The Company We Keep

I just finished reading "The Sons of Heaven" by Kage Baker. It is an entry in her series often referred to as The Company; it wasn't until the end of the book that I realized that it is, essentially, the last book in the series. From some light online research, it sounds like she did publish subsequent works after this, but The Sons Of Heaven definitively wraps up all the major plot threads and character arcs she had been working on up to this point, and I think the later novels are a fresh start.

 

It's been a long, leisurely and enjoyable journey through these books. Looking back through my archives, I started with the first book just over a decade ago. These have become sort of comfort books to me. Not in the sense of being soothing books - there is a fair amount of violence, heartbreak and tension throughout the stories - but they're very readable, fun, with great characters, good worldbuilding and a nicely twisty plot. For a while I was reading them in tandem with Charles Stross's Merchant Princes books, and more recently with his Laundry Files. Just, y'know, a good series! I think we all want some of those.

MINI SPOILERS

I haven't been blogging about each entry; I think I have a hard time writing up stories that end in obvious cliffhangers with the next entry waiting for me to read. Because I've been reading these over such a long period of time my memory feels a bit hazy at points, but I'm also surprised at just how clearly I can remember a lot of things, particularly the supporting characters: Literature Specialist Lewis, Regional Director Suleyman, Labenius, Chatterji, Billy Bones and more. The Sons of Heaven doesn't spend a lot of time recapping things or re-introducing characters, so I was glad to have retained as much as I did.

MEGA SPOILERS

I am impressed that she was able to wrap everything up so neatly. I'm used to other series, fantasy in particular, that sprawl out exponentially as they get further along, to the point where two new plot threads get introduced for every one that gets resolved. The complexity of The Company has definitely expanded over the course of the series, as we've learned that some of the core axioms are actually flexible and gotten to know various vying factions among the immortals. But by this point all the pieces are on the board, and she can focus on making them move in a satisfying manner.

The one big introduction that felt "new" here was the literal Dr. Zeus. That's been one of the odd things about the series. In the first couple of books, you have the vague impression that the human members of The Company are incredibly intelligent, not just in their scientific acumen but as incredibly talented schemers, planners and manipulators. Then you eventually get to meet the humans, and they're... pretty lame. Childish, peevish, picky, easily startled, lacking in culture or grit or just about any redeeming virtue. How did these dummies get to run everything?

We eventually learn that, at the behest of one of the (secretly disaffected) servant cyborgs, the humans opted to make The Company's database (the "Temporal Concordance") into a self-aware artificial intelligence. This parallels Captain Morgan, the Pembroke Playmate given to Alec some books ago that turned into an incredibly powerful (and humorous, and caring) AI. Because Dr. Zeus has sprung from the time-traveling historical record, he doesn't just turn into an AI: he's an omnipotent and omnipresent AI that, after he has been created, has always existed in the past and has been responsible for all the actions and decisions taken thus far.

Physically, Dr. Zeus manifests as a lifesize statue of, well, Zeus, in his Artemision depiction. This is a fairly chilling character, who SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS and seems to know what everyone is thinking before they say it.

Jumping ahead a bit (well, a lot), Captain Morgan and Alec's several-books-long plot comes to fruition, as the various bombs and things they've hidden throughout space and time all erupt into a massive assault on Dr. Zeus. He ends up not getting a whole lot of "screen time" or putting up much of a fight, at least from what we can see, although it does sound like the Captain has his hands full dealing with him.

The most interesting part of this book, to me, are the various cabals among the immortals. I get the impression that most cyborgs aren't really affiliated with any of them and are just on the sidelines watching. There are two "bad guy" factions, one that wants to enslave humanity, the other that wants to exterminate them, led by Labenius and... hm, I'm blanking on the other guy's name. Then there's the "good guy" faction, led by Suleyman, that wants to free the cyborgs from human control but to coexist peacefully with them.

Outside of them are the core characters of Mendoza and the various manifestations of Nicholas Harpole / Edward Fairfax / Alec, along with the Captain and his lackeys. Mendoza has usually been one of my favorite characters, but these sections of the book were relatively less interesting to me. The concept of what's happening is pretty stunning: in the previous book, Edward succeeded in tricking Nicholas and Alec, stealing Alec's body and partitioning away their minds. In this book, Mendoza and Edward wed, Edward becomes immortal, and then Mendoza becomes pregnant with two cloned children bearing the full consciousness of her former lovers. They are born, and a lot of the book is given over to raising this very strange family.

There are a lot of other plot lines as well. I was particularly moved by the plight of Lewis, who had been cruelly sacrificed to the Kin, who seem to be a race of aliens / gnomes who have created most of the actual inventions of The Company. He was experimented on and left for dead as part of a plot to develop a means to permanently destroy the immortal cyborgs. He is found, rescued and eventually rejuvenated by the unlikely named Princess Tiara, one of the Kin. This seems like an homage to Arabian Nights, and I really enjoyed how it played out.

Oh, and there's also Budu, one of the ancient Enforcers who fought the Great Goat Cult, and Joseph, who is helping Budu in his quest to take down the faithless mortal masters. This plot line surprisingly also includes William Randolph Hearst. This isn't the first time a historical figure has entered the story - we've already met Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson and lots of other folks - but Hearst is unusual; apparently he figured out about the existence of the Company, approached them, and became the only person from the past to become a Company shareholder and the only adult to become an immortal cyborg. Watching Joseph and Hearst interact is pretty interesting; Joseph is playing a very particular role, like a 1920s newsie, all "Gee whiz, mister Hearst!" even though they both know what Joseph is. Budu and Joseph fill in Hearst on "the silence", the plot of the mortal masters to destroy all cyborgs in 2355, so Hearst comes over to their side and proves invaluable in collecting equipment and information for their scheme. He's one of the few new characters to be introduced and make a major impact in this novel. (At least I think he's new, I don't recall him from the other books, but it's been a while.)

Everything comes to a head on Santa Catalina Island, and again, it's a lot of fun: good action, scheming, plans executed or thwarted, betrayals and double-betrayals, redemption, catharsis. One of the core concepts for the entire series is that nobody knows what happens after The Silence, so there's a lot of genuine tension and drama heading into the climax. I suspected that the series would have a happy ending, but it really could have gone in any direction and felt meaningful.

One last note: the epilogue is narrated by Joseph, and man, I'd forgotten just how much I love his voice! He hasn't been very present lately, and it's a shame, he has such a wonderful point of view: cantankerous, world-weary, sarcastic, but with a grudging deep-seated love for humanity. It did make me wish he could have narrated more of this book, but that wouldn't have worked with all the different storylines and perspectives on display. It does kind of make me want to go back and re-read Sky Coyote, though.

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So, yeah! It's been a great journey through The Company novels, and I'm glad to see them through to a proper conclusion. I know that Kage Baker has written some other novels, including a few in The Company's universe; I also should go back and finish her House of the Stag series, which is where I first was introduced to her. Sadly she's no longer with us, but I'm glad she left such great books behind!

Accelerando

I rarely blog about short story collections, and haven't been consistently blogging all of my Charles Stross novels, but I do feel compelled to jot down some thoughts on Accelerando. This is, yes, a short story collection from Charles Stross; but it reads much more like a novel than I expected it too. It might be a bit closer to a classic serialized story, as the stories were originally published in various sci-fi periodicals, but they do tell a unified, fairly linear story.

 

MINI SPOILERS

The stories in Accelerando were written around 2000-ish, and are set in their near future, which is chronologically near our own present. That's one of the things that first caused me to fall in love with Stross through novels like Halting State, where it's science fiction but science that is extrapolated just a few years out from today, based on very firm research being done today.

The main character for most of the book is Manfred Macx, who in many ways is an archetypal cyberpunk protagonist - he even unironically dons mirrorshades at one point. He's very much a Free Software Foundation type of person, creating things and then releasing them for the world to use for the benefit of all mankind. He is pretty strategic in his directions, though. Depending on his idea and the situation, he may grant it to a particular person or entity who he thinks will accomplish the most good with it, and be willing to follow any guidelines he has in mind. Others are just copylefted to the net.

In this future, there is some form of "social credit" system, although I don't think Stross ever uses that specific term. Macx is broke in a traditional sense since he doesn't have any money, but thanks to the massive goodwill he's generated over the years, he doesn't want for anything - he can always find a place to stay, a computer to borrow, a seat on an airplane. This puts him at odds with Pamela, who at the start is his lover but becomes his nemesis: she is a freelance agent for the IRS, a kinky dominatrix who has very traditional values when it comes to raising a family and supporting the government. She is exasperated at Macx, who could easily have earned millions or billions of dollars that could be taxed by the United States, but instead has opted for non-pecuniary remuneration.

Macx reminds me a lot of William Gibson, specifically how he is always living just a little bit further in the future than anyone else. He accomplishes this by always being constantly online, monitoring all the gossip and announcements and speculation: he can draw the connections before anyone else because he has his eyes in every subculture. If Macx didn't exist, his ideas and inventions would still come into being, but some time later, most likely by some corporate group or avaricious entrepreneur. As the book continues, we learn more about the nuts and bolts of how Macx does what he does. There's a stunning sequence when Macx is mugged and has his glasses stolen; this results in the loss of his memory and even his personality. More startling, his mugger becomes Macx, carrying out his schemes and planning new ones. We come to realize that Macx has offloaded most of his memories to digital storage, which he can access on demand through his glasses - well, "access" implies a passive "pull" model, but what Stross depicts is more of an active "push" model. Macx has previously set up agents that take care of the grunt work and just notify him when he needs to take some specific meat-space action. But those "agents" really are, in some way, Macx too - he created them, and when people interact with Macx, they're interacting with the version of him as mediated by his programs.

I won't do a blow-by-blow of all the stories, but the thing I loved most was how it telescopes out into the future. Those early Macx chapters are all very believable and feel like they could be happening now - if Google Glasses had taken off and gotten multiple generations, if the FSF had acquired a truly wealthy benefactor. Macx is pointing the way to the future, but eventually the future arrives and overtakes him. Of course many other people, and eventually everyone, adopts the augmented intelligence he has championed. However, he draws the line at implants, which he sheepishly admits feel weird to him. But the younger generation doesn't have the same qualms, and so their augmentations are an order of magnitude faster and better than Macx's. He fades into a secondary supporting character, and eventually a revered but irrelevant elder as his biological daughter comes to the narrative foreground.

One major change is a sort of "fuzzing" of individuality and eventually reality. If you note someone else who seems interesting to you, you might offer to share some subroutines with them; if they reciprocate, those parts of your greater-self personalities may run a simulation of what your lives together would be like. Because they are just digital, they can run at much faster speeds than biological life, so they could run an experiment of many years of cohabitating in under a minute. You could then each check the results of the collaboration and use that to decide whether to explore greater intimacy together.

There's a recurring subplot about the question of personhood and rights. Early on, Macx is contacted by a colony of lobsters who had been uplifted by a revanchist Soviet Union. They have become self-aware and long for their freedom. Macx arranges for this; specifically, though, they want to leave their lobster bodies behind, and instead become a digital intelligence that is beamed into the depths of outer space. Meanwhile on Earth, people have become more comfortable with concepts of cloning: someone might choose to clone a beloved elder who has passed away, or create cloned versions of their own offspring in the event of some calamity, or the classic gambit of cloning yourself. Besides biological cloning, though, there is digital cloning too. Near the end of the book, technology has advanced to the point where people can upload their consciousness into, well, "the cloud"; once there, it's possible to "fork" your "self", creating two (or more!) copies that start off as identical but may be set on separate tasks. In one example that's great because it's so mundane, a person encounters a loquacious talker when entering a party. He has wanted to talk with this person for a while, but knows that doing so will eat up all his time at the party. So he creates one fork to stay and participate in this dull conversation while the other fork continues mingling with other guests. Ultimately those forks can reintegrate, at which point their memories will join together and synthesize.

So you end up with a variety of conscious entities: AI who have become sentient, non-human animal species that have grown intelligent, humans who have augmented their consciousness with digital agents, humans who have uploaded their consciousness and become purely digital, and, eventually, created beings who have always been digital. Macx can see where this is headed decades earlier, so one of his priorities is to ensure that "human rights" are carefully reconsidered and updated for the coming era of multiple intelligences.

Another thing I've always loved about Stross is how he thinks about the girders that underlie the worlds he creates. How does the economy work in a Berkeleian universe where people experience life through direct neural stimulation rather than through their biological sensors? Well, it ultimately comes down to bandwidth and compute power: these are the actual limited resources; within the digital world, actually experiencing, say, a stage coach or a steamboat or a jet plane are all equivalently "expensive". In the italicized sections fronting each short story, Stross describes how much computing power is held within biological brains versus computers, and notes the point where this crosses over. One of the most striking developments comes when the insatiable demand for additional computing power leads to the demolition of planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, and eventually the gas giants will be taken apart, their raw material reworked into "computronium", the engineered matter that will expand the grid of digital power. This sounds shocking, but does make a lot of sense: a tiny ping-pong-sized ball of computing power can hold enough capacity for an entire world to experience full lives.

There is an early, brief discussion of the Mormon church in Accelerando, and by the time it reached the end I thought it was surprisingly aligned with some aspects of Mormon theology. Stross isn't Mormon, of course, but in some ways this felt like a Mormon book in the way that, say, Ender's Game never did. The idea of researching ancestry and praying for the salvation for the previously deceased sort of segues into a world where you can collect all known information about a person, and essentially take a crack at "re-souling" them. Of course, for a pre-digital-age person this will be less likely to match who they "really" were, but it still may satisfy the needs of their "summoner"; people who have lived more of their lives digitally can more accurately be studied and reborn. And the explosion in resources does give each person the capacity to essentially have their own universe to create and guide and even populate with new sentient life: the only limit is the amount of matter in the Solar System.

Much like with Halting State, I found myself thinking of Neal Stephenson novels while reading this, but Stross wrote his books earlier. Halting State's MMORPG reminded me of T-RAIN in REAMDE. Accelerando has a lot of overlap with Fall, particularly the idea of digitizing consciousness and living in a purely digital world. In Accelerando, though, this is just one step along a long process, and the veil between living and dead seems at most porous, at least irrelevant; in Fall, there's a much more severe chasm between the living and the dead, mostly due to the different speed at which Bitworld runs.

The few blurbs I've seen about Accelerando describe it as a collection of stories about the singularity, which it probably is, but I did like how the characters within kind of pooh-pooh that idea. There's an early discussion about the singularity, and everyone has a different idea about it. Some think it's just around the corner. Others think it's impossible. Others think it happened centuries ago. Others think it's meaningless. That variety of opinions felt very real to me, which leads to the surprising groundedness of this book.

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I haven't gotten much into the actual plot of the book, especially the back half, so I'll just note that it's highly entertaining, surprising and rewarding, as I've come to expect from Stross. This book has been a great read, bursting at the seams with ideas. It's kind of shocking that it was written two decades ago; while we aren't living in this world, it did an amazing job at predicting many developments, and even better at anticipating the concerns we'd have today. Overall this is much more of a hard-sci-fi book than, say, the Merchant Princes or Laundry Files series, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in a nice meaty speculation about our digital future in the universe.

Oankali

I'm continuing to gradually poke my way through Octavia Butler's books. It's kind of funny, I've been vaguely aware of her for a while but hadn't realized she wrote science fiction until quite recently. I just finished "Dawn", which is (probably) set in a different timeline than her "Parable" books.

MINI SPOILERS

I really loved Dawn. It's very different from Parable of the Sower, but like that book it felt far ahead of its time to me. (Which one would expect with science fiction, but in my own readings authors are usually exploring contemporary concerns in a future setting, not future concerns in a contemporary setting.) It doesn't feel prescient about specific events and trends like Parable, but it fully engages with ideas that were not in common discourse back then and are everyday topics now.

Where Parable's background is a very slow-burn gradual decline and rot of society, Dawn's background seems more traditional: a catastrophic nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. I flipped back to the copyright page and saw that this was published back in 1987! Funny to think how ubiquitous this scenario used to be and how it has vanished.

Basically all life on earth is toast as a result. It doesn't happen in an instant, and we only learn small snatches of facts in passing. It sounds like the northern hemisphere was hit the worst. The southern hemisphere is doomed as well, in large part because of the freezing temperatures brought about by nuclear winter.

With human life on the brink of extinction, they are saved by a race of aliens called Oankali. Probably the first 2/3 or so of the book is mostly the protagonist Lilith getting to know the Oankali: how they work, what they're doing, and what their plans are both short-term and long-term. The Oankali are an ancient race engaged in something they call "the trade". They explore, find sentient species, study them, modify their own genes to incorporate desirable traits, uplift the species with traits of their own. The Oankali as a civilization spread in this way, with half remaining behind and the other half continuing their exploration.

The Oankali have "saved" some of the surviving people, bringing them from the lethal surface of Earth to a space ship, curing wounds, and putting them into suspended animation. Most Oankali tech is biological rather than mechanical: the space ship is alive, and humans are kept alive and in stasis by Venus flytrap-type plants. We learn that these plants used to be carnivorous, but the Oankali modified them to be helpful instead.

I'm not clear on exactly what the timeline of Oankali contact with Earth has been. Were they silently observing the Cold War for years as it lurched towards Armageddon? Were they coincidentally passing by at the time? Did the energy of the nuclear war get their attention? In any case, they have a pretty deep understanding of humanity (though not as deep as they think they have). Jdahya, the first Oankali who Lilith meets, says that humans have two fatal traits. One is that they (we) are hierarchical. The other is that we are intelligent. Either one alone would be fine, but the combination would always inevitably lead to destruction. Because of this, they deliberately do not rescue the most hierarchical humans, which are the generals and politicians hiding in fallout shelters in the northern hemisphere. Human society will need to change.

And, more creepily, human biology will change too. The Oankali won't act without consent, but they seem implacable in their determination to mix human genes with Oankali genes, which severely grosses out Lilith and all of the other humans as well. Humanity has been "rescued", but will they still be humans once they become hybrids?

Reading this book, I thought this problem was nicely ambiguous and compelling. It's a very strange thing, and a very strange situation; but clearly humanity on its own wasn't faring so hot, so it might be something to consider. Looking back over it, I'm now wondering if we're meant to consider this idea sympathetically, or with horror like Lilith does.

I've been writing a lot about humans, but more of the book is about Oankali, and they're pretty interesting too! Physically, they're vaguely humanoid, but their bodies are covered with many dozens of tentacles. The impression I get from reading is a little like a sea anemone or something: they tend to move in concert, are used for sensing, seem to mostly move unconsciously/automatically but can be controlled if desired. Their skin is gray, smooth and cool. They are alien and revolting to look at, and it takes quite a while for Lilith and eventually others to be able to stand interacting with them.

Besides their tentacular appearance, the most interesting aspect is probably that they have three sexes. The females seem to be the tallest. Males are closest in appearance to humans. The "ooloi" have no gender and are referred to as "it". Ooloi look physically different from males and females, with an additional pair of "sensory arms", particularly thick and sturdy tentacles. Ooloi seem to dominate, although I'm not sure if that's generally true or only for the situations humans are observing. Oankali biology requires all three genders to participate in order to reproduce, with an ooloi essentially mediating between a male and a female. Yes, there is alien sex in this book.

MEGA SPOILERS

Lilith has been chosen to help train a larger group of humans, with the goal of relocating back to Earth in the Amazonian jungle. Humans don't come off very well. Prior to Awakening her first group, she is nearly raped by a human male: the first human she has seen in the long time since her captivity. This is the first of what will become many examples of the Oankali in general and the Ooloi in particular not understanding people (individually and as a whole) as well as they think they do.

Unnverved by that experience, Lilith is very strategic in her Awakening, reading candidates' biographies to try and find likely allies. This has mixed results. People are being awakened from the stress of nuclear war into an alien environment surrounded by strangers, so it's not too surprising that people aren't at their best.

In some ways, this section feels a little like a zombie movie, in the sense that "the real monsters are the humans." That isn't generally the case, or even mostly the case, but the scariest and most disturbing stuff tends to come from people (usually men) violently imposing their hierarchical superiority.

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I just checked to see if there's a sequel, and there is! I'll probably check it out at some point, there's definitely more story to go with this.

Dawn is a little like the Parable books in that it looks directly at the problems with humanity - our selfishness, violence, fear and hostility towards the unknown - while still fundamentally loving humanity as a whole. The protagonists need to navigate challenging and dangerous worlds, and we admire them for that. There's good in the world, and bad in the world, and the good need to stick together and act on their principles in order to secure a better future for themselves. No matter what form the apocalypse takes.

Railsaw

"Railsea" is a super-fun China Mieville book. It stands on its own without tying into his other worlds, but will feel familiar to readers, as it similarly conjures an original, remarkable world. I find myself often thinking "How did he think of that?!" as his imagination barrels forward in ever more unexpected directions.

MINI SPOILERS

The central conceit of Railsea emerges relatively early on; unlike, say, The City & the City, where it can take quite a while to intuit exactly what's going on, Railsea has some helpful passages of exposition, carefully spaced throughout, in which the omniscient narrator speaks directly to you and lays things out. Between this and characters explaining things to one another through dialogue, the oddness is more clear. (I wouldn't say I necessarily prefer this approach, as I generally prefer spec fic that leaves it to the reader to suss things out, but it does make this a more approachable read without dumbing anything down.)

Anyways: To oversimplify a bit, the "railsea" of the title is, literally, a "sea" made out of endless railroad. There are tons and tons of tracks, branching off, switching, joining, occasionally changing gauge. The rails run over a very hazardous earth, and underneath the earth are a huge variety of monstrous predators, including enormous molerats, earwigs, earthworms, rabbits, owls and more. They will periodically "breach", emerging from the earth to feed and wreak havoc. Trains serve the role of ships, traveling along the rails, navigating through safer or more dangerous areas.

While the novel almost entirely unfolds on the railsea, we learn about the overall cosmology as well. "Islands" of land emerge from the railsea, on which live most of the people, forming cities and farming and such. Far up above the islands are multiple layers of heavily polluted sky, poisonous to anyone who enters; "divers" will occasionally suit up and ascend into the murky reaches above.

The book as a whole feels like an homage to, and partially a pastiche of, Moby-Dick. The protagonist Sham stands in for Ishmael, the mole-hunter Medes replaces the Pequod, Captain Naphi plays Captain Ahab, Mocker-Jack represents Moby Dick, Mbendo replaces Queequeg, and on and on. Naphi is obsessed with her Great Southern Mole-Rat and risks much in pursuit of her quarry. A fun aspect of this novel, though, is that this is not at all unusual in the railsea: we learn of dozens of captains who likewise have a single, larger-than-life quarry that they relentlessly pursue; not only that, but they have a term for them, "philosophy", and ascribe them deep symbolism and purpose: one captain's "philosophy" might represent loss, another's dangerous knowledge, another's mortality, another's community, another's the sublime, and so on. The whole thing ends up feeling like a really fun, winking commentary on English Literature classes.

The writing itself is really fun. After the first few chapters, the omniscient narrator (who seems to be someone from this alternate world and not Mieville himself) gets increasingly chatty, commenting on what is happening, how you might be feeling about it, and so on. One of my favorite parts is a chapter that digresses on the text's use of the "&" symbol. This is one of the more striking aspects of the novel; a typical sentence might read like:

A storm of faces hanging on him & listening as off in other bits of wherever they were Kiragabo & Vurinam were dancing together, & someone gave Shame another drink, & someone said "So what was is you found on the wreck?" & "Aaaaaah," he was saying, tip-tapped the side of his nose, never you mind, secrets, that was what.

As the narrator eventually explains, many centuries ago writers would have used the word "and" in these situations, but in the world of the railsea, where everything curves on itself and folds over and splits and combines, the "&" symbol is far more appropriate. Which I love! I also love the later sections where the narrator reluctantly stops writing about a particular storyline to focus on something happening elsewhere, then grows increasingly apologetic at how long it's taking to return to the cliffhanger we left on.

All of this writing is really fun and original. I do have to say (not at all as a slight on this book, just in praise of the original) that Moby-Dick itself is probably even more creative and original. I haven't read that book since college, and reading this sparked a lot of memories for me and makes me want to revisit it. I remember being amazed as the novel abruptly shifts into a Shakespearean play, or a Borges-style catalog, or a scientific treatise.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator wistfully recounts some of the other possible stories that could have been told instead of this one - the wild horses that gallop along the tracks, or the political intrigues of two evenly matched islands. This seems to be a very common thing in China's novels: he creates an amazing world that's wholly original and wholly compelling, which could serve as a fertile basis for a writer's entire career (in the style of Lovecraft or Howard or Tolkien); and yet, with the partial exception of the Bas-Lag books, he'll only write a single story set there and then move on. Which I guess does make me kind of think of Tolkien after all, as there's something especially compelling about encountering a single tale that seems to be floating in a sea of other tales, each untold but adding weight to the one we do read.

A final thought: I really liked Sham, and thought he's one of the best Mieville protagonists I've run encountered. He's not especially good at what he does, but has a good heart and good instincts. He doesn't always act on those instincts, but I can relate to his indecision.

Oh! Post-final thought: it's interesting that one author has written two entirely separate novels about fantastic trains, between this and Iron Council. They are kind of opposite conceits in some ways, as Railsea has a multiplicity of overabundant rail, while Iron Council has free-roaming track that moves along with the train. Both of them seem to arise out of a loose adaptation of a deep understanding of the historical development of the railroads, particularly the over-investment and over-development of rails and the self-inflicted wounds capitalism inflicted on itself in the mid-to-late 1800s. As a Brit, Mieville is probably drawing on his homeland's experiences, but they're basically identical to America's, just experienced a few decades earlier. Anyways, this ended up being yet another unexpected entry in my recent run of books about the follies of destructive competition in early railroad development.

END SPOILERS

I ended up enjoying Railsea more than I thought I would. It isn't often mentioned as a favorite book among Mieville fans. I wouldn't say that I like this more than, say, The City & the City or The Scar, but I'd put it on a similar tier with them. It's less macabre than the Bas-Lag books and a slightly quicker read while still feeling weighty and interesting.

Ad Astra

It's been a little while, but I dived (dove?) back into Stellaris. I've accumulated a few new DLC over the last couple of years thanks to the largesse of my brother, and enjoyed seeing what they added to the game, along with the regular procession of free game updates.

As is usually the case, I restarted a few times before landing on a keeper of a run. Some of the restarts were due to bad luck or bad decisions, but a big part was just getting reacquainted with the game and coming up to speed on the changes since my last run. A problem I frequently made was neglecting my military. Even with the game settings modified for less aggressive AI, they will definitely notice if you present a rich target with few guns and few allies. I like to play more pacifist games, but you're a lot less likely to get attacked if you have a big fleet.

There were two huge gameplay changes I noticed. The first was Unity. Previously, Unity seemed like the most useless abstract resource: it was useful in the first part of the game to unlock Tradition trees, but by the end of my games I would always be producing way more Unity than I could spend on Edicts; unlike most other resources, there's no way to convert it or cash it out. I would end up with huge surpluses despite never really investing in Unity-producing jobs or buildings, beyond the automatic ones like capitals. So I stayed far away from playing as Spiritualist or other approaches that seemed design to boost Unity.

In the current game, Unity has a lot more uses. It's the main currency for Leaders - more on that later, but where in the past you recruited them with Energy, now you pay Unity for recruitment and upkeep. There's also the dumping ground of Planetary Ascension. You can pay a large amount of Unity to boost the effects of your planet's designation; for example, if it's a Mining World, you'll get a bigger boost to Mineral production and cheaper maintenance for Miners; on a Science World, research complexes will get progressively cheaper and researchers require less upkeep. (I think the overall effect is similar to Centralize State in Europa Universalis IV.). Perhaps more importantly, it will also reduce the Empire Size impact from the districts and pops, which in turn will boost your overall research speed and tradition unlocks. The Unity cost for Planetary Ascension grown exponentially the more you use it, and even by the end of the game I still had use for more Unity.

Leaders have also been reworked; the overall impact is that they are more powerful, versatile and have more personality. You can select the abilities a leader gains when they level up, allowing you to groom and shape them as you like. These choices come from a semi-randomized list, so they will end up each being somewhat distinct, but you can still guide them to fit your planned strategy. You can manually select some leaders to serve on the government Council, where they will serve ministerial positions. These provide useful boosts to the empire - for example, a "Head of Research" will increase the Research Speed by an amount scaling on the level of the leader, while a "Minister of State" will increase the effectiveness of Improve Relations and the speed of operations like First Contact and Espionage. Leaders can also have abilities that apply buffs to the entire empire while they're on the Council, like increasing Stability or providing more Trade Value.

The roles of leaders have been adjusted as well. Generals and Admirals have been folded into a single "Commander" class, which I think is great - Generals felt really useless for most of the game. You can still take level-up powers that will make a given Commander better at space combat or ground combat, but they're interchangeable. Governors have been moved to a new "Official" class; these work similar to before, but you can now assign an Official to either the Galactic Community or your Federation, which is more impactful than the old Envoy-based approach. Finally, Science no longer requires a Scientist heading up each of the three main research categories; instead there's a single Head of Research on the Council. In addition to their traditional work with exploring, surveying and conducting archeology, Scientists can now also serve as the Governor on a planet. This isn't as effective as an Official, but it does produce a bigger boost for Research, so it can be a good move for research-focused worlds. Overall I found Scientists a lot less useful in the endgame in the new system than previously: once you've surveyed everything, there's very little for them to do.

Oh: And (again thanks to a gifted DLC) I had access to "Legendary Paragons", who are especially powerful and moderately expensive Leaders. They may appear randomly or as the result of some action (like certain archeology excavations). They have their own unique large portraits and dialogue on recruitment. They have more traits than an equivalent-level Leader would, including some unique traits unavailable anywhere else. They don't feel game-breaking, but give great flavor and were a lot of fun.

In all of my restarted games, I was trying to play the same type of empire: playing around with the new utility of Unity, I was a Spiritualist, Xenophilic, Pacifist Democracy with the Ascensionist civic. I was planning to boost Unity to cruise through the Tradition trees, while using Pacifism to keep my Empire Size low.

In my final successful run, I lucked out in a few ways. I had some friendly neighbors, instead of a bunch of Devouring Swarm Hive Minds. In particular, one Spiritual neighbor invited me to join a Holy Federation with them, which I had planned to do anyways once I had that option. I pretty aggressively recruited other friendly empires into the Federation as well, and we ended up with a nice defense pack that protected us against potentially hostile adversaries.

It's interesting all the variations that occur between games. In first few games, I had pretty interesting pre-FTL versions of Sol III (Earth) that were cool to observe, as well as a lot of pre-FTL civs in general; I haven't run across many of these before, and had fun running operations on them. Another recent game update has been getting unique technologies by observing "primitive" civilizations, and I'd unlocked a lot of those before getting stomped in an earlier game. In my final game I didn't get to build any observation posts until pretty late in my expansion, and only unlocked a couple of techs, but it's still fun to see all the different scenarios that can play out for these planets.

I had a couple of L-Gates in this game, and focused on getting Insights whenever I could, so I was able to unlock the L-Cluster before the mid-game year. It was definitely a risk to open it then, as I would have been completely unprepared for an invasion. It worked out really well, though: for the first time I got the outcome where you meet "The Gray", a super-powerful entity that takes the form of a massive warship; I think it has like 80k power or something. With that alone, I instantly flipped from the least powerful to the most powerful fleet in the galaxy, removing any risk of getting declared on.

I'd been looking forward to playing a Spiritualist game for a while. I was technically Spiritualist during my Megacorp televangelist run, but that was a bit different, with Spiritual just being an entree to draining rubes of their bank accounts. This game was more of a Shroud-focused excursion. I took the "Teachers of the Shroud" Origin, which was powerful and cool. You start off with Latent Psionic, which is a great perk in its own right and also basically gives you an extra Ascension Perk. You also have contact with the Teachers of the Shroud (the exact name is randomized, it can also be called something like the Shroud Coven), a Curators-style Enclave that's focused on Shroud stuff. This gives an unlockable wormhole-type connection with a distant part of the galaxy, possibly opening up a useful expansion path. There are some nifty purchases you can make from them, but the Influence cost kept me from indulging until pretty late in the game.

I've definitely played with the Shroud before, but I think this was my first time since they added the new Covenants. The only option used to be "End of the Cycle", a sort of doomsday pact with the devil where you would get very powerful for 50 years and then lose the game. There now are other covenants, which give a lot of perks and a few penalties. The Shroud is infamously RNG-based, and I burned a lot of energy, zro and time trying to get the Covenant I wanted or even any Boons out of the Shroud. Eventually I made contact and signed a Covenant with the Instrument of Desire; this has a lot of effects, the most useful being a straight-up boost to the resources produced by every. single. pop.

Around this time, I also started to muse about Becoming the Crisis. I've had Nemesis for a while, and thought it was cool that they added the option to become the bad guys, but never felt tempted to pursue that path. Now, though, I was mulling it over. Fighting the Unbidden for the fifth time didn't sound all that exciting, and as a Spiritual empire I was unlikely to trigger the Contingency. As a Pacifist and Xenophile I was doubly locked-out from choosing the Crisis Ascension Perk; but from Wiki-trawling I knew that proceeding along the Covenant line would eventually give me the option to reform into an Authoritarian Spiritualist, which would open the route to the Crisis. And, the more I thought about it, the more I enjoyed the dark narrative of this timeline: A peaceful and spiritual empire begins communing with spirits, gradually falls under their thrall, and eventually brings about the end of the galaxy. It has a nice resonance with the Ashen Veil of Fall from Heaven 2.

I delayed for a long time before picking it; I also wanted to get the mega-structure Ascension Perks and get those rolling before flipping to the Dark Side, but those are gated behind very late-game techs, so I spent a ton of time without my full Perk loadout. This kind of doubly penalized me in particular, since I was also pursuing Planetary Ascension: You can get more Planetary Ascension tiers (not to be confused with Ascension Perks) as you unlock more Ascension Perks, up until 5 tiers with 9 perks; once you get the 10th perk, you unlock an additional 5 tiers, letting you ascend to level 10. Reaching 10 basically removes that planet entirely from your Empire Size penalty. If I'd been able to reach that earlier, it could have had a significant impact on my research speed.

But, while I was waiting for those last Perks I had time to generally prepare and scheme for my diabolical plan. I finally picked up Become the Crisis in the late 2300s; that was late enough to build a huge tech lead over the rest of the galaxy and harden my defenses, but early enough that I didn't have to worry about Fallen Empires awakening or the actual Crisis starting.

One thing I learned from the wiki that I hadn't realized before is that there actually is a viable path where you pick the Become The Crisis perk without actually Becoming the Crisis. BtC proceeds through a series of tiers. In order to advance to the next tier, you need to both complete a Special Project (via research) and acquire a certain number of Menace Points (via various sources like destroying ships, invading planets, vassalizing empires, etc.). The Tiers grant really powerful abilities, balanced with a large Opinion malus with all other empires, and those abilities alone could be a really compelling reason to pursue the Crisis.

For me, the best intermediate benefits of BtC are the new War Goals and the Menacing class of ships. You gain the ability to declare war on any empire to either destroy them or "imposed inclusion", resulting in a vassalization. This bypasses the prep work that's usually necessary for a military expansion and lets you easily fire off wars at will.

"Menacing" ships parallel the main ship classes, with Menacing Corvettes, Menacing Frigates and Menacing Cruisers (but no Menacing Battleships). At first I wasn't clear on the benefit, but the biggest perk is that you construct Menacing ships with Minerals, not with Alloys; Alloys are incredibly precious, so being able to build a fleet (or a large chunk of one) with just Minerals is huge. Menacing ships upgrade with your tech, but unlike regular ships and defense platforms their build cost doesn't scale, and they always cost the same flat amount of Minerals; when new tech is available, you can upgrade for free. Finally, you can gain huge boosts to Menacing ship build speed, letting you almost instantly replenish any lost ships.

For me, I stuck with my regular fleet of Battleships as my main heavy hitters; but I switched to Menacing Corvettes for my rapid-response / quick interdiction fleets, and was really happy with how they worked.

While I was building Menace Points to progress the Crisis tiers, I basically started off with the weakest unaligned Empires I could find, used the "Imposed Inclusion" to vassalize them, then moved on to the next-weakest unaligned Empire. I mostly did this solo with my Federation Fleet, though my Holy Federation allies pitched in when they could.

By this point in the game, there were two big federations: the Holy League, where I had become President-For-Life and which dominated the northwest quadrant of the galaxy, and the Cosmic Pact, a mostly-xenophobic non-contiguous alliance based in the south and west. Roughly a third of the galaxy was unaligned, but as I approached the late 2300s all of them had become my vassals.

I was now getting ready to flip the switch. Fortunately you can select when to complete each Special Project, so before taking the final step I launched what I started to call my COINTELPRO phase: using my diplomatic skill to sow discord and chaos in the galactic institutions that could stop me.

In the Galactic Community, I had been steadily advancing Divinity Of Life resolutions to promote Spiritualist ethics; the last few steps actually outlaw some Materialist-type actions like Synthetic Ascension. I also moved through several Military Sanctions so violators' Naval Capacity would diminish. Just before Crisis-ing, I also pushed through the higher stages of Unchained Knowledge, which similarly penalize non-Materialist policies. The sum total put a lot of empires on the wrong side of galactic law, hamstringing their power broadly.

Of the two major federations, the Holy League was definitely the most powerful; mostly due to me, but those empires in general were strong compared to the Cosmic Pact. I used my unsurpassed powers to cripple the federation: I disbanded the Federation Fleet, set the Fleet Contributions to None, reduced Centralization to Minimal, switched most votes to require unanimous action, and, in my last act, abolished the Diplomatic Weight for voting. Whoever my successor as President would be, he or she would inherit a broken and unwieldy institution, incapable of reforming itself as a galactic power.

I also kicked off a war between the Holy League and the Cosmic Pact; I don't remember now what my War Goal was, it might have been a Liberation War against one of the members. I knew that after becoming the Crisis the galaxy would declare war on me, so I was hoping to set up a three-way fight, and that some of the Holy League / Cosmic Pact fighting would draw away attention from me.

It worked out even better than that: once I reached the final tier of the Crisis, there was a war declared against me; but only my former members of the Holy League were part of it. Holy League was fighting both me and the Cosmic Pact, while the Cosmic Pact was only fighting the Holy League and not me.

I wasn't expecting that, but on further reflection, it probably makes sense given the rules of warfare. I'm more familiar with the EU4 war rules at the moment than Stellaris, but I don't think the engine supports two nations being on the same side in one war while they're on opposing sides in another war. So given a pre-existing war, only one side could declare on me. It may just be luck that it was the Holy League that turned against me. (Which, the more I think about it, actually was the ideal outcome; otherwise I would have been stuck in my crippled Federation for the duration of the conflict.)

MINI SPOILERS

"Become the Crisis" actually has a really compelling narrative and structure, with some great writing and neat mechanics. Again, it reminds me a bit of the Ashen Veil in Fall from Heaven 2, and more broadly the Armageddon mechanics. Story-wise, your scientists become aware of the Shroud, and the great power latent in that realm, and become obsessed with tapping it. This starts off as a pure knowledge-based initiative, but gradually turns into an insatiable lust for power. By the end, your civilization's goal is to tear the veil between reality and the Shroud, unlocking unimaginable volumes of energy, which your population will use to transcend to a higher plane of existence.

Mechanically, you progress this by upgrading a megastructure called [checks the wiki] the Aetherophasic Engine Frame. You need enormous quantities of Dark Matter to upgrade it: 20,000 to start and a total of 140,000 in total. You get that Dark Matter by using special Star Eater ships; these are basically like the Death Star from Star Wars, but instead of blowing up planets you blow up stars, turning them into black holes and destroying all planets and anomalies in the system.

Blowing up a star also returns the system to being unowned, and it's a very melancholy feeling to see blank stretches beginning to march across the galaxy map, an inversion of the expansion of color that drives the early game.

At certain phases of the upgrade, Psionic Avatars will invade the galaxy. I'd assumed that they would only target my empire, but from scanning the galaxy map I noticed that they can appear everywhere, adding a hostile threat that impacts the whole galaxy. This makes me think again of FfH2, where threats like the Horsemen and Hell Terrain impose such specific universal harms that all empires are strongly incentivized to oppose the evil, even beyond the compelling motivation of not wanting to lose the game.

Overall I found the situation relatively easy to deal with. I'd completed my Gateway network, linking my capital together with heavily fortified Citadels on the borders of my empire. The Citadels alone could repel the periodic invasions from Holy League attackers, possibly with a couple of Defense Platforms lost, or I could quickly crush them by rushing through a fleet. The Psionic Avatars just lurked in their systems and were easily hunted down by my large fleets.

The biggest threat I faced were the Fallen Empires. I had two in this game, the Shard of Xenophobes and the Progenitors of Xenophiles. The Shard declared on me soon after I became the Crisis, and I wasn't sure why: their war goal is the standard lebensraum, but I'd carefully avoided ever expanding next to them. I did pick up a vassal who was a pre-FTL civ that has spawned right next to the Shard; I don't think that counts as one of my systems, but if the Shard had declared on my vassal maybe I'm the one who gets the war declaration? Or maybe they just declared because of the huge opinion malus ("Trying to destroy the galaxy: -1000") and the game used their existing standard text instead of a new one.

As usual, war against FEs is a little wonky; for decades their Economy and then their Fleets were considered "Pathetic" next to mine, but their Technology was still "Overwhelming", which means that their total power is a lot stronger than it looks on paper. Fortunately, FEs still have absolutely miserable AI for combat. They weren't quite as dumb this time as in the past: at least they were attacking my systems instead of flying to the opposite edge of the galaxy for no apparent reason; on the other hand, they tended to fly forward, take a system or two, then pause, return home for no apparent reason, and pause before trudging back to where they were before.

The Shard had two fleets, one of about 240k and the other around 120k; the bigger one zoomed straight into the northeast quadrant of the map, which I had carefully colonized behind the FEs, and had under-protected with Starbases since I hadn't planned to initiate any wars with them. So before long this fleet was hovering over a planet of mine and a scary stack of Space Marines was heading near them to drop.

Fortunately, the smaller fleet popped through a wormhole into the southwest quadrant of the galaxy and started making its way towards a chokepoint with a Citadel. I carefully timed out their arrival, then moved in my entire navy, 3 full fleets of battleships and another 3 fleets of corvettes. (Well, not QUITE entire - I had the Gray warform defending one Star Eater and a fleet of corvettes defending the other one. But most of them.) Despite their superior tech, I quickly overwhelmed them.

As usual, I was briefly tempted to continue fighting for a Victory, but quickly talked sense into myself for a White Peace. On paper I had a much higher Fleet Power, which gave a bonus for acceptance, and that single battle (which only actually destroyed a single Battlecruiser and two Escorts but sent a lot more MIA) gave something like 50% War Exhaustion. The calculus could have swung dramatically if they took a planet from me, so I was pleased to call off the war before that happened.

A year or so later, the Progenitors also declared war... against the Holy League! I'm still baffled why and how this happened; the Xenophiles are incredibly easy to get along with. But now my main opponents were fighting THREE wars: against the half of the galaxy in the Cosmic Pact, against little ole' me who's just trying to destroy the universe, and against an incredibly powerful Fallen Empire. The Progenitors swiftly took control of most of the Androj Commonwealth, the most powerful remaining empire in the Holy League.

In the meantime, I'd steadily been marching my Star Eaters through Holy League territory. I think you can destroy any star, including ones you own yourself, but I wanted to keep my existing empire intact. I was focusing on my former allies, although I would also blow up systems that they owned but the Cosmic Pact controlled during their war.

The graphics for blowing up stars are really cool. At first glance Stellaris is a typically stale Paradox UI, just a map with a ton of icons and text, and that's definitely the view you'll be looking at for 99.99% of your playtime; but when you do zoom in on systems, they can be quite beautiful, and space battles can look incredible, with lots of lights and effects. Whenever you open a system whose star has just been cracked, you'll see a remarkable explosion as the star explodes and the lights go out; I eventually realized that there's an ongoing animation for the entire process, where you can watch the Star Eater gradually powering up and emitting its beam and the desperate struggle of the astral entity to survive.

The free-for-all wars gradually wound down. The Holy League made peace with the Progenitors, at the cost of Humiliation, significantly harming their effectiveness. Hostilities with the Cosmic Pact wound down soon after. I was curious if the former Pact members would now join the war against me; they did not, although I was already near the end and maybe they would have once the truce ended or something.

I did have another war against the Shard. They immediately declared war the instant our truce was up, without sending me any demands first. This time I was prepared for their maneuvers, and I patiently waited for them to reach one of my armed-to-the-teeth citadels before teleporting in my entire fleet, wiping them off the map, and then quickly calling for a White Peace.

MEGA SPOILERS

A few other story beats continued to play out as I approached the end. There's an event where a massive psychic backlash emanates from the Shroud; according to the wiki, this should kill some random Psionic pops and Psychic leaders, but apparently since I had taken the Psionic Ascension we were prepared for that eventuality and didn't suffer any consequences. That was cool; some of the writing for BtC can feel a little odd as a Psionic Ascension empire since it sounds like the Shroud is a new and mysterious realm when we've actually been dipping in there on the regular for well over a century. But it was really neat to see specific reactions to our particular situations.

At long last, we finished upgrading the last stage of the frame and: Boom! The entire galaxy exploded! The energy released from the Shroud detonates all of the remaining stars in the galaxy, incidentally killing every living and mechanical entity throughout existence. Very dark, literally, but also really cool to see. In  my games I'm usually the one saving the universe from destruction, so it's neat to see what destroying the universe looks like!

Probably my favorite thing about Becoming the Crisis is that it very definitively ends the game at a specific point in time. In past Stellaris games, I'll often beat the Crisis with, like, 30 or 40 years left in the game, which means that if I want to record my score I have a very boring couple of play sessions where I'm just playing on high speed, typically ignoring all the empire management stuff and running out the clock. There was none of that here, just a big BOOM, then a nice clean map full of black holes with absolutely nothing to take my attention besides quitting.

END SPOILERS

Stellaris is one of those games that I can keep coming back to over and over again, a good combination of familiar and novelty. The core game mechanics have felt really fun for years, the randomness keeps things interesting, and the steady advancement of game updates and new expansions add lots of fun new bells and whistles. It would be a perfect "desert island" sort of game to just play over and over again; since it's always competing against other, often newer games that I want to play, I tend to go for years between campaigns, and it feels a little like a new game each time I come back to it.

Lately I've kind of had my eye on a couple of other Paradox games: Hearts of Iron IV and Vicoria 3 are both set in places and during times that I've lately been fascinated by, and I love the idea of playing as, say, Spanish Republicans during the Civil War or creating a socialist utopia in 1860s Germany. But do I really need yet another game that has dozens of DLC that I could easily play for hundreds of hours? Probably not, but that doesn't stop me from dreaming!

Bronze Sunset

I think my mind must be slipping. I've been reading "Iron Sunrise", a hard sci-fi novel from Charles Stross. It's the sequel to Singularity Sky, which I knew I'd read previously but couldn't remember when. I just checked my blog and saw that I read it, um, just about four months ago! It feels like a lot longer.

 

I've now enjoyed reading quite a few of Stross's series. While they've all been sci-fi, they've explored very different flavors of the genre. These two novels form what's apparently called the Eschaton series, and are the most science-based books of his I've read: he grapples really deeply with the implications of faster-than-light travel, how that impacts causality and time travel and such. He also looks at how those technologies impact civilizations, society and culture, but the science is the key to it. (Unlike, say, the Merchant Princes series, where the main impetus seems to be exploring a social/economic framework, with the science a convenient excuse to do so.)

MINI SPOILERS

Iron Sunrise starts with a literal bang: a man-made nova, destroying a star by means of temporal manipulation, essentially accelerating the passage of time of the star's core, fast-forwarding it a few billion years until it has collapsed into iron, then snapping it back into the "present" and unleashing incredible destruction over the entire bounds of a solar system. It's an awe-inspiring bit of prose that makes the stakes feel incredibly high.

This is set in the same universe as "Singularity Sky", and also shares some of the main characters, particularly Rachel Mansour and her now-husband Martin. The action takes place in different places, though: from the destroyed system (confusingly named "Moscow", apparently named after the Idaho city rather than the Russian capital) to Earth to several other planets, stations and large starships. And other than Rachel and Martin there's a large cast of new characters. For better and worse, they are unevenly represented in point-of-view: some just pop up for a chapter or two, while others end up driving most of the narrative.

The main character is probably Wednesday, who seems to be inspired by Wednesday Adams: she's a very Gothy teenage girl, always dressed in black and often sulking. Her family are refugees from the Moscow system: they lived on a station outside the Oort cloud equivalent, and so had time to evacuate before the blast wave reached them. She's also in contact with "Herman", a component of the cluster of intelligences and agents that make up the Eschaton, the totally-not-a-god entity who touched off the singularity and has shaped the fate of humanity.

MEGA SPOILERS

The pacing in this novel feels a bit uneven, with a ton of setup and backstory and musings for the first 7/8 or so and then a ton of action crammed in at the end. It's all very readable and fun, though.

The main villains are, unsurprisingly, the ReMastered. From the beginning they have strong Nazi overtones, with Stross calling out their blond hair and blue eyes. He's pretty vague about what their whole deal is for much of the book, but you can piece it together and infer a lot, so much of the big reveals near the end feel more like the characters catching up than us being surprised.

It's interesting to think that this book was published in 2004, likely written during 2003, during the height of the rush to the Iraq War. I don't think this book is directly commenting on that, but when Stross notes how the ReMastered used the threat of security and terrorism to whip local populaces into a panic and use that fear to install their own leaders and carry out their agenda... well, I don't think that storytelling is happening in a vacuum. Of course there are the straightforward analogies to the Reichstag Fire besides the more sideways links to yellowcake.

The plot gets pretty messy and complicated near the end, but I actually really liked that. As Herman warns, there isn't just one group of "good guys" and one of "bad guys", but multiple sub-factions, with the same group often at odds with itself. That feels a lot more real to life than most books; I mean, just look at how frequent turf wars between bureaucracies in the US play out. I appreciated how the characters in the book would share the reader's confusion, with their assumptions of who was responsible for what and to what end being upended, and subsequently questioning the rightness of a course of action.

Some of the "twists" in the book are incredibly choreographed: it's pretty obvious that Svengali the clown is an assassin long before it's officially revealed. Others did catch me by surprise, especially Steffi's role in the action: it is a neat trick to use a character's POV but elide some topics.

END SPOILERS

Ordinarily this is where I would write "I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series", but in this case, there are no other books. Apparently Stross has found irresolvable problems with how he's set up this particular universe and won't be returning to it. I'm not surprised about the trouble - causality is such a delicate idea both in reality and in fiction, and while it's ballsy to play with it (even within constraints) like Stross does, doing so seems especially fraught. Especially in a hard-science-fiction context like this, where you can't just hand-wave away problems and attribute them to midichlorians or The Weave.  I am a little sad we won't get more, especially since (unlike the first book) this one ends by strongly setting up the next course of action. Still, I hugely respect that decision, and hey, there's still plenty more Stross for me to read!

No (Nah)

I had the privilege of taking a whole week off of work, which among other things meant a lot of focused time for reading. I brought entirely too many books, including the absolutely massive House Of Morgan, which I may finish in 2026. Balancing that tome, though, was the incredibly fun and readable Nona the Ninth, the third entry in Tamsyn Muir's excellent series about Necromancers In Space.

 

It looks like I never blogged up my reaction to the second novel, and perhaps partly because of that, my memory of that book was a lot fuzzier than the first. I remembered many specific scenes and characters, but not much about how that book exactly ended, and as a result felt somewhat lost when following the new action here.

MINI SPOILERS

I've enjoyed all three books, but my favorite remains the first, almost purely because of Gideon's voice. Harrow and "Nona" are great and well-drawn characters, but it's tough to compete with Gideon's razor-sharp wit, sarcasm, anachronistic pop-culture references and relentless meanness. Harrow wasn't as funny, but felt really dangerous and intense. In contrast, Nona seems like a total cinnamon roll: sweet, helpful, considerate, compassionate. I can see why the people around her act so shocked at her attitude!

It felt a little constricting to step into a seemingly smaller-stakes story after dealing directly with the Necrolord Prime, the Resurrection Beasts, the River, the Saints and the other high-profile elements of the previous book. I think it works pretty well, though. Living at the smaller scale of a city wracked by fear gives a great sense of the human stakes that are impacting everyone in the galaxy. And at the same time we keep tabs on the grander story proceeding in the background. The most dramatic face of this is a series of flashbacks, between the necromancer emperor ("John") and a female companion, which lays out the origin story of the whole series.

MEGA SPOILERS

It's a pretty cool story, and makes it clear that this story takes place in our future, not some alternate Star Wars-style universe. Things on Earth have continued getting worse and worse, to the point where the whole planet is dying and our species with it. A lot of people (and companies and governments) are debating and experimenting with various last-ditch survival strategies. The big goal is to somehow get humanity to a far-away planet that can sustain life. The problem is how to get there: the distances in space are unimaginably vast, far longer than people can live. There are some suggestions like cryo, freezing bodies for the long journey and then thawing them out; and more radical ideas, like digitizing peoples' consciousness and carrying them on hard drives or scraping a few cells onto a plate and then cloning them after arrival.

John is working on his preferred approach, and discovers by accident that he is able to animate dead bodies. He experiments with this, getting to learn more about his ability and the underlying powers of thanergy and thalergy. As amazing as this ability is, it still pales in comparison to the threat of species extinction, and he tries to find ways to put his gift to use. There's some limited progress along commercial lines, but he and his followers become supremely disenheartened when they discover that the rich and powerful people bankrolling this effort have no intention of saving all of humanity: they're building a single ark that will get themselves off the planet and leave everyone else to die behind. (Which is sort of an inversion of the Douglas Adams story of the B Ark.)

Things escalate, with John deciding that he'll get more ability to direct things for good by presenting himself as a necromatic wizard instead of some scientist, and using his powers to directly affect things. It all comes to a head when John realizes that individual peoples' souls are all connected to the soul of the Earth, and then he devours the planet's soul, making himself incredibly powerful, able to crush his enemies and bring his plan into action.

These passages were really compelling: the story itself is pretty wild and bonkers, it does a great job at filling in backstory that was only teased at before, and John himself has a pretty great voice: wry, self-deprecating, chagrined, occasionally angry.

The main story doesn't rise to those high levels, but I came to really love Hot Sauce, Honesty, the Angel, and the more domestic glimpses of Pyrrha Dve and Sextus Palamades and Camilla. The Sextus/Camilla situation in particular was interesting; again, my memory of the second book is pretty fuzzy, but I think there was a similar scenario in there of multiple memories / "souls" residing in a single body, and the first book also played around some with mistaken identities and swapping bodies. I don't want to say that this book is "about" gender necessarily, any more than Gideon the Ninth was "about" sexual orientation, but it's cool to have a book that's comfortable portraying these ideas in interesting scenarios.

END SPOILERS

This was another really fun book, a quick read but not at all ephemeral. It looks like we have at least one more entry on its way. Next time around I think I'll refresh myself with a synopsis or something before diving back in, but I am definitely going to dive in!