I wondered if there was little criticism because there simply isn’t much Science Fiction being written about the real effects of climate change in the first place? That there isn’t much to really interest Science Fiction writers?

He goes on to argue that climate change is too slow, too incremental…too boring for science fiction. In his response, Niall argued this sells science fiction short, and I agree with him (as did Mark, in the comments). But I do think Mark was right that science fiction writers don’t seem all that interested in climate change, and I think the limited ambition of Niall’s response to this specific point (well, Night Shade has published three climate change books recently) illustrates the issue. Obviously there are science fiction novels that involve climate change, but we need only compare with other tropes to see how muted the genre is on the subject. Zombies, anyone? Yes, most zombie fiction is probably best considered fantasy, but there are plenty of science fictional approaches to zombie fiction at the moment. How about spaceships? Pretty common, yes? And yet for decades it has been obvious that manned space travel of the sort envisioned in the heady early days of the space program quite distant from the present, and science has very little to say about zombies no matter how much authors might wave their hands about viruses or genetic engineering. In comparison, climate change is not just an important area of cutting edge science with large implications for the near future, it’s constantly in the newspapers and on television as people debate the extent of it and what ought to be done.

As always in these genre discussions, there’s a frustrating lack of empirical data to work with, so whether or not you find the above paragraph persuasive, concede for the moment that climate change is underrepresented. Why might that be? Is it just because the process is too slow and subtle? That doesn’t help, I suppose, but I’m willing to go a lot farther and assert that concern about climate change is philosophically alien to most science fiction authors and readers. Before I go into the reasons why, I will disclaim that this is going to entail the sort of unprovable, sweeping generalizations that tend to piss people off, especially those who feel said generalizations leave them out. The SF community is diverse (at least in some dimensions) and I’m not saying there aren’t people who love SF and are enormously concerned about climate change. I’m saying a subset of the community would prefer to read and write about something else. How large and influential the cultural subset I’m describing is (and whether it exists at all) something you’ll have to decide for yourself when I’m finished.

Here’s the short version of my argument: Science fiction is the literature of change, but the modern environmental movement is fundamentally conservative.

I expect the second clause requires some explanation, as I’m using “conservative” differently than the political definition in America or Britain. When he founded the American conservative magazine National Review, William F Buckley’s lighthearted description of its mission was to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” I’m not enough of a historian to say whether that was a good description of his movement in 1955, but it certainly has little to do with today’s American political conservatism, which has fundamentally revolutionary impulses. It’s a fantastic description, however, of the modern environmental movement, and in particular its campaign against carbon emissions. I would summarize the core climate change activism argument as follows: “Human civilization is emitting more and more carbon dioxide and, if this goes on, the result will be calamity. We must take swift measures to reverse this trend, and though the lack of fully developed substitutive technologies means this reversal will cause significant economic pain, the alternatives are considerably worse.”

Even though science fiction ought to be home court for any “If this goes on…” setting, I think there are many reasons why many in the science fiction community, even if they accept the conclusions of climate science, would prefer not to dwell on this argument:

• SF doesn’t have a strong naturalistic tradition. Yes, Dune is the most popular SF book ever, but vast numbers of SF books take place entirely within wholly artificial environments. Nature has, from the start, been something largely relegated to fantasy, where Lord of the Rings planted a strong ecological note deep within the genre’s subconscious. Unfortunately, fantasy is so conservative that it only rarely deals with the industrial revolution, much less climate change, but it does frequently put forward restoring balance to nature as an important goal, an idea that goes all the way back to the ancient polytheistic traditions. Science fiction, for its part, has from the start almost always rejected balance in favor of change.
  

• Environmentalism tends to be pessimistic about technology. Technological change created the means for our vast increases in carbon emissions, the ubiquitous technology of our daily lives requires energy usage we can’t sustain without carbon emitting power, and for a variety of reasons (some good, some bad) most environmentalists are deeply hostile to geo-engineering approaches to halting global warming, insisting on emissions reductions as the only answer. Dune, for all the power of its ecological content, looks very favorably on geo-engineering, and to a lesser degree so do the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars books. On the other side, Iain M. Banks was channeling the conservative nature of the environmentalist movement when he posited that in his enlightened far future, terraforming will be forbidden as an ecological crime, but unlike other elements of the Culture setting this idea doesn’t seem to have proved influential.
  

• Carbon emission arguments, whether by coincidence or some sort of psychological deep structure, strongly resemble religious arguments: “Certain things you like doing are, in fact, bad. If you continue in your wicked ways, nothing obviously bad will happen to you immediately. Maybe not even in your lifetime. But eventually the price must be paid. The details are complicated, but scholars far wiser than you have ascertained these truths. If I do not convince you, then you should read their writings, for not only does your sin imperil you, it endangers the entire community, and therefore we must urge you to help us spread these important truths to others. If people will not voluntarily comply, they must be compelled for their own good.” It has often been observed that science fiction has, at best, a distant relationship with religion, and while this is sometimes overstated it has been and remains true that most science fiction will at best avoid it. While the personal right to religion is widely accepted, if a character in a modern SF novel strongly believes that society should reflect the sin/punishment axis they are almost certainly a villain, or indoctrinated by a dystopian society.
  

• Climate science, at least in applied form, is the science of constraints. Science fiction is the literature of possibilities. Much as some might wish otherwise, SF is usually happy to ignore science when its constraints are getting in the way of a good story. The obvious analogue is relativity, a theory far older than climate change science and one universally believed among the SF community. Needless to say, relatively is depicted more frequently in the breach than the observance.

Those are all reasons why climate change might not resonate with some readers. Beyond those, there are also reasons particular to writers:

• Climate change is perhaps the broadest collective action problem ever encountered and, as such, the responsibility for both the problem and any eventual solution is inevitably diffuse, spread across both enormous populations and time. This is just a refinement of Mark Charon Newton’s original point, but while Niall is right that SF can still depict the effect of climate change on individuals, but if we want novels that are “about” climate change instead of novels that incorporate a changed climate into the matte painting behind the characters, it would help if there was a way for a protagonist to defeat it. Or even affect it in any measurable way. By making climate change the central “enemy” of a novel, the author renders the protagonists helpless. It’s true that literary fiction has produced a long line of helpless main characters, but popular fiction has always preferred active protagonists who are able to at least try to change their circumstances. Science fiction is widely considered a populist genre no matter how vibrant its literary wing has become, and American science fiction in particular tends to be strongly individualist and distrusting of collective authority. Even leftist science fiction routinely sets up dystopian rightist governments for its protagonists to fight.
  

• Climate science is changing far more rapidly than virtually any other branch of science (considering science, here, as distinct from technology). For rhetorical reasons, the popular literature of climate change emphasizes the science as “settled”, and indeed the idea that global warming is happening and it will be very, very bad if it continues is pretty settled. But bad in what way, for whom, when? These are enormously complicated questions to answer and scientists do not agree. Popularizers tend to wield worst-case scenarios, so the moment some scientist publishes a scenario worse than the one they’ve been trumpeting, they switch to the new one. This makes plausible extrapolation difficult. When I reviewed Rob Ziegler’s Seed for Strange Horizons, one problem I had with the book was I didn’t find its depicted climate plausible, to the point I at first assumed the author had intentionally invented an unrealistic climate. An interview he gave convinced me that, no, he believed it was quite plausible. Was he right and I wrong? I spent some time researching the question since I was reviewing the book, but ultimately I’m not a climate scientist. Unfortunately, in writing the appearance of implausibility is just as dangerous to writers as the real thing.
  

• Finally and perhaps most importantly, fairly or not climate change remains controversial, particularly in the United States. On any controversial issue, writing with an activist stance alienates those on the other side. Readers are hard enough for most writers to find as it is. Ambitious writers have an enormous incentive to smooth over any edge even a relatively small minority of readers might consider rough.

None of these obstacles are insurmountable, as demonstrated by the success of The Windup Girl, but I think it’s going to be a while before we see climate change crowding out spaceships and dystopias in genre bestseller lists.

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.

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.

After taking a year off, the other China Miéville is back. Last year’s Kraken was, whatever its faults, a product of the China Miéville who became one of modern fantasy’s most prominent authors by writing Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Embassytown, Miéville’s latest novel, is much closer to The City & The City than the rest of his work. I suppose for most people this will be great news: The City & The City was rapturously received in most quarters and won more awards than I’m willing to list here, and so far Embassytown seems to be getting fantastic reviews as well. I respected The City & The City but, alas, didn’t actually like it. Embassytown has a better story, but I’m afraid it suffers from some of the same overall problems that The City & The City did.

The initial section of the novel relates the backstory of the narrator, Avice Benner Cho, and in the process introduces us to the science fiction landscape Miéville has constructed. On the barely-explored edge of human-controlled space lies the planet of Arieka, inhabited by an intelligent alien species with impressive bioengineering but no space flight.  Humans establish a trading outpost there, a small city called Embassytown ruled by Ambassadors who theoretically represent wider human civilization, but who over the years have become a strange sort of aristocracy. Avice is a commoner native of Embassytown who escaped her simple origins to become a spacer and see the world, but she returns after marrying a linguist fascinated by Language, the language spoken by the aliens on Arieka. For most of the story Avice is basically an unemployed dilettante. Unlike her husband, she’s not much interested in Language, but when the interstellar human government tries to change the manner in which Ambassadors are selected, a crisis develops that turns upon the possibilities and limitations of Language.

Just as most of The City & The City was devoted to explaining the central concept of unsight at no small cost to its detective story, most of Embassytown is spent examining Language. Embassytown is science fiction, not a detective novel, and that’s a genre more at home with this sort of idea-heavy approach, but still the story ends up being more than a little dull in places. Avice spends almost the entire novel being completely passive, listening to what others tell her about Language, about the Hosts, and about Embassytown’s increasingly shaky government. Miéville seems to have anticipated this criticism, so Avice is proud of the fact she’s a “floaker”, which as far as I can tell is an unnecessary neologism for being passive. It’s true that in the climax, Avice suddenly becomes extremely active, but this seemed completely out of left field given how little she had done up until that point.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the narrator is more an observer than an instigator, Avice relates many scenes in what amounts to summary form, and in quickly breezing through such events she frequently amalgamates her feelings and those of other characters into the first person plural. It has often been said, metaphorically, that the cities of Miéville’s fiction are the main characters, but these long stretches of collective narrative actually go some way toward making this literally true of Embassytown the city in Embassytown the novel. This is an unusual approach for a reason: for all the insight it gives us into the crowd psychology that is important in crises, it opens a gulf between the reader and the story’s individual characters. Miéville gets a lot of mileage out of his evocative writing in these segments, but when the focus narrowed for the important, plot-critical scenes after long passages full of linguistic discussion and summary, the characters still felt like cogs of the larger story, robbing these pivotal scenes of some of their power.

But if, like The City & The City before it, this is a novel that is focused completely on its ideas, relegating the story and characters to supporting roles, what about those ideas? I wasn’t hugely impressed with the story, but there’s more thought put into Embassytown‘s central ideas than a dozen typical science fiction novels put together. So what’s Miéville up to?

There are three ways in which the Ariekei and their Language are unique. The first is that the Ariekei have two mouths and each can make sounds independently. Both “voices” must be used simultaneously in order to speak Language, so right away it’s physically impossible for a single human to speak it correctly. The second is actually not a property of Language itself, but of the Ariekei who speak it: they cannot lie. Lies can be expressed in Language, the Ariekei understand that in theory one could say something untrue, and when humans lie using Language the Ariekei more or less understand it. But something about their minds does not permit them to actually speak something they know is untrue. This means they are incapable not only of lies but also of fiction and even metaphor. They can use similes, but only if the referent is a real thing that exists in the world. At times this leads them to actually change things about the world around them in order to better express their ideas. One of the formative experiences of Avice’s life is when she “enters Language” by being used as the real referent for a simile: “There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time”. The third unique element again relates to Ariekei psychology. Not only can Ariekei not understand what the single voice of a human is saying, they don’t recognize it as speech at all, nor do they regard an individual human as an intelligent entity. Further, although human computers can synthesize two-voiced speech perfectly, Ariekei cannot understand that either. The only way to communicate with Ariekei, and in fact the only way to even get to the point where they realize communication is even being attempted, is to have two humans who are almost impossibly similar mentally speak a sentence together, providing the two voices Language requires simultaneously.

Now, there’s a lot going on here, more than I can hope to adequately summarize, but I’m afraid that last point strikes me as deeply suspect. Are the Ariekei telepaths?  It’s easy to imagine telepathic aliens, but it’s harder to imagine these aliens’ minds would be able to link with ours. The novel doesn’t attempt to explain this. Avice mentions synthesized speech doesn’t work and leaves it at that. I did my best to suspend disbelief, and since proper communication seemed to require extraordinary communion from the two human minds speaking, I figured telepathy was in play somehow. But later on, the fact that Ariekei can understand recordings of paired human speech becomes a very important part of the plot. What could possibly explain their ability to understand recorded but not synthesized speech? The only explanation I can come up with is an unpleasant one: authorial fiat. Although science fiction seems like the natural medium for an investigation of linguistics and thought, I can’t help but think that a fantasy setting would have provided better tools for Miéville to tell this story.

In any case, from this foundation, much of the novel is about Ariekei efforts to learn how to lie. I believe it’s implied this has long been an aspiration, but since contact was established with humans and they discovered paired human Language speakers can lie, the Ariekei efforts have grown more intense, to the point of holding festivals where Ariekei linguistic athletes compete to see who can get the closest to speaking a lie. I should mention here that the more I read Embassytown, the more I was interested in what sort of effects not being able to lie would have on their society, but this turns out not to be something Miéville is interested in. Confined to human viewpoints, we never get more than the vaguest possible sense of how Ariekei society is organized or the degree to which their thinking and communication is impaired by their inability to use metaphor or even ungrounded similes. A few characters believe that the Ariekei inability to lie is an indication they are in some sense prelapsarian, and that, for them, learning to lie would represent a calamitous fall from grace. This was another idea I found quite interesting, but again Miéville dismisses it without much elaboration. I suppose we can’t blame an accomplished author of fiction for being unimpressed by such arguments.

What Miéville is interested in is contact. The story takes place long after human first contact with the Ariekei, but from a certain point of view, that contact hasn’t truly occurred. Have the two species truly met each other if Ariekei do not realize that individual humans are intelligent, believing them to be unthinking biomachines like those they themselves use? Can the paired human Ambassadors really be speaking the same Language as the Ariekei if they can lie? Are the paired human Ambassadors even human themselves, for that matter, given the elaborate engineering required to make them think sufficiently alike to be able to speak Language and be understood? The novel explores these questions and leans toward a negative answer to most of them. Then, Miéville puts Embassytown under enormous pressure, forcing the characters to try to find some way of making a communications breakthrough.

In these circumstances, such a breakthrough isn’t a matter of stringing together the right sounds, but instead one of completely reorienting psychology. Oddly for a book that doesn’t shy away from colonial themes that put the Ariekei in the role of the noble, primitive natives and the humans in the position of outsiders exploiting their access to technology and trade, Embassytown takes it for granted that the psychology that should change is that of the Ariekei. The fact that the native Ariekei mind cannot express something that doesn’t exist, Miéville seems comfortable saying, is a defect that demands a solution. When a “cure” for the alien thinking of the Ariekei is found, the only disappointment is that it cannot be imposed on all Ariekei everywhere, but the narrator rather smugly comforts herself in the knowledge that the trade advantages that accrue to the Ariekei who have adapted to human-style thinking will allow them to out-compete their recidivist cousins.

I’m not sure what to make of this aspect of Embassytown. On one hand, it’s refreshing to read a novel where the protagonist triumphs by finding a better way to communicate, not by being especially effective at punching or shooting people. But this business of establishing productive communication between cultures by having one culture obliterate what is unique about the other seems rather, ah, old-fashioned. It’s so counter to modern ideas about multiculturalism that, as I write this, I’m mentally reviewing the story’s ending, looking for clues that the author doesn’t endorse what happens, but I can’t think of any, and Miéville’s past novels have never been so subtle in their politics. It’s been argued elsewhere that Embassytown is best understood through the lens of Hegel’s concept of self-awareness. I’m no expert on Hegel, so I’ll leave that to others, but I will note that if the story is trying to claim the native Ariekei are not self-aware, it doesn’t earn it. In this, Miéville’s purposes work against each other. As befitting a novel of contact, the Ariekei are seen only from the human perspective and are too alien for the reader to truly understand. This makes them that often attempted but rarely achieved science fiction triumph, the convincingly alien species, but unfortunately it also prevents any thorough examination of the affects of Language on those who speak it. Since we are never able to understand how the Ariekei live (indeed, to maximize the effect Miéville doesn’t even properly describe what they look like), we never find out what the implications of Language are.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas in Embassytown, but all this leaves me in the familiar position of respecting a Miéville novel more than I like it. How many authors have we seen hit upon a big success and then just try to do the exact same thing for as long as the they can?  Miéville could have used the success of his Bas-Lag novels to, well, sell lots more Bas-Lag novels. Instead, he’s branched out in all sorts of different directions. Even though I wish I liked the results so far as much as everyone else seems to, it’s good to see him being rewarded for taking artistic risks. I said it about The City & The City as well as Kraken and I’ll say it again: while this novel didn’t quite click for me, I’ll definitely be back for his next one.

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.

This doesn’t mean reviews on this site will be any less frequent (not that they are very frequent to begin with). Expect to see an in-depth review of Patrick Ness’ widely acclaimed but in my view slightly problematic Chaos Walking trilogy here later this week.

Right away, Surface Detail has some parallels with Transition. Like that novel (or at least part of it), Surface Detail is concerned with the morality of torture, or rather the lack thereof. Starting from the common idea of mind uploading, Banks speculates that civilizations would use it to provide a virtual reality afterlife for their citizens. In addition to the Heavens you would expect, sometimes these afterlives would include Hells as well. The central conflict of the novel is the humanitarian struggle to get rid of these things, for Banks’ idea of Hell (and by extension, every Hell ever created by civilizations in the novel…there doesn’t seem to be any diversity) seems pretty much taken from Dante. I found this disappointing, to put it mildly. Don’t get me wrong, when it comes to torture Banks has a reputation for creativity that goes back to his earliest novels (Consider Phlebas in particular is infamous for opening with the main character’s captors executing him by drowning him in excrement) and he hasn’t lost any of that spark. But ultimately the pro-Hell argument seemed very much a straw man to me. Dante’s Inferno is seven hundred years old, after all. Yes, people still believe in this version of Hell, but I’m going out on a limb and guessing none of Banks’ readers do. Well, I guess no one is reading Banks to learn about cutting edge Christian theology, but Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God” is far more interesting and has much more to say on this subject despite being a short story instead of a novel. Still, I would have been much more interested to see Banks turn his formidable creativity toward what the various virtual reality Heavens might look like, since heaven remains just as elusive a vision today as it was when Dante wrote the Paradiso.

Then again, the Culture is a sort of secular heaven, even if it is more accurately called a utopia. However, one of Surface Detail‘s main characters Lededje (his novels might be uneven but the aesthetics of Banks’ character names are, ahem, consistent) literally dies and, thanks to a device that transmitted her neural state at the time of death, wakes up to find herself in the Culture at the beginning of the book. She’s had a hard life up to this point to say the least, but instead of exulting to find herself in secular paradise, she immediately starts heading back to her homeworld to get revenge on the man who repeatedly raped and ultimately killed her. That’s understandable, but what’s less understandable is that while the Culture politely scolds her for wanting to kill someone, it doesn’t seem to have any therapy or counseling options available besides, well, being in the Culture, and that’s obviously not enough in this case. In any case, Lededje is given a new body but no psychological help, so off she goes. Her quest takes up a fair amount of the novel, but it ultimately doesn’t have any real impact on events.

Her murderer, Veppers, is a technocrat with a corporate empire in a non-Culture human civilization. In addition to being a serial rapist and a murderer, he literally has a harem and also holds gladiatorial events on his massive estate. A substantial chunk of the novel is told from his perspective, but this is made bearable by one of Banks’ literary superpowers: his ability to infuse charisma into over-the-top villains like Veppers and Transition‘s Adrian. Bearable, but not, in my opinion, worthwhile. These utterly self-centered characters have showed up frequently in Banks’ later work, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence they are absent from his best novels. In any case, most of the civilizations operating Hells turn out to have contracted out administration and maintenance to Veppers over the years, and he has a convoluted scheme to turn the galactic debate over their morality to his advantage. In the end, however, his schemes come to nothing and it seems unlikely they could have ever succeeded.

Prin and Chay meanwhile are anti-Hell activists of a nonhuman race that operates a virtual reality Hell, although to avoid censure from both domestic and galactic sources, this Hell is kept secret. With the aid of hackers, they enter their race’s Hell while still alive with the intention of escaping and then going to the media with their story. These are the scenes that let Banks construct his infernal theme park, but additionally Chay’s story in particular turns out to have some interesting moments. Overall, however, this was a frustrating storyline. The only argument presented by the pro-Hell side justifying their virtual reality Hell, which I remind you is a secret, centers on its deterrence. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how it can deter anything unless people know it exists. Meanwhile, Prin’s goal is to testify before some sort of galactic tribunal of unspecified powers, but plenty of civilizations seem to admit to operating Hells and no one has stopped them yet, so I’m not sure what this was supposed to accomplish. Ultimately Prin and Chay’s crusade is overtaken by events elsewhere, so their heroism doesn’t end up changing the outcome.

The only Culture citizen of the viewpoint characters is Yime, a human working for a branch of the Culture’s Contact bureaucracy that specializes issues relating to uploaded dead people. I don’t see why the Culture wouldn’t just call these “people” since really there’s nothing dead about them, but in any event she is sent after Lededje in hopes of…well, that’s never made clear. She’s just supposed to get to Lededje and trust this will be useful somehow. This seemingly simple task proves unexpectedly difficult, but Lededje turns out to be unimportant, so Yime’s mission is even more so.

The final viewpoint character is a man named Vatueil. After much acrimonious debate in galactic diplomatic channels, the pro-Hell and anti-Hell activists apparently decided to settle the issue by fighting a virtual war and swearing to abide by the result. Vatueil fights in this war for hundreds of subjective years. In the end, the losing side doesn’t respect their oath and starts a real war instead, so Vatueil was apparently completely wasting his time. I think Banks was trying to be ironic here, something along the lines of war being hell and Vatueil finding himself in a virtual hell about virtual Hells. Maybe. If so, it didn’t really work.

Incidentally, Banks is fond of twist endings, and there is a revelation in the epilogue relating to a previous Culture book. For once I anticipated one of Banks’ little twists from miles away (and even figured out the relevant anagram while reading), but even if I hadn’t, it amounts to a “hey how about that” and doesn’t change much of anything about the novel (or the novel it references).

From these summaries of the viewpoint characters, you may notice a common theme. Although they frequently seem like they are about to influence the course of events, the characters all turn out to be spectators to the story. To a certain extent this is an inherent problem with the Culture setting. The intellect of the artificial intelligences that control the Culture is so vast that humans end up being mere bystanders. To the extent that the Culture is heaven, or at least a utopia, it begins looking suspiciously similar to Veppers’ life. Much of the time Banks spends with Veppers seems aimed at demonstrating how empty his life is: being wealthy, he can have virtually anything he wants, and he indulges himself with ridiculous pastimes as well as nearly constant sexual activity. Well, this really isn’t that different from the life we see Culture humans leading. Their post-scarcity economy gives them basically anything they want, they fritter their time away in outlandish hobbies, and of course seem to have as much sex as they want. While the Culture doesn’t allow the rape, murder, and slavery that Veppers also practices, these things are basically tangential to his lifestyle, and in any case if I recall correctly the Culture allows people to indulge such tastes in simulations.

Although there are some interesting contrasts here, it’s not really anything new if you’ve read previous Culture novels. It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m pretty sure the meaninglessness of life when it’s reducing to being a mere pet of machines was at the core of the Idirian opposition to the Culture in Consider Phlebas. While Banks has added a few new departments to Contact as well as a sort of galactic equivalent of the United Nations that ends up working out in practice rather similarly to the patronage system in David Brin’s Uplift novels, this is basically the same Culture setting being brought out of the toy box for another round. If you haven’t read Banks’ best work like Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas, you should be reading those and not this novel. If you have, however, you might want to know if this novel is worth reading. Given all my complaints about the treatment of Hell and the powerless characters, I’m sure you would expect me to say no.

The thing is, when it gets going, this is an enormously fun novel. The Culture warship Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints steals every scene it finds itself in, and Banks makes sure it’s in plenty. I’ve often noticed that although people talk about wanting to see big battles in space opera, it’s really the sort of thing that comes across much better visually in a film or TV show than in prose. Banks squares this circle by letting us watch a complicated engagement with the Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints‘s running commentary. The ship’s breezily casual attitude toward combat, its relentless sarcasm, and its smirking asides are the prose equivalent of big budget special effects, at least for me.

Additionally, while as I’ve said there’s no substantive development of the Culture setting here, I feel out of all the Culture novels this one best captures the dark cynicism of Special Circumstances. Usually we see it from the inside, or else in retrospect, but most Culture characters in Surface Detail aren’t part of it and in fact both dislike and fear it. Even though this feeling is evoked and then not developed intellectually the way Banks’ early novels did, it’s nice to see Special Circumstances in its proper light without the distraction of the James Bond antics of their operatives.

In the end Surface Detail can be called a minor Culture novel, but it’s one of the better ones. Science fiction authors are well known for tailing off late in their careers and Banks has been writing for a long time now, but there’s more than enough good here for me to keep holding out hope that Banks has another great novel in his future.