Nexus

I recently read "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari. My friend Dan recommended it, and I can see why: it's an intriguing book, bursting with knowledge, analysis, theories and predictions. The author is a professional historian, and the book liberally cites historical examples, but the book is more interested in describing how society works as a system: the parameters, the choices and limits available to us, how technological developments have opened or closed doors in the past and how they might change in the future.

 

 

Looking back, this kind of feels like two books to me. The first third looks at the history of "information networks" from the dawn of our species through the present day. This is a very broad but very vital topic: how ideas are generated, debated, accepted, spread, and how they affect us as individuals, groups and nations. The second two thirds focus on the impact of computers in general and AI in particular, sounding an alarm for the potentially existential threats they pose to our way of life. I found the first section extremely compelling and convincing, the latter part less so.

It's hard to summarize the whole book in a blog post, but my primary take-away of his argument is that, while we tend to think of "information" as reflecting reality, it doesn't necessarily have any connection to reality. "Information" is just data or thoughts, which could be true or misleading or false or fictional. Nonetheless, despite not necessarily being true information does have a profound impact on our entire lives. Concepts like "money" are purely human inventions that don't reflect natural law, yet the shared ideas we have about "money" control so many aspects of our lives. In fact, the most powerful forces in our history have essentially been myths and stories we tell ourselves: about religion, race, nations on the macro level; love, friendship, rivalry, heroism on the micro level.

I'll note early on my biggest criticism of the book, that some of the language feels a bit shifty. Harari calls this out in particular: he writes a lot about "information" but acknowledges that this word means something different to a biologist, a historian, a journalist, a computer scientist, and so on. I think his personal definition is carefully crafted and fit to purpose, but I get the nagging feeling that there's some semantic sleight-of-hand in how he uses it throughout the book.

Somewhat similarly, he writes a lot about "dictatorship" in contrast with "democracy," but he seems to basically define "democracy" as "a good government." He explicitly says that a democracy is not about majority rule, which I think is insane. In my opinion, you can have dictatorships that protect minority rights, or democracies that do not protect minority rights, but he seems to think that any system that protects minority rights is automatically democratic. He really should use different terms for what he's talking about instead of slapping significantly different meanings on well-established words. (It's wild that he defined "populist" and traces back the etymology but never does this for "democracy.")

Later on he somewhat snippily writes that he doesn't want to create neologisms so he insists on using common words. Which, fine, that's his choice. But I don't think you get to do that and then complain about how people are misunderstanding or misinterpreting your argument, when you're using common words to mean something different from how most people understand them. I vastly prefer Piketty's approach, using a neutral word like "proprietarian" that he carefully defines and then can usefully examine in his work, sidestepping the confusing baggage that comes with words like "liberal" or "capitalist" (or "democrat").

But those complaints about words aside, I think Harari's big argument is very correct and is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately, paralleling some significant changes in my own thinking over my life. When I was a baby libertarian in my late teens and early twenties, I whole-heartedly agreed with statements like "The solution to hate speech is more speech." As I've grown older and observed how things actually work in the real world, and how things have worked in the past, I've come to see that this isn't true at all: adding more voices does not automatically, consistently or reliably neutralize the harm generated by hate speech.

Prior to reading this book, I've tended to think that this is a symptom of the modern world, where the sheer volume of information is far too much for us to properly inspect and interrogate. We have enough time to read 100 opinions when rapidly scrolling a social media feed, and won't click on any of the articles they link to, let alone follow up on those articles' primary sources (if any). So we early believe the lies, spins, misrepresentations and exaggerations we encounter in our informational ecosystem. Why? We're biologically conditioned with a tendency to latch on to the first thing we hear as "true" and become skeptical of subsequent arguments or evidence against our previously received beliefs.

As Harari shows, though, the spread and persistence of misinformation isn't at all a modern phenomenon. One especially compelling example he gives is the history of witch hunts in Europe. In the medieval era, belief in witches was very local and varied a great deal from one community to the next: each village had their own folklore about witches, maybe viewing them as a mixture of good and bad: sometimes bringing rain, sometimes killing goats, sometimes mixing love potions. Late in the medieval era, the official Catholic church doctrine was that belief in witches was a superstition, and good Christians should trust in God rather than worry about magical neighbors. That changed when Heinrich Kramer, a man with bizarre sexual and misogynistic hang-ups, rolled into the Alps denouncing particular women for having sex with Satan and stealing men's genitalia. He was shut down by local secular and church authorities. He left town, got access to a printing press, and printed up thousands of copies of the Malleus Maleficarum, which gave lurid and shocking details about a supposed global conspiracy of secret witches who had infiltrated every village and carried out horrific crimes against children. This took off like wildfire and led to centuries of torture and execution of innocent people This is all very similar to QAnon, Pizzagate, and trans panics today. An individual can write a compelling and completely false narrative and set off a global campaign of hate and violence, completely deaf to the litany of evidence against these lies. Whether in the 1600s or the 2000s, having more information didn't bring the world closer to truth or solve problems, it led to immense misery and evil.

The conventional view of the printing press is that it broke the Catholic church's religious stranglehold on information and enabled the development of the Scientific Method, allowing people to freely publish and share their ideas. There is some truth in this, but it's overstated. Copernicus's groundbreaking book on the heliocentric system failed to sell its initial run of 1000 copies, and has been called "The worst seller of all time." Meanwhile, the Malleus Maleficarum instantly sold through multiple runs and continued to be a best-seller for centuries. The fact that Copernicus's book was more true than Kramer's did nothing to increase its popularity or reception or impact on the world.

Instead of unfettered access to information, Harari credits the Scientific Method to the creation of institutions with a capacity for self-correction. This was very different from the Catholic Church, which was (and is!) forced by its own doctrine to deny any error. Interestingly, Harari points out that most of the founders of the scientific revolution did not hail from universities, either. Instead, they were an information network of royal societies, independent researchers, journals and so on. The key difference here was that information was peer-reviewed: people wouldn't just say "Trust me," but would share their theories, experiments and data as well as their conclusions to their colleagues, who would look for errors, omissions or alternative explanations. And if an error later was discovered, journals would publicize the error, making corrections to the past record rather than cover it up or ignore it. While this seems like it would weaken the reliability of a source, it ends up building trust in the long run: the reality is that, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are fallible, and by embracing this self-correcting system we can move in the direction of greater truth, not merely the most compelling story.

Fundamentally, Nexus is arguing against what it calls the "naive" view of information, which is basically "More information will reveal the truth, and the truth will produce order and power." This idea is that more information is always good, because true and useful information will drown out the bad and lead to a better understanding of how the world works. Again, this view is easily disproven by history. One alternate view is what Harari calls the "populist" view, which essentially denies that an eternal "truth" exists at all, and equates information with power. Controlling the production and flow of information will produce power, which in the "populist" view is implicitly good in its own right.

Taken from another angle, Harari thinks that there is a "truth" which reflects "reality", but "information" doesn't have any intrinsic relationship to truth. Some information truly reflects reality, other information distorts reality. The consistent effect of information is that it connects - when we tell stories to each other, we grow more connected, and I can persuade you of my ideas and convince you to act in a certain way, or you can make me feel a kinship with you and act for your benefit. There is an even larger class of information that contributes to what he calls an "intersubjective reality". This is information that exists on its own independent of an underlying physical reality. Think of story-telling: you might make up an impressive work of fiction, someone else might write fan-fiction based on your world, a critic might write a review of your fiction summarizing what happens in it, a fan would argue that a character should have made a different choice than they actually did. You end up with this entire ecosphere of carefully-constructed and internally-consistent thoughts about an idea that doesn't have an underlying reality. You, the critic, and the fan are all choosing to participate in a shared intersubjective reality.

There is actually some evolutionary advantage to our ability to create and share stories. We talk about how our fight-or-flight instincts are biologically inherited from our ancestors who needed to quickly react to the presence of a saber-toothed tiger. Harari brings up the interesting point that our neanderthal and sapiens forefathers had a similar evolutionary advantage around their ability to cooperate in teams. You can have a small band of, say, chimpanzees or bonobos that may cooperate against another band, but you never see chimpanzee communities of hundreds or thousands. You can get bands of that many humans, though, thanks to their ability to share stories and ideas. These ideas may be built around myths, concepts of extended kinship, oral traditions of prior hardships and victories.

To this day we have a very strong reaction to all sorts of "primitive" stories: boy-meets-girl, good-man-beats-bad-man, sibling-rivalry, etc. These stories gave evolutionarily beneficial advantages in winning mates, having children, taking territory and defeating enemies. Today, we still strongly respond to those stories; however, in the same way that our daily lives have many more encounters with rude bicyclists than with saber-toothed tigers, we're far more likely to need to navigate an opaque bureaucracy than to kill a rival chieftain. But we don't have a gut-level appreciation for stories about bureaucracies in the same way we appreciate action or romance stories. And our brains don't retain information about bureaucracies very well: we can remember bible stories about rivalries and murder and who fathered who, but we are terrible at remembering lists of sewage inspection reports or NGO organization charts or certification requirements.

As an aside, this observation reminds me of William Bernstein, who writes about how man is a story-telling animal. We respond much more strongly to stories than we do to data, which was evolutionarily adaptive in the past (we won't eat the red berries because someone told us that they're poisonous) but gets us into all sorts of trouble today (we listen to our friend who says investing in bitcoin is safer than US Treasuries). Interestingly I think this observation is from his finance book The Four Pillars of Investing and not one of his history books, although the observation seems even more relevant to history. But Bernstein is a trained neurologist, has a keen understanding of how our biological makeup and mental hardware impacts our daily lives and how we organize as a society.

Harari is a big fan of the Scientific Method, as is Bernstein (in The Birth of Plenty), but neither writer is too rose-tinted. One thing I've heard in the past that Nexus backs up is that individual scientists almost never change their mind, even when faced with persuasive empirical evidence challenging their prior beliefs. Scientists are humans, with egos and prejudices and concerned about maintaining their prestige and positions. When science advances, it isn't like everyone reads a journal and changes their mind; it's that the old guard continues believing the old thing but eventually dies off, and is replaced by a new generation that grew up being persuaded by the better, new belief. Change is measured in decades, not months or years.

Which is fine, if that's how it works, but feels discouraging when considering the problems we face today. We may not have decades to react to crises like climate change or the subversion of democracy. And "decades" is specifically for the class of professional scientists who pay attention to evidence for a career; it's even less likely that the populace as a whole will change their mind to a truer, more correct belief. I mean, Newtonian physics was disproven something like 120 years ago, yet we still learn it in school and most of us follow it in daily life; those of us who have finished high school are vaguely aware of relativity, and have probably heard of string theory but don't really understand it.

All to say that, I don't think science can save us from urgent wide-spread problems. It's slow, and while it can influence the elites it can't change the mind of the masses. Harari seems to suggest that the real key is trust. If we're a society that trusts scientists, because we know they peer-review their work and admit mistakes and are continually improving, we may accept their pronouncements even if we personally don't have the time or inclination to check all their work. But if we don't trust scientists, we lose the benefits of science: longevity, productivity and affluence.

Science is ultimately about truth, but as Harari keeps noting, truth isn't the end-all and be-all: a society with access to truth does have some advantages (it can keep its citizens healthier and produce more reliable military equipment), but it is not guaranteed to triumph over a society with less devotion to the truth. Harari sees Order and Truth as two separate pillars upon which societies are built. You need both of these. Without truth you can't survive: you'll have feces in the water supply, desolate cropland with the wrong grains planted in the wrong season, walking on foot because you don't have motors. Think of something like the Great Leap Forward in China, which upended scientific truths and led to internal misery and the stunting of external power. (In a surprising coincidence, Nexus devotes a few paragraphs to Trofim Lysenko, who I just wrote about in my last post: he was a charlatan who convinced Stalin that genetics was bogus and led the USSR down a path that led to the evisceration of its sciences and widespread man-made famines.)

But you also need order in a society. If you don't have order, then you have anarchy, the collapse of the bureaucracy and the inability to function. Again, you can have bad sewage, because nobody is preventing others from poisoning the water supply; crops are desolate, because farmers know bandits will take any crops they grow, walking on foot because nobody is organizing the factory which makes motors. Between truth and order, you can make a convincing argument that order is the more important factor. Stalin was a moral nightmare, his internal terror was horrific to truth, which caused huge real problems like massive losses in the Red Army; and yet, the system was incredibly stable. Nobody dared challenge Stalin despite his many failures, the USSR endured for multiple generations and had a real shot at total world domination. Or consider the Catholic Church: it has consistently prioritized order over truth, defending bad ideas like the geocentric nature of the universe, disastrous crusades and self-destructive inquisitions; and yet it has lasted for two thousand years, far longer than the School of Athens, the League of Nations or the Royal Academy of Sciences.

In an ideal world, of course, you would balance these two. Those of us in the West will generally push for the primacy of Truth, but still recognize Order as an essential ingredient. There may be times when this requires tough choices, as in the 1960s with widespread dissent and protest against the Vietnam War and racial injustice. One thing I really like about Harari is that, like Piketty and unlike Marx, he foregrounds the importance of choice. Order doesn't inevitably triumph over Truth, nor Truth over Order; multiple stable configurations exist, we can help shape the kind of society we live in, and we should also recognize that other societies may follow other paths, with results that are different from ours and may be stronger or weaker than us.

Going back to the various views of information, Harari has rejected the naive view that information leads to truth, and truth leads to wisdom and power. He also rejects the simplistic populist view that there is no truth or wisdom, that information directly leads to power. His view is that information produces both truth and order. Truth and order, in tandem, generate power. Separately, truth also leads to wisdom. Wisdom relies on truth, but power does not require wisdom. It's an interesting view; I think I'll need to sit with it a while longer to digest and decide if I actually agree with it, but it does feel useful to me.

Phew! All of the above thoughts and reactions are for the first third of the book, which is mostly teeing up the second two-thirds. (There's a lot more I didn't get into in this post, like how advances in information technology enabled large-scale democracies for the first time, the historical development of the bureaucracy, or the 20th-century conflicts between democracy and totalitarianism.) I'm less enthused by the last 2/3 of the book which is mostly about the threat posed by AI.

Examining my own reaction, I think I have a knee-jerk skepticism. Overall I find his arguments persuasive but annoying. I am not at all an apologist for or proponent of AI, but I've been in the camp that views AI as the latest graduated step in advancing technology, whereas Harari sees it as fundamentally different from prior technologies. His point is that algorithms in general and AI in particular are agenic: they can actually take action. Up until now technology has merely augmented human decision-making. A human needs to consult a book, then execute the action described by the book; a human is in the loop, so there's an opportunity to stop and question the book's instructions before carrying them out. But a computer program can, say, deny credit card applications or impose a prison sentence or alter the outflow rate at a sewage treatment facility without requiring any human intervention. Two programs can directly communicate with one another in a way that two books or two TV shows could not.

In another interesting little coincidence, I just recently (re?-)watched The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock. Many parts of that movie felt like they were in strong conversation with Nexus. For example, in one scene her character Angela Bennett is trying to get back into her hotel room, but the clerk tells her, "The computer says that Angela Bennett checked out two days ago." She insists, "No, I'm Angela Bennett, and I didn't check out, I'm standing right here!" but the clerk refuses to engage with her and moves on to the next person. Even thirty years ago we had offloaded our decision-making to the computer, so what's different now? The fact that there won't even be a clerk in the future: just touchless entry at the door, with nobody to hear your complaint or the ability to override the system. And the ubiquity of the system: in The Net, human hackers had singled out Angela Bennett in particular (much like Will Smith's character in Enemy of the State); but in the future, AI might target entire classes of people: the sick, or anyone with a criminal record, or humanity as a whole.

The triumph of AI isn't inevitable: it requires us choosing to give it control. But if we do make that choice, we may find it impossible to reverse. We can't appeal to AI's mercy or wait for it to fall asleep. Harari repeatedly refers to AI as not just "Artificial Intelligence" but "Alien Intelligence": it isn't that it thinks like a human but more rapidly, it "thinks" in a completely different way from us. For well over a decade now AI has been a black box: we can't understand how it makes its decisions, only watch the final choice it makes. All this adds up to a very urgent and potentially deadly situation.

Harari does offer some suggestions for how to address the threat posed by AI, which I do appreciate. It's very annoying when books or articles lay out doom-and-gloom scenarios without any suggested solutions. The proposals in Nexus tend to be pretty narrow and technical. They include things like keeping humans in the loop, requiring us to sign off on decisions made by AI; along with this, AI needs to explain its reasoning. Harari also muses about banning or at least prominently labeling all bots and generated content online: we waste far too much mental energy arguing against bots, and the more we engage with them the better they get to know us and the more likely they are to persuade us.

As modest as these proposals seem, he acknowledges that they still seem unlikely to be implemented. In the US they would require legislative action, which is incredibly difficult these days, and even more so when the majority party is (perhaps temporarily) benefiting from AI support.

One of my annoyances with this book is how Harari stumbles into what I think of as terminal pundit brain, the impulse to treat political factions as equivalent. He writes things like "Both parties are losing the ability to communicate or even agree on basic facts like who won the 2020 elections." It's insane to act like the Democratic party is equally to blame for January 6 and election denialism! Elsewhere, though, he does acknowledge the reality of the situation, making a cogent abservation about the abrupt transformation of right-leaning parties. Historically the conservative party has, following Edmund Burke, argued for cautious, slow and gradual change, while the progressive party has argued for faster and more ambitious change. But in the last decade or so, Trump's Republican party along with parties abroad like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Duterte in the Philipines have transformed into radical parties that seek to overthrow the status quo: getting rid of bureaucracies, axing the separation of powers, imposing new economic systems, and broadly and rapidly changing social relations.

This is a surprising change on its own, but Harari notes that this has also thrust the traditional left-leaning progressive party like the US's Democratic party into the unlikely role of the defender of the status quo. They aren't necessarily adopting more conservative positions, but they do want to retain the overall democratic system. While Harari doesn't dig into this aspect much further, it does really resonate to me. I often feel like the Democratic party insists on bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's very frustrating to hear, say, Chuck Schumer repeat the tired paeans to bipartisan cooperation and consensus, when the house is burning down behind him. I do feel a bit more sympathy for him when I think of how he wants to keep a robust pluralistic democracy running, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that his actions will help bring that about. My overall pessimistic feeling has been that that era is just over now, and while a populist left may be less stable than a broad-based democratic left or broad-based democratic right, it's the best option available to us now.

I think that Piketty is much more useful in this area than Harari. If we're going to marshal the resources to actually address climate change and similar existential issues, we need to retake democratic control of our wealth, which in practical terms means taxing the rich and limiting the influence of money in our politics. It's no coincidence that the ascendant conservative faction tearing down institutional systems is the faction aligned with the wealthy.

Harari points to the breakdown in political and social cohesion in the US. During the 60s the country was wracked by big divisions over civil rights, women's rights, war in Vietnam, and other points of friction. The entire Western world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. And yet the system still functioned pretty well. The Civil Rights Act was supported by majorities in both parties, the Nixon administration broke every norm of the justice system yet ultimately abided by court order. The fragile and messy democratic West eventually came through this period and triumphed over the more order-orientated USSR. Today, there's no bipartisanship, not a shared set of beliefs in facts let alone ideology, a lack of trust not just in specific bureaucracies like the CDC or the FBI but overall institutions like science and government as a whole, as well as a rejection of core structural decisions like the separation of powers.

Harari admits that he doesn't know what the reason is for this breakdown in consensus that has occurred over the last decade or so, but he implies that there's at least a chance it's the impact of alien intelligence: shrill political bots driving outrage on social media, algorithms steering individuals into more siloed media environments, and so on. Personally, though, I think you can draw a straight line from Newt Gingrich giving speeches to an empty House of Representatives in 1984 through to Donald Trump pardoning the January 6th rioters in 2025. There's a pundit-brain temptation for symmetry and a refusal to acknowledge that one faction just wants power and doesn't have qualms about how to get it or keep it.

Again, there's a lot of stuff in this book that I found valuable which I haven't unpacked in this post. I should mention that Harari does a terrific job at examining Facebook's culpability in the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar and YouTube's role in bringing right-wing nationalist parties to power in 2016. That's all stuff I'd heard before (and lived through!), but it's really helpful to view as a unified trend and not isolated phenomena. But once more, I think Harari's instinct towards bipartisanship blunts the potential insights he could have. He views the algorithmic pull towards outrage in purely capitalist terms, as angrier people will interact more with content, not only generating direct ad revenue but also providing Facebook and Google with additional data they can store to make their products more powerful. But he skips over the fateful Peter Thiel-led decision to axe the human team running the Facebook News team in favor of the algorithm in the first place. Likewise, he doesn't mention how the GOP House accused YouTube of left-leaning bias and pushed for a more "neutral" algorithm, which in practice meant less truthful content and more outrageous content. Harari argues that we have collectively given too much power to the machine; in my view, a specific faction has led that charge, and is benefiting the most from the consequences.

I should also mention that Nexus is an extremely readable book. It looks a bit long, but I flew through the whole thing in just a few days. The language is very readable, each section is just a few pages long and makes a clear and cogent point. For all my complaints, I think Harari does an excellent job at noting what parts of the book are well-established facts, which are well-supported inferences, which are controversial statements, and what are merely speculative scenarios.

Overall I think I'd recommend this book to others. I think the first section is fantastic, the latter two are arguably even more important but less fun. I am curious to check out Harari's earlier books, it sounds like he's been working in adjacent areas for a while. I like his mix of concrete history and abstract systemic theorizing, and am curious what other tools he has come up with.

Monday Starts On Saturday

I've been enjoying working my way through the Strugatsky Brothers' novels. I just finished "Monday Starts On Saturday," which is the fourth one of theirs I've read. I haven't been following any particular order, just what happens to be at the library. All of their books I've read up until now have been science fiction, although they're all pretty different from each other. Roadside Picnic is set on a future Earth, not exactly post-apocalyptic but aspects of it can seem dystopic. Hard to Be a God was set on another planet, but its setting feels equivalent to our historic past. Monday Starts on Saturday is set on Earth, in modern times, but the setting feels very strange. 

 

MINI SPOILERS

It takes until about a third of the way through the book to clock what's going on. The narrator, Privalov, is a young computer programmer in the contemporary 1960s. He's driving while on vacation and picks up two hitchhikers, who set him up in an unusual house. This leads into an increasingly odd series of encounters: a quirky landlady, a very disturbed night sleeping on the couch, repeated dreams, disembodied voices, a talking cat, a regenerating coin, and so on.

For a while I thought that Privalov was in an extended dream, thinking that he was waking up but actually dreaming. We eventually learn that these fantastic things are really happening. This isn't really a sci-fi book, more of a book about magic, being done in the "real world" of the Soviet Union.

Once this becomes clear, Privalov becomes a part of this world, joining NITWiT: the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The rest of the book is kind of a series of vignettes about life in the Institute: the magical research being conducted, the zany scientist/magicians, the administration and bureaucracy, feuds and rivalries and collaborations. There are demons and djinns and homonculi and all sorts of creation and manipulation of matter.

The setting reminded me of quite a few other books without being very much like any of them. I was immediately reminded of the Laundry Files by Charles Stross, which I'm reading in parallel. Like that book, MSoS has an explicit linkage between mathematics and magic: the Aldan computer is a key component to the simulations that power many magical experiments. And both books/series pay nearly equal attention to the mundane bureaucracy that supports the supernatural excitement. But the tones of the books are very different; both are funny, but the Laundry Files tends to be very sarcastic, while MSoS is satirical but also optimistic, maybe having a bit more of a Swiftian or even occasionally Wodehousian voice. And the Laundry Files are set against a very dark and malevolent Lovecraft-esque backdrop, while MSoS's magic feels much more whimsical and ridiculous.

The "magic in the real world" angle to the book feels a bit like Harry Potter in general and Hogwarts in particular, with a sense of place where magic is being focused on in a world that mostly ignores it; but there isn't a focus on learning magic at all in MSoS, NITWiT is very much a research institute and not at all a teaching college. As you get further in the book, it also seems like there's a different relation between magic and mundanity. In Harry Potter, magic is real in our world, but all non-magical people are ignorant of it. But late in MSoS, there are a bunch of sections where journalists are covering the "experiments" of various researcher-magicians, and it's clear that stuff is being written about and reported on. So it seems like this is probably an alternate world to ours and not a hidden side to our world. (Though, now that I'm writing that, I suppose it's also possible that these journalists are writing for a select audience, maybe not the general population, in which case the overall dynamic may be similar.)

The overall feel of the setting is maybe closest to Unseen University from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, especially the bumbling of the supposedly very intelligent wizards. But again, MSoS is definitely set in the Soviet Union and not a fictional world.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Privalov volunteers to be a guinea pig in a time machine. "Time machine" is one of the only elements of this book that sounds science-fiction-y, but this is very different from an H. G. Wells - style machine. This machine takes the rider into the "described past" or the "described future": not our own timeline, but the timeline as recorded by historians or as predicted by science-fiction writers. Privalov opts to go into the future, which feels like it's probably a tongue-in-cheek criticism of Soviet science fiction. He sees hundreds of rockets blasting off into space, each one with a heroic young man being seen off by a doting young woman. Later on each one comes back with a tale to tell of what they encountered out in space. Privalov is very bored at how there is so much talking and so little action, which feels like a tongue-in-cheek criticism of contemporary Soviet sci-fi, or perhaps some lampshading self-criticism.

A particularly interesting segment occurs when Privalov encounters the "iron wall" that blocks off the view from one side of the "Refrigerator" complex: I'm like 99% sure this is a reference to the "iron curtain". A young woman says he's allowed to look at the other side but will have to answer for it, which fits with the supposedly open but de-facto autocratic surveillance state of the era. Privalov peeks through a door and is immediately overwhelmed by what he sees on the other side, a horrifically violent post-apocalyptic scene of destruction and despair. He revisits the door a couple of times, briefly chatting with an English-speaking man on the other side. Over there, they have dealt with malevolent invaders from other planets: a planet of aggressive bees, a planet of aggressive spiders, a planet of aggressive vampires, even a planet of aggressive Communists! I laughed out loud at that. Again, this has to be meta commentary on the state of science fiction in the 1960s, and it's fascinating to see a sort of comparative literature lens over genre fiction from within a work of genre fiction itself.

The end of the book does get a bit more science-y and a bit less fantasy-y, but the science always feels pretty magical and unknowable. There's an interesting bit on counter-motion near the end, where someone starts traveling backwards in time: not second-by-second, but living one day midnight to midnight, then jumping back to midnight on the previous day, and so on. This feels less plausible to me than a continuous Looper-style backwards flow through time, and the characters in the book are similarly initially skeptical. Ultimately it serves the story, which seems to be what this is all about: not science fiction for science's sake but for fiction's sake.

END SPOILERS

I looked up a few things in the book after finishing it, which led me down a wiki wormhole that led to Trofim Lysenko, who was the inspiration for a particularly pompous and buffoonish character. Reading about that person makes me feel freshly depressed about the times ahead for the United States with RFK Jr. in charge of our national health.

I haven't dug deep into this, but I have been fascinated by Boris's afterwords to these novels, which usually touch on the censorship the brothers occurred under the Soviet regime. There was a bit of a dance, where sometimes they were able to slip through some criticisms and original ideas, other times innocent and innocuous things would bring down the censorship hammer. Sometime I would love to read a biography of them, I'm so curious what their personal ideology was, how that was expressed through their writing, and what their experiences were like living through the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Overall, Monday Starts On Saturday leaves me even more impressed at the Strugatsky brothers. I'm coming to appreciate how there is a huge variance not just in their stories and settings, but even the style and tone of their books. Most of their books may end up getting filed under "Science Fiction", but each one I've read has felt like a wholly original creation. I'm glad that I have more of their books to look forward to!

Double Dragon

I hit another major story beat in Dragon Age Veilguard, so this seems like a good point for another checkin!

 

 

Overall I'm really enjoying it so far. This most recent section was pretty explicitly framed as Help Your Team Members Deal With Their Personal Issues, which I honestly enjoy, particularly in a BioWare game. Companions are always a high point in these games, and while I shouldn't draw any final conclusions before finishing the game, at this point I feel like this is one of the best overall ensembles from any of the Dragon Age games. In particular, I think this may be the first DA game where I have felt a strong attachment to every single member of the party. Typically there are a few characters I love, a few I find interesting and one or two I'm annoyed by. This time, from top to bottom I like them all. They're all very unique, in personality and background and combat style and stuff, but they all click individually and work as part of a big, varied but unified team.

 

 

I'd mentioned before that my motivation behind team composition has changed over time, and it continued to evolve in this act. DA:V (which, side note, now that I write it that way it seems confusing, since V is the fourth game and not a roman numeral fifth) is the first game in the series with a rigid separation between your PC and the companion NPCs. You personally gain XP and level up as you complete quests and kill monsters and stuff. Your companions don't have levels or the same skill tree or XP. Instead, you gain Ability Points as you increase your Bond with them. It seems like you make a lot of progress in the Bond when you finish their personal quests, but you also gain some Bond by having them in your (two-person) party when you complete a quest, and I think you also gain a little Bond by defeating enemies/bosses in their primary enemy faction (like Darkspawn for Davrin, Venatori for Neve, Antaam for Taash, etc.).

 

 

In some ways this reminds me of the 90s / early 2000s era of CRPGs where companions would only gain XP while being in your party, so you were incentivized to recruit your core party early, and then keep them around forever and never swap in less-favored members. That shifted later to have companions always gain XP at the same rate whether in the party or not, so you wouldn't be gimping yourself (or not significantly so) if you wanted to temporarily bring another member in because they seem more relevant for a particular quest or environment or something. In DA:V I feel like I'm actively encouraged to swap between party members, not just to hear different banters and things, but also to keep their ability points moving forward. So we've moved back to companions advancing based on having them in your party, but in a way that feels like it's rewarding you for adding them versus penalizing you for removing them.

 

The pacing of the game has felt good, it's a long game but not overwhelming. I think the zone design really helps here, usually there are multiple things you can do in an area, including major story quests, companion quests and side quests, along with a few puzzles to solve and high-value treasure chests to track down. There's a good sense of progression, and more opportunities open up as you move along, but since there's a finite amount of stuff to do at a given time in a given zone you never reach that breaking point of an Oblivion or a Skyrim where the sheer volume of quests makes each one feel meaningless.

 

 

Gear advancement has felt pretty good. I said this before, but I'll repeat that I love the lack of inventory management. No item limits or carry limit, and you can't sell any gear, only trash/"valuable" items. That does mean that you end up getting a ton of equipment that you'll never use, but that's okay, it doesn't harm you to have it in your inventory, and it is extra-exciting when you do get a drop that works for you. I've been sticking to pretty consistent loadouts for my PC and my companions, I think so far I've only customized for one specific fight, after losing against a very tough optional boss who's vulnerable to Necrotic and resistant to Electric attacks. The one very minor annoying thing is that each Enchantment can only be applied to a specific piece of gear at a time - you can swap to another item of gear at any time while in the field, but if you want to put an Enchantment on that, you need to trek all the way back to your home base first. It would be nice (at least gameplay-wise) if each enchantment was applied to the slot instead of to the item, or if you could swap enchantments in the field.

 

 

Build-wise, I took the Veil Ranger specialization, which is the Archer subclass of a Rogue. My Abilities are mostly lightning-based, and for combos I can inflict Weakened or detonate Overwhelmed. I can make this work with a lot of companions, but it's a particularly natural combo with Taash who can detonate Weakened and inflict Overwhelmed (both on command and periodically passively). I mostly do ranged attacks from a distance, usually trying for headshots but often settling for center-of-mass targeting. During this Act I've mostly been rocking the Trueflight Bow, which does bonus damage to Armor; a big part of that is that it's generally been my highest rarity useful bow, I think it's currently at Epic tier. The special effects of this are generally useful, I think there are some other ones that might be a better match for my playstyle, so once I finish upgrading other bows I might swap it out.

 

 

One interesting thing about Veilguard is that there are two broad classes of gear. Most items have a dual upgrade track: as you find duplicates of the same item, you upgrade the Rarity tier, which in turn will unlock other special effects of the item; you can also use the Caretaker's Workshop to upgrade the Level of the item, which will directly improve the numeric stats of the item (like Damage or Stagger). Then there are a few hard-to-find Unique items. These don't have a rarity or a level and come fully unlocked. These tend to be gimmicky. Examples include a Bow that reduces your Arrow Count to 1 but massively increases the Damage; another Bow that adds seven arrows and fires triple shots that each do 50% damage; one piece of Armor that massively increases your Defense but reduces your Ability power; and so on. I think that for a future playthrough of the game, it could be very powerful to design a build around some of these specific Unique items and beeline to them as soon as you can. In a way these items remind me of the Meteorite Staff from Elden Ring, in that it's a very powerful item if you get it early, but will eventually be outclassed after you're able to upgrade other items.

 

 

As I've built out more of my Archery abilities I do less hand-to-hand combat, but it is very satisfying. My strategy is heavily built around Dodge: I'll close range with someone (or shoot at them until they close range with me), get in a few hits with my dual-wielded blades, then dash through them, get a few more strikes, dash again, and repeat. Depending on the enemy speed and how crowded the battlefield is I may be able to get a whole attack chain in before the dash, or might need to dash after each individual tap. I'm currently using two Unique weapons for my melee swords. One does very low damage but inflicts Bleed on each hit, along with increasing the max stacks of Bleed; obviously this gives decent DOT, so if I'm in trouble I can lay down a few stacks of Bleed, run away, and hopefully something bad happens to the bad guy. The other weapon does 0 base damage, but inflicts a good amount of every type of Elemental damage, for high overall damage; I added an Enchantment to this that adds back in some Physical damage. I think this ensures I can do Critical melee hits no matter what element an enemy is resistant to.

 

 

Overall, I try to pick items and abilities that increase my archery abilities. I'm not too concerned about arrows: thanks to my ability tree I have a good amount to carry and good regeneration, so even in boss fights I never run out. But I'll use items that boost ranged damage, help with weakpoint attack, or otherwise increase my most common attacks. (Unlike Elden Ring, I haven't dug into theorycrafting and still don't understand [haven't bothered to look up] some basic concepts; for example, I have taken several passive abilities that upgrade my Area Abilities and Duration Abilities. But, I don't know what Area Abilities and Duration Abilities are, and whether I use any of them, and thus whether those upgrades are useful or useless.)

MEGA SPOILERS

In the romance department, I'd been flirting with multiple ladies, narrowed it down to Bellara and Harding, and ultimately locked in to romancing Harding. I already had a soft spot for her from our time together in Inquisition, and she's just great in general. Some sweetness (I love her subtly flower-embroidered collar), a lot of strength, self-awareness, devotion to her cause and her team, a certain level of maturity while still remaining open to new experiences. We're currently dealing with a physical incompatibility in the form of her raw lyrium expression triggering intense drowsiness in Rook. I'm curious to see where her Stone Sense storyline continues.

 

 

Harding is a bit of an outlier in general. She seems to be the one companion without any associated faction. I suppose that Kal-Sharok is her most affiliated location, but unlike, say, Arlathan Forest for Bellara you can't ever return there. She's most linked to the Inquisition, and I did love meeting the Inquisitor and getting notes from them, but that's a very distant southern faction you never directly interact with. On a practical level, while all other companions have unique gear you can buy from their faction merchant, Harding seems to have a few pieces scattered between a few different stores.

 

 

My favorite overall companion is probably still Davrin; as I noted in my previous post, I've been surprised by just how strongly he's grown on me. I initially assumed he would be a boring one-note fighter type, but he has such a great personality, an interestingly specific struggle he's dealing with, and... I dunno, I just really like him a lot.

 

 

Emmrich is probably the most out-there companion; I can't think of anyone similar from any other RPGs I've played. His vocal delivery reminds me of Dorian from Inquisition, which is great, but his personality and background are very different, despite both being mages. Like Bellara he has a nerdy obsessive quality to him, but he's her opposite in age, experience and maturity, reminding me of a beloved professor emeritus. Full of interesting ideas, confident while never seeming arrogant. He's often my go-to when I have a tough boss battle ahead but Harding isn't in my party, as I've built out his Heal ability and he synergizes well with a different set of companion abilities.

 

 

For the main story: I don't think there were any especially huge choices in this act like the Minrathous-vs-Treviso choice of Act 1. I've been generally supportive and encouraging of all companions as is my wont, although the form this takes can vary; some seem to respond better to toughness while others warm up more to a sympathetic ear. I don't think your tone ever locks you out of content, but you get stronger reactions one way or the other.

 

 

The last big story beat I hit was helping the remnants of the Grey Wardens defend against one of Ghilan'nain's blighted high dragons. This was a pretty epic fight: once you get the dragon down a good chunk, the second blighted  high dragon swoops in. But there's also a fun mechanic for the latter part of this fight where you can periodically summon off-screen allies (in my case Minrathous shadow dragons) to fire a powerful magic ballista at a designated target. By this point in the game I'd fought enough dragons to get the mechanics down. Periodically, one or more of their limbs will start glowing and appear in the modal overlay as a "Weak Point". After doing enough damage to the shifting "Weak Point"s, the dragon will collapse to the ground, exposing its heart as a new Weak Point. It takes massive damage when you hit that - I think each hit might be a crit or bypass defense or do multiplicative damage or something. Anyways, you want to whale on that exposed heart while you can, but that's also a great time to fire off your Ultimate Ability or invoke a lyrium-infused ballista bolt or otherwise do huge damage. So, even with two dragons on the field at the same time, I was able to get through this battle without dying and reloading, yay!

 

 

Immediately after this sequence and the next set of story beats, I picked up Taash's personal quests, which led me to yet another two cool dragon battles, one fire dragon and one ice dragon. So that was a good four dragons taken down in one long session - pretty fun!

 

 

I'm just dipping my toes into Act 3, which so far seems to be continuing the Act 2 theme of "The most important thing you can do now is to teach the Power Of Friendship to your team." I feel like the game is heading towards an ultimate boss battle against Elgar'nan, possibly with Ghilan'nain but maybe separately. But who knows. I haven't seen Solas for a while and I definitely still don't trust him. I am curious about Mythal; I did talk with Morrigan and Flemeth's alternate spirit, so I imagine Mythal will be an ally if anything. The stuff about the Titans has been interesting too, especially as that's been teased since the Descent DLC for Inquisition. I imagine that the Titans will be more prominent in a future DA game, but again, I've been surprised in the past!

 

 

Oh, I should also note here that I defeated the Formless One late in Act 2. I've loved how this tradition of semi-hidden, optional, super-duper-powerful bosses has continued throughout all four games, and of course that continues the great tradition of Kangaxx and similar "secret bosses" in Baldur's Gate and earlier games.

END SPOILERS

I'm already making good progress in Act 3 and enjoying the game. I think it took longer for this game to click with me than the earlier ones, in large part due to the more Action RPG style of it, but now that I'm invested in the companions, world and story I feel motivated to keep going, and I have enough experience with the controls that I'm no longer annoyed with them. (I do still wish this was more of a traditional tactical RPG than an action RPG, but that isn't my choice to make.) I probably have one more post to make after I wrap up the game, will see you in a bit with that!

Dat Antivan Veil

Checking in on Dragon Age Veilguard. I hit a pretty solid story beat recently; I think I'm probably out of Act I, assuming that is a thing for this game. I've finally assembled what seems to be my entire party, have some big story goals to pursue and a whole bunch of side-quests. So I wanted to write another little-ish post to capture my thoughts thus far, hoping to avoid writing too long of a novel after finally beating the game.

 

 

Let's start out with some purely mechanical notes.

 

 

The control scheme for exploration is pretty much the same as for Dragon Age Inquisition. It's been so many years since I've played that, and I'm abruptly reminded of how funny and mildly frustrating it is that "jump" and "use" are bound to the same key. Rook runs up to someone and hops up in the air when he wants to talk. Comes across a treasure chest and does a happy little hop. Comes across a door: do you pick the lock? Bash it down? Turn the knob? Nope: just jump straight up!

 

 

I do really appreciate the simplified inventory system. Armor just comes in complete sets, not individual pieces. New armor equipment drops from large treasure chests (marked on the map) or after clearing a stage; you can preview the equipment compared to your current piece and decide whether to swap or not. Each companion has their own separate gear, so you never need to sort through hand-me-downs. Equipment (armor, weapons, rings, runes) are never sold. You do sell miscellaneous items you pick up in the world, which in previous games were labeled "junk" or "trash". They are exactly the same in this game, except they've been rebranded as "valuables".

 

 

One mild annoyance is that there is an optimal way to sell the "valuables". Certain items are favored by particular vendors, so you're better off selling to them; you could also sell to other vendors for far less benefit. The only way to discover this is to travel around six different zones (with long loading times each) before selling to anyone, or else to pull up this Google Sheet and have it in front of you while you're deciding what to sell.

On the plus side, there's no carry limit for quantity or encumbrance, so you can skip past my absolute least favorite RPG activity; instead, just focus on playing the game, and sell the trash-er-I-mean-valuables when you need the cash.

None of this is remotely realistic, of course. Even less realistic is how finding a duplicate piece of equipment will upgrade the rarity of the existing piece you have: by definition, wouldn't it become less rare after you find two? But as a system it works great. Your gear keeps advancing: when you upgrade the level of one piece, every other piece in the category advances as well; and when you find a new piece, even if it isn't one you plan to use, it removes that from the pool and increases the odds of finding a piece you do want.

 

 

The world is pretty cool, although I've been spoiled by Elden Ring and to a lesser extent Baldur's Gate 3. DA:V feels like Inquisition, with large zones rather than an "open world". Each has its own unique atmosphere, whether a dripping gloomy swamp or a bright sunlit forest or a bustling dockside neighborhood. They do feel a bit generic fantasy-y, not as striking and original as Elden Ring... but that's okay, there is comfort in familiarity.

 

 

I do like how exploring pushes out the world as you uncover more of a zone's map but also connects earlier parts as well. You'll open doors that were locked on the other side, push down a tree to cross the canyon to where you originally came from. This makes subsequent travels through the area quicker and easier. It reminds me a lot of Elden Ring dungeon design, which eliminated back-tracking by providing shortcuts back to the start. But in Elden Ring it tended to be for one-time travel after finishing a dungeon or a streamlining the path to the boss. In DAV the entire world is linked like this, letting you cross-cross and move through the map more quickly and easily as the result of your previous exploration work.

 

 

There are a lot of different types of puzzles in the game. The rules seem inconsistent - when holding an arcane cube you can't jump. The types of puzzles tend to cluster by areas: arcane beams around fade portals, blight boils in blighted areas, wisps in the necropolis. The puzzles are fine, probably more enjoyable than the stand-alone puzzles like astrolobes in DAI. One thing that's a little annoying (as with navigation in general) is that it isn't clear when a particular puzzle can't be solved yet, you'll need to leave the area and come back after opening another door or something. 

 

 

Non-systemic puzzles have been good, nothing earth-shattering but also nothing too frustrating or difficult. Like one where you needed to make three statues point a certain way, and if you explore around the area you'll find miniature statues pointing the way you want. I did really enjoy a companion conversation back at the base where we griped about needing to solve puzzles to get loot - I think my Rook said something is, "I dislike random puzzles. There has to be some sort of a purpose!" Dragon Age has had some really good lampshading in the past, and this is right up there: we're playing in a universe where people are obsessed with putting annoying puzzles in their dungeons to thwart adventurers.

 

 

Combat also... I was going to say that it's like Inquisition, but it isn't. What is like Inquisition is enemy placement: there's a regular trickle of "trash fights," infinitely respawning low-to-mid-level enemies. You can get small amounts of XP and gold or trinkets from killing them. But they end up serving as resources in level progress. In Inquisition you could build up stuff like Guard from low-level fights and carry that into a boss fight. Similarly, in Veilguard you can get Momentum or power up your Ultimate from those trash fights, and enter the boss fight with a much stronger punch than if you had just entered directly from the quick-travel spawn-in point. 

 

 

Having played this some more, I really get now why people compare it with Mass Effect: it's basically exactly like that. You have two companions with you. They can never die. They fight on autopilot, but you can order their targets, and command them to use their special abilities on cooldown. You want to plan cross-team builds to use primers and detonators. I'm not complaining - Mass Effect combat was fun - but it is a shift from the previous Dragon Age games (which, to be fair, were each radically different from one another).

 

 

That said, for party composition I've mostly ignored companion builds or synergy. At first I prioritized bringing the people I liked. Then I started bringing people most relevant to the area. Now I'm also bringing the lowest-bonded to get their relation meter up; I think this advances when they complete a side-quest with you. I'll sometimes bring a strong and synergistic team if I'm specifically expecting a big fight and not exploration.

 

 

A quick note on the save system: after dealing with sparse and limited save points in Elden Ring, it has felt really refreshing to be able to save anywhere at any time (at least outside of combat). That said, it isn't a true save: previously-defeated non-boss enemies usually come back after loading a save, and if you've, say, burst three of five Blight boils, save and quit for the night, when you reload the next day you'll need to burst all five again. That hasn't been a big annoyance, and I'll still take it over Elden Ring style saves, but I've also started to make sure my end-of-day saves are at the end of a section and not in the middle when I can help it.

MINI SPOILERS

Early in the game, I was a bit struck by the casual language; in particular, some characters like Bellara have speech patterns closer to a modern teen than the standard faux-received-pronounciation generally associated with fantasy. Casual dialogue (with lots of modern swears!) has always been a part of the series but feels more pronounced now. Though, that also may be my reaction playing this game in my 40s vs playing Origins in my 20s; the characters here feel young but they're probably around the same age as people in Origins and Dragon Age 2. (Well, other than Wynn!)

 

 

Steam says I've played for 34 hours, which seems about right. I've spent a bit of time in the menus but not a ridiculous amount. I'm doing my standard RPG thing of trying to exhaust all side-quests before proceeding with the main game. Giving a slightly spoilery rundown of my game so far (mega spoilers for Inquisition):

 

 

My Rook is a male Qunari Rogue, somewhat recently taking the Veil Ranger specialization to focus on archery. He was a Shadow Dragon in Tevinter, and sees himself as a warrior defending the oppressed from the powerful, particularly breaking up slaving rings but more broadly anyone misusing their influence or authority. He would theoretically have some sympathy for Solas's crusade against the Elven gods, but is fixated on Solas's willingness to sacrifice innocent human life to tear down the veil, and as a result is consistently hostile to Solas in all our communications.

 

 

I think I mentioned earlier that Rook left the Mayor to deal with the consequences of the Blight, seeing it as a way to punish the putative leader for sacrificing his people. When the Evunaris attacked the cities, Rook opted to defend Minrathous first, mostly because of his affinity with the Shadow Dragons; once he could reach Antiva, though, he focused on clearing all the Blight possible.

 

 

I've recruited all companions, just recently getting Taash on board. I like all of them; Davrin is probably the one who has surprised me the most by how quickly he's growing on me, at first he seemed like a pretty generic Gray Warden but he has a really great personality, and I strongly relate to his bond with his griffin, which is a mix of affection, exasperation, humor and worry. I'm mostly flirting with Harding and Bellara, though I haven't committed to anyone yet.

 

 

The last major story thing was fighting Ghilan'nain and her dragon during the Siege of Weishaupt, which was a nicely epic sequence. I really loved how the companions you didn't bring in the party participated in the assault, which felt a bit like the action in Mass Effect Citadel. The boss fight was hard and fun; some annoying camera issues where a dragon's neck fills the screen so you can't see any of the dozen other enemies running around, and there's a recurring issue where you can get knocked into the water and insta-die-and-respawn, but even with those glitches I had a blast.

 

 

I continue to understand why reviewers compare this game to Mass Effect, and right now I'm particularly getting a Mass Effect 2 vibe: we've assembled this team of People With Particular Skills, and the explicit goal now is to Help People Solve Their Personal Problems so they can Focus On The Bad Guy. I'm not complaining! Mass Effect 2 was great, I'm already enjoying the Veilguard companions and expect to like them even more as I get to know them better.

 

 

Oh, and before I forget, I was a little bummed that so little of the world state from the first three games comes forward into this one, but it was fun to see the Inquisitor pop back up again. I kind of wish I had spent more time designing her; I decided that my first PC Aztar Cadash will be my canonical Inquisitor for this game, and she is a dwarf with darkish skin and short reddish hair, but really doesn't look much like my original one. I'm wondering now if a fan will ever build a tool to extract the Inquisition sliders (either from a save file or the Keep) and give steps on rebuilding them in Veilguard. But (a) the fact this game takes place a decade later does give at least some plausibility to looking different, and (b) having (who I think is) the original voice actor(s) back is hugely convincing.

 

 

More broadly, I am legitimately enjoying seeing (literally) old faces popping back up again. I was surprised to see Isabella make another appearance, I think she was MIA in Inquisition, other than maybe a War Table mission or two? She is visibly aged, which I honestly enjoy, it helps the world feel grounded and real. And somewhat similarly, seeing Morrigan appear was fantastic; she has not visibly aged, which makes a lot of sense given she is (a) a witch, and (b) Flemeth's child. But her style has changed (arguably more so than Isabella's), which gives the same sense of growth, that each person is the star of their own story and we get to see these stretches where we intersect.

 

 

 

 

END SPOILERS

So yeah, I'm definitely enjoying this game; it's too early to weigh in on how this compares with the earlier ones, at first it wasn't gripping me as strongly as I'd hoped but now that I have the team together and the main story has kicked in I'm getting a kick out of it. I'm looking forward to playing more and writing more about it!

The Somewhere Book

I'm a big fan of China Mieville, so it's a bit surprising that I first heard about his latest novel on The Colbert Report. It's an interesting book, co-written with the actor Keanu Reeves. Some years ago Reeves wrote a comic called BRZRKR, and more recently he and Mieville have collaborated on a novel "The Book of Elsewhere" that builds on the comic.

 

I haven't read BRZRKR, and I'm a little curious about the intended audience for TBoE, whether they assume that most readers are already familiar with the world and characters, or that they are not, or if they try to account for both. I honestly found the book a little hard to get into and struggled for the first hundred pages or so; I mildly suspect that, if I was already invested in the characters or familiar with their background, I might have gotten hooked earlier. I'm glad I stuck with it, as around the midpoint it started to click with me, and by the end I was really enjoying the ride.

MINI SPOILERS

One of the very few things I knew about BRZRKR heading into this novel is that it's a pretty gory comic. The main character, who variously goes by "B" or "Unute", is an ancient, immortal fighter. When he gets angry, he enters a sort of fugue state and becomes a whirling dervish of death. He's stronger than anyone on the planet and can take on entire squadrons of armed soldiers without serious injury; when he does get hurt, he rapidly heals; and even when he does die, as has happened many many times over tens of thousands of years, he is reborn again, with all his memories intact and ready to fight again.

The book mostly takes place in the present day, where B is the focus of a secretive special-ops agency of the US government: he's a one-man wrecking crew, but has an entire organization backing him up, giving him direction and support. A lot of the early book was referring back to previous events, including some deaths of soldiers attached to the unit, and I suspect but don't know that those are callbacks to the comics.

While the main plot unfolds in the present, there are a lot of chapters and sections that flash back to previous events in B's life, sometimes from his perspective and sometimes from the perspective of a mortal: a kid he encountered on a trans-oceanic voyage, or the woman he was married to for several decades, or an adversary. Mieville really unpacks and unspools the implications of B's life: how would someone's mind work if they had 60,000 years of memories to sift through? Would anything be able to surprise them? Would anything feel significant? Many of these flash-back events felt like one-off issues of a comic, where you take a break between big arcs and explore some backstory or a side character. In many cases, though, these end up directly tying into the main plot by the end.

By the end of the book, I concluded that Mieville was the perfect person to write this novel, in large part due to his mastery of the macabre. While this setting is very different from Bas-Lag, a lot of the description and imagery feels right out of Perdido Street Station: lots of blood that oozes and crusts and snags and snaps, eggs that are coated with slimy mucous membranes, bones that snap and tear into flesh. He'll tell the tale of a bullet as it passes through a body, the damage done within and the explosive mess it leaves as it exits. Fights are raw, brutal, physical, tolling. I've long thought of Mieville as a visceral author, in the sense of "filled with viscera," and this book is an exemplar of that aspect of him.

I should say that I don't, generally, enjoy those kind of books! I'm perfectly fine with glossing over the "gross bits" or leaving them out of the story entirely. That said, I think Mieville is extremely talented at that mode of writing.

Oh! And before I forget, I should say that I can't help but read B/Unute's lines in my head with Keanu Reeve's voice. It's pretty fun! Glancing at some art from the comic now, it seems clear that B is modeled after Keanu, so that's cool. (There's a character named "Keever" who I had also thought was based on him, just because of the name, but I think that's just me thinking that.)

MEGA SPOILERS

The plot takes a while to click in, and this ended up being one of those books where I got nervous near the end since it seemed like there was too much story left to go and too few pages. He does end up wrapping up everything in a satisfying way, though. I'll sum up my understanding of the overall story here, though most of the oldest stuff isn't made clear until near the very end of the book.

There are, broadly speaking, two primal forces in the universe, which B identifies as "Change" and "Entropy"; it feels a bit like a life/death or an order/chaos dichotomy, but is fundamentally different, as chaos and death can also be forms of change.

These forces have avatars, personalities, agendas. The "Change" force was likely responsible for the creation of life millennia ago. At some, rare points in the past, the "Change" force entered the body of females who had called upon it in times of great distress, and the women bear children: demigods, of whom B is one example. We know of a couple of humans, and one pig; there may be more. These beings all share immortality but otherwise are different.

The Entropy force wishes to end the Change force, and really all the dynamism of the universe. This will ultimately mean ending life, but one early step on the way is ending B.

Over the years B gets to know the big, as well as a half-sister, Vayn. B is identified with Death, while Vayn identifies with Life: she can make inanimate objects gain consciousness and move around, or bring back life to people who have died. Vayn tricks B into entering her church, binds him and tortures and kills him thousands upon thousands of times, before eventually realizing that they area actually the same: his ending of life is as essential as her creation of life. (Vayn tries to tell B this, but he refuses to let his raging fugue state lapse for long enough to listen.)

Many many years later, an agent of entropy, also known as Thowless, learns about B's activity in the Unit. Taking on the persona of Doctor Shur, a warm-hearted therapist, she becomes a trusted member of the Unit and builds bonds with the various soldiers, scientists and bureaucrats composing it. When one soldier dies at the hands of B, she subtly steers his lover into a supposed support group called the Life Project. While ostensibly a 12-step-style support group for grievers, it is actually a powerful cult run by Alam, a biological descendent of Vayn. Alam is guided by Shur, and grows to believe that by killing B, the avatar of Death, he can end Death itself and grant life to all people.

The infiltration into the Unit enables some funky things to happen, including what's basically a flesh golem going on a rampage, along with mysterious assassination attempts by super-fast invisible bugs. In the middle of this is Caldwell, a deep agent for what I think is yet another cult or secret society, who is turned by Alam and crew, and eventually traps B. Rather than fight, B agrees to surrender, and eventually reveals the situation to Alam. Shur is revealed, some people die, B emerges with a much better understanding of his place in the universe, and feeling much less alone.

I'm leaving out a whole bunch of plot there, but that's the main through-line as I understand it!

END SPOILERS

This did end up being a really enjoyable read. I'm still not really planning to pick up BRZRKR, but if I ever happen to run across the collection at the library or something I may check it out. It's one of those things that isn't really for me, but it is a very well-made example of what it is. I'm glad to have gotten to experience a slice of the genre, from one of my favorite authors no less!