association-list

I really like Karl Schroeder’s books so far. Meaty SF think-​​heavy books that never shrink from engag­ing with the human char­ac­ters at their hearts. That said, I have some quib­bles with the Virga books. While the cen­tral idea is a great one, and it is explored in relent­lessly inter­est­ing ways, I can’t help but think here that there are too things com­pet­ing for space in what are, after all, rel­a­tively short novels. The first three books were pretty light, action-​​adventure novels that took us on a tour through Virga while includ­ing real human drama and the ugly choices that people are forced to make by cir­cum­stances. Since they were at ground level, play­ing out, for the most part, far from the character’s home, there’s fairly little engage­ment with soci­etal con­struc­tion, and that’s fine, because we never really stick any place for long enough for the reader to start won­der­ing how it would all work.

In The Sun­less Coun­tries, Schroeder goes darker and attempts to engage with some seri­ous, fas­ci­nat­ing soci­etal issues (absolute demo­c­ra­tic rule when the public is ill-​​informed, the hijack­ing of a polity by neo-​​fascists), all the while keep­ing up the adven­tur­ous pace and rip roar­ing action and giving us more Virga wide-​​screen SFX and taking us out of Virga for the first time and and and. This could really work well, but the down­fall of the novel is that Schroeder sticks to the format of the other Virga novels. That is, it is some­what short (maybe 100-​​110k words?) and pri­mar­ily fol­lows the view­point of a single char­ac­ter. It’s rare that you’ll find me argu­ing that a novel should be longer. I’m gen­er­ally exas­per­ated by the level of padding required to get a book out to the 200k-​​ish words that seem to be required these days. But this is a book that could really use it. Using both Hayden and Leal as view­point char­ac­ters, actu­ally fol­low­ing Leal out­side of Virga, rather than having her briefly recount her adven­tures, spend­ing more time with the fail­ure of the Eternist takeover, making the ending less abrupt, etc. Another 100 pages at least are jus­ti­fied here, and the last quar­ter of the book suf­fers a lot for their absence. Every­thing feels second-​​hand and rushed, and it skews the pacing of the novel some­thing awful. You spend a great deal of the end of the novel inhab­it­ing the per­spec­tive of some­one in a locked room while a naval battle goes on outside.

I enjoyed the book a lot, and the setup at the end could poten­tially lead some inter­est­ing places, but I hope that Schroeder will manage to rush the ending less next time, which might mean bend­ing the struc­ture more than he’d like. As the book stands, it’s a tan­ta­liz­ing hint of the book that it could have been; great fun, but not all that it could quite plainly be.