association-list

I liked this book. I didn’t hon­estly expect to. The last Williams book I read, Implied Spaces, was clev­erly con­ceived and had some inter­est­ing moments, but it was impli­ca­tion­ally half-​​baked. We got a bunch of first-​​order stuff, some smash-​​bang plot­ting, and it was great fun, but the second-​​order stuff was spare to miss­ing. His future seemed direly old-​​fashioned, some­how. Williams’ space opera thing whose name I am too lazy to google, I couldn’t even get through the first book.

But this one got through to me for some reason. Per­haps I have too much of a soft-​​spot for geeky topics, or maybe it’s just that Williams is better at con­tem­po­rary set­tings, but this one had me from begin­ning to end, stay­ing up late, the whole bit. Other review­ers have com­plained about the end being too obvi­ous, or revealed too early, but it didn’t bother me too much. My only nit­picks are about the dri­vers of the plot being too con­ve­nient, too lim­ited to the scope of the story. It’s totally unbe­liev­able that the AI trader scheme would be as easy to carry out as Williams frames it. That they’re able to take over more or less the entire finan­cial world show touch­ing faith in the rather brit­tle field of machine learn­ing. Still, a clever idea well-​​enough inte­grated into the fic­tion of the world that it isn’t too obtru­sive. Also, there’s a cal­lous­ness — at times bor­der­ing on sociopa­thy — on the part of the pro­tag­o­nist and her friends to the suf­fer­ing of the people caught in the AI-​​triggered cur­rency crises. We spend the first part of the book where the pro­tag­o­nist lives through one of these crises and sees the effects it has on the natives, the deaths and chaos. Yet when she finds out that one of her best friends is more or less entirely respon­si­ble for the issue, she barely reacts. It could be that the flat­tened affect is inten­tional, after all, she’s freshly trau­ma­tized for most of the book, but the fact is that the good geek friend is sig­nif­i­cantly more dan­ger­ous and dam­ag­ing than the actual sociopath who’s trying to kill her.

I should stress that unless you’re a CS person, you’re not going to be both­ered by the first one, and the second never seems to matter while you’re read­ing. Not chal­leng­ing, but an enjoy­able read.

Spoiler warn­ings, I guess. Which should likely be the sub­ti­tle for this blog. Can’t really get at issues of con­struc­tion with­out reveal­ing any­thing. At least unless you’re will­ing to be coy to the point of affec­ta­tion, I suppose.

I wish that I could say that I unre­servedly loved this book. It’s one of Reynold’s better out­ings (since the very begin­ning). Some fas­ci­nat­ing stuff going on, all well told, in an inter­est­ing world. Strong cen­tral themes, decent char­ac­ter­i­za­tions (the cen­tral char­ac­ter is pretty wooden, but he’s sur­rounded by a number of win­ning sec­ondary char­ac­ters). Tore right through it. In the moment, it’s a great book with some for­giv­able flaws. Adam Roberts says more or less how I felt about it here (espe­cially the extra 100 [or maybe 150] pages in the middle), save for:

• Some seri­ously abom­inable copy edit­ing. Not Reynold’s fault, but c’mon, VG.
• Overkill on the fore­shad­ow­ing. If there’s an arse­nal on the mantle, we don’t need to see each gun fired in the third act, really.
• The end.

Oh god, the end. Which makes the title a stupid fuck­ing pun. Which under­mines the drama of the whole novel. Which leaves a bunch of bad ques­tions yawning.

OK, so: The world is a ter­raformed colony world. It’s slowly dying because its cit­i­zens can no longer main­tain the atmos­phere because the world has been divided into zones where real­ity has a dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tion or grain size. The high­est tech stuff doesn’t work at the lower levels because it’s too com­pli­cated, it dis­solves into noise and seizure and plaque. To a cer­tain extent these zones can be changed by people with the unsul­lied inher­i­tance of the system’s main­tain­ers, who were a genetic caste with mod­i­fi­ca­tions to allow them to oper­ate the machin­ery of the world. They’re regarded as witches and hounded. So far so good.

Then you learn what machin­ery they’re meant to oper­ate. A pre­sum­ably super­lu­mi­nal gate-​​system that allowed people to travel between the stars. We’re on a world called Earth­gate, maybe. A hor­ri­ble acci­dent has occurred some 10k years in the past, break­ing the system. The entire system? Unclear. So the result is, if it’s hap­pen­ing every­where, there are more inter­est­ing places to tell this story. It’s a side­light, at best, to the main show. Worthy of a novella at best, not 500 pages. If it took out the whole damned system, where are the repair­men? The space dwellers? I sup­pose that I am being overly nit-​​picky about the world-​​building, here, but there was a lot of world-​​building. If I am going to sit through umpty-​​hundred little hints, your reveal better be both stun­ning and airtight.

This isn’t fair, to be honest. The book is not about the reveal. It’s about its char­ac­ters and their inter­ac­tions. Ulti­mately, it’s about the frailty of human soci­eties, and how easily they frac­ture and degrade. These are new themes for Reynolds, mostly, and they’re well han­dled, if at too great a length. The whole novel is a solid effort, and if you can forget or for­give the ending (or don’t really care to think through its con­se­quences), its one of the better books of the year so far. I couldn’t, though.