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.

For Chill, by Elizabeth Bear

I really wanted to like Chill.

Honestly I did. I loved Dust, I think, although I’ll have to check my notes. I for sure love it in my memory.

I recognize that it’s the middle book of a three-book sequence, and that it’s setting up and leading up.

I loved getting to know Tristen and Benedik and their various failures, and their problems.

I loved revisiting the world.

But they have no agency.

We spend the entire book on a journey that is basically wasted.

If they’d been a day or two later, Cynric would have been reborn all the same, from how I read it.

In an ideal world, Tristen goes off after Arianrhod and returns with Cynric a chapter or two later, and this is done offscreen. We spend that time watching Ben and Caitlin patch things up, or try to, and then something else happens. Percival doesn’t spend the entire novel being wounded.

I can’t seem to find anything that I’ve written about Dust. Hopefully when Cleave/Grail is released I’ll have the time to read through them all at once and write something more substantive.