association-list

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.