who felt remorse.  Really?  The only one?  This can perhaps be attributed to the Return’s limited exposure to humans, but this is still hard to swallow.  Poor Viola, the one who should actually have been important due to her connection with the incoming settlers, spends the first two books playing second fiddle before finally getting to be jointly Special with Todd in Monsters of Men.  For some reason, the two of them represent the only hope for a peaceful resolution to a war that no one actually wants.  Why they are the last, best hope for peace?  Perhaps being young, they are free from the history and prejudices of those who lived through the initial settlement, but in a simple agrarian society aren’t there lots of young people?

Unfortunately, after courageously leaving his protagonists powerless for most of The Ask and the Answer, Ness finds some fairly contrived ways to give them control over events in Monsters.  It’s not preposterous both would have influence: Todd is basically the Mayor’s adopted son while Viola is the only one the scouts from her fleet will trust.  But then Todd is talking about trying to command the army while Simone is deferring decision-making authority to Viola.  Also, none of the adults question the strength of Todd and Viola’s relationship.  All of this would be understandable if they were, say, twenty, but they’re thirteen.  Maybe Todd’s farming society has a different adulthood threshold than ours, but in most other areas Viola’s people seem fairly equivalent to us.  This is complicated by another thin point of the world: there are almost no romantic relationships other than that of Todd and Viola.  There are a couple of married characters, but they are either old or unimportant.  After the Mayor waltzes into Haven and separates the men and women, most characters seem to regard this as a logistical inconvenience, not a disruption of hundreds of existing families.  Perhaps Lee is meant to be, like Ivan, representative of a broader phenomenon, but he is separated from sisters and a mother, not a wife.

In the end, the transition of Noise from metaphor into magic culminates in some wizard duels where Todd and his antagonist cast magic missile at each other until someone loses.  This actually sounds (and sometimes reads) worse than it is, since lurking beneath all this is the idea that Todd is genuinely connected to other people while the story’s various villains merely control them.  His magic is the stronger magic for this reason, I guess.  I’m not sure that the suggestion that humanity will eventually develop a sort of hive mind is any more convincing here than, say, when Asimov did this in his later Foundation novels, but it does make for a pleasantly optimistic conclusion to the trilogy.

I don’t read YA very much, so I can only really judge Chaos Walking against the adult genre fiction that I typically read (although this would probably be a fantastic book for classroom discussions in schools).  I hesitate to call the trilogy great when, after all, I just got through making all sorts of complaints.  But even if I have reservations about how it handles some of its ideas, the fact I’m motivated to write at such length about them shows there’s a lot more here than in most books.  I would have liked a little more coherence to the ideas and a lot more depth in the world, but this is a trilogy that is constantly thought-provoking while still remaining an enormously engaging read.  That’s more than enough reason for me to recommend it wholeheartedly.

I seem to have something of an odd/even pattern with this series.  I loved the first book, Gardens of the Moon, and really enjoyed the third, the fifth, and now this, the seventh.  The three even numbered books, beginning with Deadhouse Gates, I’ve been a little cooler on.  Although it was my favorite of those three, I thought even Bonehunters moved too slowly, especially in its first half.  I’m not sure that Reaper’s Gale moves any faster but I liked it more.  The difference, I suppose, is the injection of characters and situations from Midnight Tides, plus some interesting new elements like Redmask’s rebellion and the Tiste Edur officials struggling to assert control over Letherii society.  Despite the huge variety of viewpoints and storylines, I was always interested in what would happen next.  I can’t say for sure without going back and laboriously counting, but I think Reaper’s Gale might have the largest cast of any Malazan book yet.  The huge character list is also incredibly diverse: mixed in with the usual grumbling soldiers, secretive mages, and scheming politicians are characters like Shurq Elalle who were primarily used for comedic effect in Midnight Tides but now provide a new perspective on the other characters.  I think my favorite Malazan books are the ones like Memories of Ice and Reaper’s Gale where a lot of characters meet each other.  This is an odd criteria, but as I discussed when talking about Bonehunters, it’s these meetings that really move the story forward in the series.

Whenever you have an enormous fantasy book with a ton of viewpoints, an important question is whether it all comes together in the ending.  With Reaper’s Gale, the answer is: sort of.  Most of the storylines resolve, but instead of all tying together it’s messy and complicated.  Yet this is, if anything, a virtue.  This is a messy and complicated book, it’s true, but one thing you can say without a doubt about the series as a whole is that it believes that life itself is messy and complicated.  If everything was tied up in a beautiful bow the way, say, Brandon Sanderson wraps up his novels, it would betray the essence of the series.  And that’s not a slam on Sanderson, by the way.  His books see the world through a rationalist lens and their stories reflect that beautifully.  The Malazan series depicts a chaotic world, and fittingly the narrative itself is shot through with chaos.

From the beginning, however, the series has constantly set out one organizing principle: unveiling power invites convergence, something extremely dangerous and unpredictable.  The ending to Reaper’s Gale is perhaps the best example of this yet.  In the series’ early books, characters said that no god can directly rule a mortal empire because doing so would be such an overt display of power that it would cause a devastating convergence.  Well, as described in Midnight Tides, the Crippled God has put a mortal puppet, Rhulad Sengar, on the throne of a powerful empire, and sure enough, by the end of Reaper’s Gale there has been an at times literally earth-shattering convergence. Characters from almost every one of the book’s divergent storylines end up in the city of Letheras.  Again, in a typical fantasy epic, the author would attempt to give each character a part to play in the climax.  Erikson has way too many characters involved to make that work, and he wisely doesn’t try.  Each character gets a scene or two in the final chapters, but the climactic showdown with Rhulad involves exactly one other character.  Dozens of other characters, most of whom were in one way or another trying to reach the Emperor, instead run into each other with unexpected (and generally calamitous) results.  Poor Rhulad, vaunted instrument of the Crippled God combining strength and weakness, turns out to be far less invincible than everyone supposed, leaving him merely weak.  There are probably at least a dozen gods, ascendants, and even mortals who are stronger than him just in Letheras by the end of the book.  Somehow, despite a metaphysical system in which abilities are never more than vaguely defined, the results of all these confrontations seem to make sense.

Needless to say, in a book this size I didn’t quite like everything.  I believe I have finally put my finger on what has been bothering me about the soldiers in this series.  When discussing previous books like Bonehunters I wondered about the way the veterans seem to exercise a great deal of choice.  After reading Reaper’s Gale I think my real problem is the motivations of the soldiers in general.  I’m not a historian, but from what I understand, the closest analogue to the Malazan system of armies would be the professional legions of the Roman Empire.  And while with any human endevor there will be a range of reasons, for the most part I think Roman professional soldiers, as the term professional implies, were fighting for pay.  Whenever there was political instability, after all, the way to shore up the loyalty of the armies was to raise their pay.  The Malazan Empire is relatively young and doesn’t have the Roman history of instability, so it’s understandable that their outlawed armies don’t declare Dujek and later the Adjunct their Emperor or Empress the way Roman armies in similar positions invariably did, but still you’d think they’d be fundamentally in it for the money.

Erikson does a good job portraying the day to day life of Malazan soldiers: the grumbling, the camaraderie, the boredom…but compensation is rarely discussed.  Soldiers gamble, so they get money from somewhere, but they rarely have any chance to spend money otherwise.  The army at Aren stayed quartered in the city, but this was presented as an anomaly.  Both Dujek’s and the Adjunct’s armies seem to be permanently on campaign, not even quartering for the winter.  Nor is there much mention of the mobile village that followed ancient armies around supplying them with food and vices.  In Reaper’s Gale, we see the Adjunct’s army taking a huge sea voyage and then fighting a guerrilla war across a ruined countryside.  Their previous campaign in Seven Cities was a lot of marching around in the middle of nowhere by themselves…no merchants, prostitutes, or other money sinks.  If the soldiers are getting paid, then they must be saving it all.  Many ancient armies didn’t pay their soldiers since they were expected to loot potentially large sums from captured cities, but we’re told explicitly that Malazan armies don’t do this, or at least are expected not to do it.  One final compensation for the typical Roman soldier was retirement: after a certain number of years, once the soldiers were too old to fight any longer, they were given money and land in the countryside.  Characters like Fiddler spend a lot of time thinking about “getting out” but they seem to mean desertion.  State-sponsored retirement is never mentioned, as far as I can remember.

Fittingly, given this payroll-free environment, every character’s back story that we learn about sounds similar: born into difficult circumstances, enlisting in the military was the best way to escape.  The exception are those who were fighting for some other army and joined the Malazans simply because they couldn’t think of anything else to do, like the former Seven Cities rebels Kalam, Quick Ben, and Corabb, all of whom end up joining the exact military unit they were previously fighting without ever coming up with a strong reason for doing so.  Having signed up for military service for what it was not, rather than anything it was going to give them, it’s not surprising these characters are confused about whether they should stay in the army.  On one hand, there’s the constant risk of injury and death, not to mention a great deal of privation.  On the other hand, the army is the only functional organization they’ve ever encountered and it allows them to hang out with their friends.

I’m not sure how realistic this image of soldier psychology is, but at least it mostly avoids glorifying warfare.  Whatever these people are, they aren’t heroes.  There has been a lot of discussion lately about the place of heroism in modern fantasy (Martin Lewis has a good summary).  I was interested, then, to see that the character Udinaas spends a lot of time using his present circumstances to illustrate the difference between stories told of heroes and how things really are.  This kind of thing goes back at least as far as Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings, but Udinaas and his companions are on a long journey where they don’t meet very many people, so they have a lot of time for discussions like this.  I don’t want to exaggerate the degree to which this ought to be seen as Erikson commenting on the fantasy genre because throughout the series he’s shown an interest in tribal life, and a lot of what Udinaas says might apply better to the oral storytelling he’d have heard as a Tiste Edur slave.  But Udinaas is part of a disparate group of people on a quest for a magical artifact, so it’s hard to ignore the possible reference to modern quest fantasy.  Not surprisingly, there are a lot of inversions of the “generic” quest (I put it in scare quotes because I’m not sure how many books are really published anymore that unironically use the old 1980′s quest template): the members of the group mostly dislike and distrust each other, they all have different and even contradictory motivations, and the more powerful the character the less they are liked and trusted.  Silchas Ruin is certainly no Gandalf.

So far, except for the fact this is just one strand among many, I might be describing Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy (particularly the second book, Before They Are Hanged, which if memory serves is the one with most of the quest narrative).  But there’s a very different feel here than what Abercrombie was up to in his trilogy.  Abercrombie’s Bayaz was a sort of anti-Gandalf: ancient, scheming, and cynically manipulative.  Silchas Ruin is a rather different figure.  He tolerates but does his best to ignore his weaker companions, and they have no illusions about his motives, or the fact that if they weren’t so much weaker than he was, he would consider them a threat and destroy them.  There is manipulation and deception in the Malazan series, but it’s not emphasized anywhere near the way it is in Abercrombie’s work.

Erikson ultimately strikes me as far more hopeful than Abercrombie (with the disclaimer that I haven’t yet read Abercromie’s latest two novels, nor the last three Malazan books).  The end of the quest subplot in Reaper’s Gale is almost comically straightforward.  After the long trip, no miracle occurs, and everything happens exactly as expected.  Silchas Ruin is far stronger than anyone else present, so he gets his way.  Anyone who tries to stop him gets run over.  But afterward he goes back to Letheras, and facing true convergence there he’s not at all successful.  The powers of the Malazan world are far too numerous and too varied for anyone to manipulate the outcome of conflagrations of that kind.  Admittedly, the Crippled God, Shadowthrone, and Quick Ben all claim to be guiding events and one might eventually be revealed as a mastermind, but so far it seems doubtful any of them are really in control.  Earlier I called this wild and unpredictable mix of powers chaotic, and while that may not seem comforting, it still seems much better than the First Law world full of cynical manipulation.

The other dispiriting element of Abercrombie’s work that has attracted the label “nihilist” is his depiction of a world with a high fantasy veneer–quests, great struggles, and so forth–but with low fantasy motivations and outcomes underlying it.  Important people do things because they are greedy, power-hungry, or outright malicious, his work seems to say, and talk of good and evil is just their way of manipulating fools.  If people are suffering in the First Law trilogy, it’s often because they are manipulated according to the selfish desires to those in power.  Even more often, they suffer for no reason whatsoever.  Admittedly, the Malazan series is not the polar opposite of this.  There’s quite a bit of suffering due to the manipulation of others, and certainly there are tragedies that prove meaningless (and thus all the more tragic).  But the series’ high fantasy trappings have (so far, at least) not been false.  There really is a war between the gods, and despite some extenuating circumstances the Crippled God seems to be more than a little evil.  Those opposing him are rarely (if ever) wholly good, it’s true, but for most of them mixed somehow into their self-interest is the idea that this evil must be opposed.  Viewed against this backdrop, most of the suffering endured by characters in the series is dignified in some small degree by the distant context of this struggle.

I’ll have to finish the series before I can say anything definitive about how I feel about the Malazan approach to fantasy.  Personally, my primary criticism of Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy was that it seemed to ignore the possibility that those in power sometimes really do genuinely believe their rhetoric.  This is a dangerous omission, in my view, because the lesson of the twentieth century is surely that ideology can be extremely dangerous, and much suffering could have been avoided if certain political leaders really were the cold blooded Machiavellians that Abercrombie depicts.  In the huge variety of characters in the Malazan trilogy, there are many whose actions are dictated by their psychology, but ideology seems to influence only a few: Karsa Orlong, definitely, and perhaps Corabb.  But with the motivations of many of the most important characters like Shadowthrone, Laseen, and the Adjunct still obscure, all this could change dramatically over the course of the last three books.

At this point in the series, it is easy to recommend. If you haven’t read any of the Malazan books, start with the excellent Gardens of the Moon, not here. If you aren’t going to like Bonehunters then it’s extremely unlikely you liked the first five books enough to get to this point. As you would expect in book six of a ten book series, not a whole lot gets resolved, and my usual practice of reviewing series rather than their individual novels seems like a good idea at this point. But since I’ve already been reviewing these books individually, it’s worth considering how Bonehunters develops the ongoing concerns of the Malazan series and the degree to which it shares the flaws and virtues of the earlier books, at least as I see them.

More so than previous books in the series, Bonehunters gets off to a distinctly slow start. The first third of the novel reintroduces dozens of characters from previous books and sets them in motion. Characters are traveling every which way on the Seven Cities continent, and since mapmaking is apparently a popular pastime for the series’ hardcore fans, it would be interesting to see an animation of the various characters and groups of characters criss-crossing the continent with their journeys. Much of the content of these traveling scenes takes the form of introspection, as characters think about where they’ve been (probably to help readers who didn’t recently read the previous books), where they are now, and what they hope to be doing in the future.

It would be easy to overstate the problem here. It’s not boring, exactly. Erikson’s characters are thoughtful and have interesting observations. But in a series this long, for someone like myself who has been reading these books in a relatively short time period, it’s inevitable there’s some repetition. How many times have characters in these books looked at the landscape around them and meditated on how the passage of time has laid low cities and wrought many changes while still leaving evidence of the ancient patterns? More pragmatically, much of the first half of the book is spent with the titular Bonehunters, and their concerns are much the same as they were in House of Chains: the poor morale of the army, uncertainties about its commander, and so forth. The plot doesn’t help matters, for like several previous novels in the series there is a big set piece battle in the middle of the book, and the novel’s climax is such a direct echo of Deadhouse Gates that it must have been intentional: Laseen is confronted over her conduct (though a rather different conclusion is reached than in Deadhouse) and again Kalam has to have a cartoonish battle with dozens of disposable Claw ninjas in Malaz City.

Perhaps my biggest problem with the introspect moments is they tend to emphasize one of my least favorite elements of the series, namely the way the characters so often seem weakly motivated. Why do Apsalar and Cutter work for Cotillion? Why is Fiddler still in the army? What is Kalam doing with his life now that he’s out of it? Where is Karsa Orlong going? The characters themselves wonder about these questions to varying extents, which is never a good sign. Since one of the series’ principal themes seems to be humans standing up to their gods and seizing their destiny, it’s frustrating not to see a little more, well, seizing.

This notion of character motivations is an interesting one in light of the fact many of them are in the Malazan army. Fundamental to military service throughout history has been the abdication of agency. A soldier follows orders and therefore does not have the freedom, or the burden, of deciding what to do. Although Bonehunters spends a lot of time portraying the life of the ordinary soldier, it rarely shows the compulsive side of military service (making a joke of it, for example, when Ganoes Paran is mistaken for a deserter). Veterans like Fiddler and Gesler are frequently presented with opportunities to desert without any consequences. As these characters have some contact with the overarching high fantasy storyline, returning to the army and remaining subject to its discipline is to some degree an endorsement of the Adjunct’s objectives, and by extension those of Empress Laseen and the Malazan Empire as a whole. Fiddler, understandably, finds the choice difficult, for he doesn’t have even remotely enough information to judge Laseen, nor does the reader. Militaries in the real world can sometimes seem mysterious because their actions are the output of vast bureaucracies, but in the Malazan army the confusion stems from the leadership. The Adjunct is a mystery to everyone, and Laseen even more so. When Kalam confronted her at the end of Deadhouse Gates, Laseen seemed like some sort of mastermind. Confronted again in the similar scene at the end of Bonehunters, she seems weak and desperate, helpless in the hands of malicious advisors. Which portrait is more accurate? Who knows? Later books will settle the question, I assume.

Of course, not all the characters are aimless. Ironically, Icarium, a character who is defined by aimless wandering, finally gets a purpose in this book, and his scenes are some of the most entertaining. But the ruminations of the purposeful characters are even more frustrating since Erikson isn’t willing to give the reader more than the tiniest hint of what they know and what they are trying to do. Quick Ben, for instance, is full of plans as always, none of which are ever communicated to the reader. Ganoes Paran arrives in Seven Cities and is at the center of some of the book’s best scenes, but exactly what he knows and what he’s trying to accomplish tends to stay vague. In Memories of Ice, I was surprised I found it exciting when characters got together and talked about things. The reason, which I partially understood at the time, is that these conversations forced their motivations, ideas, and goals out into the open instead of being hoarded away from the reader’s view. This doesn’t happen often in Bonehunters, with characters sometimes going to improbable lengths to avoid cluing the reader into what’s happening (I’m thinking here of when Kalam, Fiddler, Apsalar, and Quick Ben are all traveling together and do their best to avoid talking to each other about their plans). I’m well aware of the narrative principle involved here. In a heist film, often the viewer isn’t told the plan, lest it become boring watching it actually carried out. But when this information is concealed over thousands of pages and dozens of viewpoint characters, it’s hard not to feel a little resentful toward the author, fair or not.

The differences in these two types of characters stem from the way the novel combines high fantasy and low fantasy. People like Quick Ben and Ganoes Paran are living in a high fantasy story as they struggle against the Crippled God and his allies. The soldiers of the Fourteenth Army, many of whom are colorfully fleshed out in the early parts of the novel, are in a low fantasy story about a military campaign. This allows us to view some of the same events from two very different angles, but it does make it that much more difficult for the myriad viewpoints to coalesce in the reader’s mind. The high fantasy characters tend to have strong motivations and clear goals, but they do their best to hide them from others, including the reader. The low fantasy characters are caught up in their machinations and wondering if they should be trying to free themselves, but they know even less than the reader about what’s going on.

The battle at Y’Ghatan is in the middle of the book, but it serves as something of a climax to the low fantasy side of Bonehunters. Certainly it brings the questions about motivation into sharp relief. Why are the soldiers risking their lives attacking Y’Ghatan? Is the rebellion in Seven Cities really a going concern? Leoman’s army is plagued by the same questions. Their rebellion has clearly failed, so what is there to fight for? Leoman, of course, produces a startling answer. The resulting battle is another of example of one of Erikson’s recurring motifs, the battle as hellscape. Y’Ghatan is a rather more literal manifestation of this than Pale and Capustan, though the effect is somewhat diminished by the repetition. The Fourteenth Army finds in Y’Ghatan the fires of hell, and the survivors must journey through what is again a literal underworld in order to escape. This, it is implied, is the sort of event that may forge the Fourteenth into something more than just a ragtag army. The Bridgeburners apparently had it easy: they just had to walk through Raraku. The idea that collective identities can ascend toward the divine just as individuals can is one of the most interesting in the Malazan series, and the contrast between the Bridgeburners and the Bonehunters raises the question: just what is required, here? Why isn’t it happening all the time? The mechanics of this is vague, as is everything magical in the Malazan series, and the scenes where Paran summons the ghosts of fallen soldiers muddy the waters still further.

I suppose I’ll have to wait for to find these answers until I read the concluding novels of the series. Certainly Steven Erikson said as much when he was responding to what I wrote about some of the earlier books in the series, feeling that it was presumptuous to speak about the themes of the series without seeing how they are fully developed. While the character of Ormulogun, official artist of Onearm’s Host, and his arguments with his “critic” Grumble are clearly a humorous take on the relationship of an author to his critics, Bonehunters also provides another model. In Deadhouse Gates, much was made about the importance of Duiker surviving to tell the story of the Chain of Dogs, although I was much less enthusiastic about this, assuming it would merely fuel more bloodshed. In Bonehunters we find that in Seven Cities, the Chain of Dogs is worshipped by a growing cult made up of the very rebels who once hated and feared it. In the Malazan Empire, on the other hand, slander has taken root which blames the Wickans in general and Coltaine in particular for the disasters that struck the Chain of Dogs and the army at Aren, resulting in vicious pogroms against Wickans. Only the survivors of Coltaine’s army in the Fourteenth know better. Duiker’s mission to tell the world the truth about what happened seems to have been a miserable failure. What are we to make of this? Is every historian helpless in the face of the biases and ulterior motives of readers? The answer is important because, with apologies to Ian Esslemont, surely the preeminent historian of the Malazan Empire is Steven Erikson.

Talion: Revenant is about a man named Nolan who works as a Talion Justice. The Talions are an interesting institution. At one time they were the administrative, judicial, and enforcement apparatus for an empire, but that empire fell long ago. The Talion organization survived, remaining aloof from the various successor nations and serving as an international peacekeeping agency. Most Talions are soldiers of one sort or another, working to stabilize the international order by training the armies of the post-Empire nations up to some minimum standard (presumably in exchange for payment that funds the Talion administration as a whole, although if that was directly spelled out I missed it). The exceptions are those of the Justice division. Like a fantasy FBI, they rove the countryside enforcing the common law of the old empire, usually working alone. Although generally a Justice is just an ordinary person whose authority is recognized by most nations, he or she does have a slightly magical sword and a tattoo that can remove a soul from a body in a particularly feared sort of execution. I don’t remember it bothering me originally, but now the thought of lone people roaming the countryside acting as judge, jury, and executioner sounds, ah, problematic. There are a couple checks on their authority: first, they have to report in detail to the head of the Justice division, but second and more importantly, the tattoo is tied to a ritual that supernaturally kills anyone who acts unjustly. If that still makes you feel uneasy, well, this is a book that questions how to properly administer justice, but not what justice is.

The book is structured so that “present day” chapters of the adult Nolan at work as a Justice are interleaved with scenes from his childhood training. At first, these training scenes mainly provide a colorful background, but eventually it turns out Nolan’s mission in the present will force him to face demons from his past and it all comes together. The whole thing is told in a first person narrative that is mildly didactic in its quieter moments (this is one of those fantasy novels where the protagonist takes the time to explain details about magic, culture, and so forth as they are encountered in the narrative) and choreographist when the fighting starts.

So is it any good? Well, not everything about it works. The childhood training scenes feel a little hazy and indistinct, with only three other students are given any characterization. It’s not Stackpole’s fault, but a year after this book was published, the first Harry Potter was published in the UK. While the worldbuilding of the Harry Potter books leaves a lot to be desired, the early books provided–and set future expectations for–a depth to the fantasy school experience that Talion: Revenant can’t hope to match with only half its narrative. There is also a little bit of a Mary Sue issue with many of these scenes as the teenage Nolan constantly performs amazing feats that outdo anyone in the history of the training system. Some justification for this is provided (Nolan came unusually late to Justice training so he thinks outside the box) but it gets to be a little much. Luckily, it’s counterbalanced by the adult Nolan chapters, as in that era Nolan is mainly known for certain high profile failures.

However, the principal selling point of the novel is the Talion organization in general and the Justices in particular. As a Talion Justice, Nolan is essentially a superhero. He wears a costume that conceals his identity, he has special powers (albeit modest ones), and, of course, he fights crime. His mission in the novel even requires him to adopt an alter ego. The Talions graft the superhero model on to a military structure, giving the book much of the appeal of both superhero and military fiction. Though technically not a soldier, Nolan’s friends from his training days were literally comrades in arms in increasingly military-oriented exercises and the requirement that he absolutely obey the orders of his superiors within the organization becomes an important issue as the novel progresses.

Talion: Revenant was apparently the first novel Michael Stackpole wrote, even if it wasn’t the first he published, and the prose has some of the awkward moments you’d expect from a first novel. Since most of the novel is spent exploring the nature and implications of the Talion organization, the rest of the world can sometimes feel like a stock fantasy setting. Stackpole definitely sets out to provide interesting twists on some of the generic ideas he uses, however. His elves are xenophobic warrior savages, for example, and in a particularly memorable sequence, his goblins turn out to live in underground colonies much like ants.

Despite occasional discussions about the proper role of fear in the administration of justice and some rather melodramatic climactic scenes, Talion: Revenant is content to be–and succeeds at being–a fun, adventure fantasy. Although apparently considered too long when Stackpole first wrote it, by modern standards it’s of average length and tells a single, self-contained story. Michael Stackpole has promised to write a sequel if the electronic version sells a sufficient number of copies, but rest assured it would be the old-fashioned kind of sequel, not a direct continuation.

This isn’t obvious at first, with the labored cod-medieval infodump in the prologue and the protagonist Prince Herric’s horror at having his engagement with the love of his life broken in favor of a treaty-sealing marriage with a child. Whatever reservoir of sympathy I might have had for hereditary nobility’s difficulties with arranged marriage has long since been exhausted by other authors, but Wood doesn’t end up making a huge deal about it. Herric moves on with his life because he’s got bigger problems: the unceasing raids by Viking-analogous northmen have brought Herric’s nation Athgar to the brink of collapse.

Although Wolf’s Cub is a vaguely Arthurian romance, the choice not to use the trappings of the elaborate monarchies of the High Middle Ages (the time when Arthurian legends got traction regardless of when the real Arthur, if any, might have lived) gave the story a pleasantly unique feel, at least for me. The monarchy of Athgar claims a direct connection to a mighty past, but it’s clear that while they live in the ruins of a magnificent civilization, the novel’s Athgarian nobility are a tiny warrior elite who have lost all the civic institutions that made a continent-spanning state possible. None of the pomp that I associate with medieval settings is present: the nobility is too busy with real combat to bother with stylized forms like jousting and dueling, the peasants are too close to dropping below subsistence level to levy in large numbers if at all, and with the low agricultural productivity cities and markets cannot be supported. This is a kingdom that, whatever its history, is in serious danger of collapse. Not to some dark lord, either, but to northmen sent raiding by population pressures at home.

This is still fantasy, so there is something of a dark lord in the picture. It seems the good old days were made possible by wise kings using wizards as a sort of civil service. But in the chaos surrounding the collapse and fragmentation of the old system, the wizards withdrew to a few mountain kingdoms and were persecuted whenever found in most of the small successor states. Athgar has its share of trouble with the neighboring wizard nations, but the question as to whether these wizards (thought to be irredeemably evil by a prejudiced populace) are really dark lords instead of rational political actors is a major concern of the Athgarian monarch given how weakened the nation has become due to the raiders.

I generally don’t read romance novels unless they are genre crossovers like Time Traveler’s Wife or A Civil Campaign, so I’m not really qualified to judge the romantic elements. All I can say is, I found Herric and his young bride to be sympathetic and believable. Unlike (I gather) typical romance stories, not only is their relationship is not really the center of the book but to a large extent it’s not even the center of their own lives. Perhaps their relationship is just a bit too understated, actually: the business of producing an heir is ignored (and not even discussed!) for quite a few years after it becomes possible, but I guess I can forgive the story this small anachronism.

Ultimately Wolf’s Cub is kind of hard to pin down, something that probably hasn’t done it any favors when it comes to finding an audience. It’s a character-oriented romance whose main character spends more time fighting battles than he does with his love interest. It’s a “gritty” fantasy in the sense that it takes place in a world of moral grays filled with bloodshed and difficulties, but its main characters are fundamentally good people whose lives are clearly destined to fulfill a prophecy of restoration. It’s also a book about the costs of war and the importance of peace that doesn’t try to shock the reader with descriptions of blood, entrails, and suffering. Finally, it’s a book that examines prejudice and the myths society tells about itself while also unironically portraying its protagonist as a hero. If there are other books along these lines (YA fantasies maybe?) I haven’t read them.

One final note: originally published in 1998 by a publisher who I believe went out of business, Wolf’s Cub and its sequel are back in print as ebooks. The death of the concept of “out of print” is the best part of the transition to electronic formats and I hope more authors do this as the market grows.