association-list

I have to pref­ace this by admit­ting that I’m a Stross fanboy. As much as I love well writ­ten prose and poetic turns of phrase and those per­fect, telling details, I’m also a sucker for Big Think SF, even when it isn’t car­ried in the most excel­let prose pos­si­ble. Not that Stross isn’t a good word­smith. He’s too smart to write badly, but if there’s music there, it’s the harsh, angu­lar music of out of con­trol tech­nol­ogy, the strange beauty of found sound and rip­ping syn­thetic bass. That said, this is his fourth written-​​to-​​be-​​a-​​novel novel, and he’s improv­ing each time. I don’t think that he’ll ever be a Wolfe or a Swan­wick, but he’s get­ting much better as time goes on, and I have con­fi­dence that these big ideas will even­tu­ally be con­tained within some pow­er­ful prose.

This novel starts off with a mas­sive infu­sion of the strange. A post-​​person, pro­saically named Robin, comes out of memory redac­tion con­fused and lost, more miss­ing than some­one would usu­ally go for when they need a new start on things. It seems that there’s been a war, and that people all over are for­get­ting things the only way they know how, which is having big chunks of the war edited out of their minds. The setup seems a bit idiot-​​plot to me, they early romance too easy and the fact that people are trying to forget a war where their mem­o­ries were mauled against their will by edit­ing their own mem­o­ries is strange to me. I’d per­son­ally think that a cult of sacro­sanct per­son­al­i­ties would spring up, trap­ping people with ortho­hu­man mental archi­tec­tures to stag­nate under the ton­nage of their accu­mu­lated mem­o­ries for cen­turies to come, but I’m not the one writ­ing it and that’s not what the story is about.

So. There’s a story here, where Robin gets caught up in an exper­i­ment gone wrong, or rather an exper­i­ment aimed wrong gone right. He becomes she becomes Reeve, and things just get stranger from there. We get the whole war in these lovely flash­backs through­out the book. Stross seem­ingly paid a lot of atten­tion to struc­ture and voice in this, as he would have to because it is not a human novel, as we think of them. The voice changes here and there as the per­son­al­ity of the teller is changed by the body that he/​she wears and by some exter­nal­i­ties that I’ll not ruin for you. Suf­fice it to say that it’s very inter­est­ing and quite odd in places. You often hear sen­sawunda men­tioned when people are talk­ing about Stross and his sto­ries and books, and this is not done for no reason. He’s very, very good at man­ag­ing to tell inter­est­ing sto­ries about people whose expe­ri­ence we can barely com­pre­hend, since they’re so far out of the stan­dard human expe­ri­ence, which is some­thing that I always enjoy. There’s a thought through qual­ity to it as well, which is some­thing that I really appre­ci­ate, even if I don’t strictly require it. He’s put a lot of thought into these things, and it pays off. The book veers from deadly seri­ous to quite funny, often in the space of a sen­tence or two, but at least Stross has the sense to have his char­ac­ters tell bad jokes when there’s some­thing really awful going on, to high­light the fact that levity cannot defeat all.

I was fol­low­ing Stross’ blog at the time he was writ­ing this novel, and he knocked the damn thing out in less than a month. I bet his hands hurt after that one. But it also means that there’s a con­tinu­tity of thought and pur­pose here that’s lack­ing from Accelerando, his other outing in this future his­tory. Not that any­thing can hang together when you’re not sure that the nar­ra­tor is the same from scene to scene, since iden­tity is so utterly muta­ble. I think that it also makes for a more cohe­sive novel, since Stross was likely able to stuff the entire thing inside of his head, so the inter­con­nec­tions are denser and more intri­cate. There’s a lot going on here, and he more or less man­ages to keep all of the balls in the air. It doesn’t say as much as Accelerando tried to, but it says what it says better. Of all of his novels so far, I think that this one is the most suc­cess­ful, bar­ring The Atroc­ity Archive, which isn’t a novel, by length, but is pretty won­der­ful and funny and has just come out recently in trade paper­back and you should get that too.