The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

It might seem a bit strange to say that The Stone Sky, the concluding volume of the Broken Earth trilogy, had a lot riding on it.  For the past two years, the SF field and its fandom have been falling over themselves to crown this trilogy as not just good, but important.  Both of the previous volumes in the series, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, were nominated for the Nebula and the Hugo.  When The Fifth Season won the Hugo in 2016, it made Jemisin the first African-American (and the first American POC) to win the best novel category.  When The Obelisk Gate won the same award earlier this year, it was the first time that consecutive volumes in a series had won the Hugo back-to-back since, I believe, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead thirty years ago.  That's probably not considered the best company nowadays, but it speaks to the kind of zeitgeist-capturing work that Jemisin is doing with this series.  In that context, the third volume might almost be looked at as a victory lap, just waiting to be showered with laurels.

To me, however, a great deal depended on the kind of ending Jemisin crafted for her story.  This was a bind she had set up for herself--one assumes in full knowledge--already in The Fifth Season's opening chapter, in which she ended the world.  Even in The Stillness, a planet (strongly implied to be a far-future Earth) wracked by geological instability and prone to "fifth seasons", in which ash released into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions caused years-long winters, the supervolcano explosion that sets off the series's story was an anomalous event, one that would render the planet incapable of supporting life for millennia.  No amount of preparation or adherence to tradition on the part of the humans of the planet--whose entire culture is designed to survive Seasons--could save them for more than a generation or two.  What's more, Jemisin quickly reveals that not only was the supervolcano eruption (referred to as The Shattering) caused intentionally, but it was done as an act of defiance and revenge by an orogene, a member of a group who have the power to cause or quell geological instability, who are reviled, persecuted, hounded, abused, and murdered by the powerless (or "still") inhabitants of the Stillness.

So, Jemisin starts with a world that is not only doomed, but which doesn't really deserve to be saved, and any reader with even the slightest amount of genre reading protocols will naturally assume that the trajectory of her story will be to fix both of these things.  But, especially given how deeply The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate delve into the myriad injustices and cruelties that govern the Stillness, it's hard not to approach the end-point of that story with a bit of trepidation.  The Fifth Season was a portrait of how the society of The Stillness operated during normal periods, including the systems it had put into place to control and oppress orogenes--the institution of The Fulcrum, where young orogenes were trained, using techniques that liberally employed physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, to control their powers and make them "useful" to the world; and the caste known as The Guardians, who protect, police, and hunt down orogenes, developing sick, codependent bonds with their charges-cum-victims.  The Obelisk Gate shows us how society functions during a Season, and here too orogenes have no place.  One of the tasks of Guardians (who are revealed in this volume to be something akin to vampires, drawing sustenance from a substance found in orogenes' bodies) during a Season is to kill their charges, then go into hibernation until the Season ends.  As both books establish, orogenes are necessary--they quell instabilities that might lead to Seasons and make the Stillness livable--and yet they are also hated and abused.  It was difficult to imagine what solution Jemisin could come up with that would persuasively counter such entrenched, systemic hostility, especially at the same time as she constructs a more familiar quest narrative whose purpose is to save the world from the effects of the cataclysm she unleashed.

Does she manage it?  Yes and no.  One of the problems with writing about the Broken Earth books is that they're completely different works when viewed through the lens of worldbuilding and ideas, and through the lens of character and plot.  On the former level, these are some of the most important, groundbreaking genre books of the last decade.  On the latter, they often struggle and overreach.  (The reason, I think, that The Fifth Season is the best book of the three is that it's the one that achieves its plotting and characterization through worldbuilding, by using its three heroines as points of view to the Stillness's various dysfunctions, and following them as they navigate the systems intended to keep orogenes under control.)  The Stone Sky, like its predecessors, switches between several viewpoints.  In one storyline, Essun, heroine of the previous two books and renegade orogene, struggles with guilt over the multiple acts of violence and mass-murder she committed in her attempts to get out from under the Fulcrum and the Guardians' control.  She hopes to expiate her guilt by saving the world, recapturing the planet's moon, which was lost in the distant past and whose return might permanently quell the Stillness's instability.  In the second storyline, Essun's daughter, Nassun, is traveling with Schaffa, a former Guardian (who, unbeknownst to her, is the person who once hunted down Essun, leading to the death of her oldest child).  Betrayed by both her parents--her mother recreated the abusive training of the Fulcrum in her attempts to keep Nassun's orogeny under wraps, and her father murdered her younger brother when he couldn't exercise the same control--and appalled by the system of injustice and abuse that traps orogenes and stills alike, Nassun is traveling to the same place as Essun, with the intention of wresting from her control of the Obelisk Gate, the system of amplifiers that could allow Essun to catch the Moon when its orbit brings it back in range, but which Nassun intends to use to end the cycle of cruelty by ending all life on the planet.  Intercutting between mother and daughter is Hoa, a Stone Eater--a race of immortal, silicon-based aliens--who reveals to us how the broken system of the Stillness came into existence, and how the Moon was originally lost.

It's a lot, in other words--a quest and a family drama and a portrait of abuse and how people struggle (and sometimes fail) to live with the weight of it--and there isn't quite enough space to do it all in a way that feels organic.  One of the goals of the Broken Earth books is to chart the emotional toll that living under constant racism and abuse can take on a person, even when that person isn't a "sympathetic" victim--when they respond, as Essun and Nassun do, with indiscriminate violence.  It's a project that works fantastically well in The Fifth Season, but The Stone Sky, like The Obelisk Gate before it, ends up telling more often than it shows, especially when it comes to its characters' fraught, complicated emotional states.  These are narrated to us in the second person, in a device that ends up having a purpose but which, in the moment, feels awkward.  When the emotional climax of the novel--and the fate of the world--hangs on whether Essun can overcome her failures as a mother to reach out to her daughter, and whether Nassun can process her many traumas sufficiently to believe that the world might still be worth living in, the fact that we get total insight into both of their minds, with every single emotion and every single step of their decision-making process spelled out, ends up feeling curiously distancing.  It makes them feel less like people and more like cogs in a machine, who make decisions not because it makes sense for them as human beings but because that's what the plot needs them to do in that moment.

Take a slightly broader view, though, and that's exactly what they are.  If I'm lukewarm on the Broken Earth books as the story of individuals, I am all-in on them as the story of systems.  And as a story about the stories about those systems.  It is, in fact, one of the most remarkable traits of this series that no matter how many times you pull back from it, how many layers of metafiction you place between yourself and the text, it still has something eye-opening to say.  At the most basic level of the systems of its world, The Broken Earth is a story about how the Stillness is designed to both perpetuate and benefit from oppression.  But the books also contain and constantly reference the texts that teach the people of the Stillness how to function within that system, reminding us that it is the story the Stillness tells itself about itself that achieves its oppressive effect.  Pull back further, however, and it's easy to see that the Stillness is made of tropes--some of the most common tropes of genre writing, here taken to their horrific but entirely logical conclusions.  And then it becomes impossible not to see that those tropes are integral components of the stories that we tell ourselves, and that, just as they do in the Stillness, in our world those stories feed off, and into, racist and oppressive habits of thought.

You see this most obviously in the books' central conceit, the oppressed superpowered minority, the subject of so much hand-wringing and exasperation in genre and particularly comics fandom.  Most of fandom (and even some creators) seem to have reached the conclusion that The Mutant Metaphor doesn't work, that it is impossible to talk meaningfully about the kind of racism that exists in our world by comparing black people, LGBT people, immigrants, or Jews to people who have tremendous and often destructive powers.  Jemisin instead takes the metaphor and makes it her own, insisting on the possibility of social justice even within a world so twisted that it offers up a so-called justification for racism and oppression.  The scenes set in the Fulcrum in The Fifth Season feel like a deliberate perversion of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, reminding us that it is impossible to simultaneously treat people like a bomb that is about to go off and a person.  In The Stone Sky, each chapter closes with a passage from the notes of a Stillness researcher who reveals the many times in which orogenes prevented Seasons, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, but in many other cases, by revealing themselves after having lived in hiding in still society.  In almost every such case, the people these orogenes had just saved turn on them with sudden, uncompromising viciousness.  It's a powerful statement that even in a world where there is supposedly a reason for it, racism is not rational.  That even when orogenes "prove" that they are good and necessary, the prejudice against them runs deeper.

Something even more powerful emerges when you remember that both of these truths--the danger that orogenes pose, and the fact that they keep saving the world even in the face of abuse and certain death--are choices that Jemisin made in her worldbuilding.  It seems to be a deliberate rebuke to the ubiquity of the dangerous, persecuted minority trope.  Instead of abandoning it, Jemisin compounds it, and then dares us to keep reacting to it from the same place of comfort that originally made it so popular.  What does it mean, after all, to build a world in which there is no choice but to oppress and abuse certain people?  It tells us nothing about real racism, but it might say a great deal about the kind of people for whom that kind of story holds an appeal.  The Broken Earth books are a deliberate challenge to such thoughtlessness.  On the one hand, they don't shy away from the danger that orogenes pose, or from their capacity to do horrific damage--over the course of her life, Essun kills probably hundreds of thousands of people, and her former lover Alabaster (the father of her murdered child and the orogene who sets off the Shattering) kills millions.  And on the other hand, they also reverse the direction of the difficulty posed by these tropes.  In The Stone Sky, it's revealed that Alabaster was motivated not just by rage and vengeance, but by cold reason.  By blowing up the supervolcano, he unleashes tremendous power that can be channeled by an orogene like Essun into the Obelisk Gate, and used to capture the Moon and end the Seasons forever.  "You want to read about worlds where racism and oppression are justified?"  Jemisin seems to be saying to her readers.  "Fine, I'll not only make the monsters of those stories my heroes, but I'll make it so that the only way to fix this horribly broken world is for them to kill millions of 'normal' people."  It's a direct challenge to comfortable readers who suddenly find the cold equations facing in the other direction.

Of course, the problem isn't simply tropes, but how those tropes both reflect and justify real racism.  The Mutant Metaphor may not be a good way of coping with with racism in fiction, but its reverse--the idea that certain groups are inherently dangerous and therefore killable--crops up in reality to justify real harm to ordinary human beings.  When the grand jury testimony of Michael Brown's killer was made public, Jamelle Bouie observed that he spoke as if he'd been facing a superhero, not an unarmed teenage boy.  Television shows and movies, including and often primarily in genre fiction, popularize the narratives that are later used to justify things like police brutality or drone warfare.  Jemisin takes that fact to its logical conclusion in The Stone Sky when she reveals that orogeny was genetically engineered into humanity not as a tool, but as a way of making such racist narratives real.  Having hounded an ethnic group, the Niess, out of existence, and having convinced themselves that they possessed superpowers that justified such hounding, the humans of what would become the Stillness had no choice but to bring the monsters of their imagination into being.

If the Niess were merely human, the world built on their inhumanity would fall apart.

So... they made us.

...Remember, we must not be just tools, but myths.  Thus we later creations have been given exaggerated Niess features--broad faces, small mouths, skin nearly devoid of color, hair that laughs at fine combs, and we're all so short.  They've stripped our limbic systems of neurochemicals and our lives of experience and language and knowledge.  And only now, when we have been made over in the image of their own fear, are they satisfied.  They tell themselves that in us, they've captured the quintessence and power of who the Niess really were, and they congratulate themselves on having made their old enemies useful at last.

A few hours before I sat down to write this review, I read an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he tries to grapple with the reality of a nation that could elect both Barack Obama and Donald Trump as consecutive presidents.  His conclusion is that America relies on the narrative of white supremacy, but is willing to set it aside when things get bad enough--as they were in 2008 when Obama was elected.  But when the pendulum swings back a little, the need to reassert a white supremacist worldview becomes paramount.  A similar dynamic is observed in The Stone Sky; Nassun and Schaffa advise a group of runaway orogene children to find a community where their abilities will make them useful during the Season.  But, they warn, if it ever looks as if the Season is receding, the children will have to run away, lest the same people whose lives they saved turn on them.

Writing about the role of narrative in perpetuating and obscuring the role of white supremacy in history, Coates observes:

It is not a mistake that Gone With the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding "African slavery". That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilisation, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honoured through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.

"The history breaks the myth.  And so the history is ignored" feels like the thesis statement of The Stone Sky, a book that is all about pulling back the curtain to reveal the ugly causes of the Stillness's ugly present.  It's not a mistake that the only way Jemisin's characters can find to finally defeat this history and begin again involves destroying much of the world--the weight of hatred, and the unwillingness to admit where that hatred is rooted, are too great for anything else.  And even then, the book's ending is uncertain.  Will peace between orogenes and stills ever be possible?  Will orogenes, finally freed of the Fulcrum and the Guardians, take their revenge and even try to become the oppressors they were once subject to?  Will stills continue to follow the forms of ancient hatreds even when what little reason there was for them is gone?  Is it possible to teach the Stillness new stories about itself, or will those stories, like their predecessors, simply serve to paper over crimes and cruelties?

There isn't another work in science fiction asking these questions.  Not really.  Not with this intensity.  Not with such a clear-eyed look at where so much of the ugliness that underpins our own society comes from.  And not with the demand that we acknowledge how much our own genre perpetuates and intensifies that ugliness.  If there's any justice, these books will represent an upheaval that the genre will never look back from.  No more building worlds to reify narratives that hurt people in the real world.  No more villains whose villainy consists of responding "badly" to their abusers.  No more quick fixes that put everything right without acknowledging how deep hatred and prejudice can run in a civilization.  In hindsight, I shouldn't have worried that Jemisin wouldn't know how to craft the right (I am deliberately not saying "satisfying") ending for this series.  Her certainty and clear vision with it have been apparent from day one, from that first chapter.  It only remains to be seen whether the rest of the genre will follow suit.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The long opening segment of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is carefully, almost studiously naturalistic.  In plain, but also irresistible and affecting language, he presents the life story of his heroine, Cora, starting first with the history of her grandmother, kidnapped from Africa and finally ending up, after much circumlocution (which is to say, being sold and re-sold), on a Georgia plantation, and moving on to detail the life of Cora's mother, who escaped when Cora was a child, and finally to Cora herself.  Whitehead's eye for the details of life on the plantation--and in particular, life in the insular, predatory community that arises among the slaves--is unflinching.  Many reviewers before me have noted the brutal quietness with which he reveals that "Not long after it became known that Cora's womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse.  If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene.  The Hob women sewed her up."  But the entire segment is rife with moments like this, in which the sheer weight of what it means to live your entire life under the burden of being thought inhuman is presented without adornment, or even much signposting.  Taken on its own, this part of the book would still be a brilliant literary accomplishment.

But of course, if you've heard of The Underground Railroad, that's probably not what you've heard about it.  Leaving aside its selection for Oprah Winfrey's highly influential book club, what has made The Underground Railroad remarkable and notable is what happens at the end of this chapter.  Stunned out of a gloomy kind of complacency about her situation by a brutal beating, Cora accepts the invitation of another slave, Caesar, to escape with him.  Caesar has made contact with a local station agent for the Underground Railroad, and after a grueling, nail-biting escape--even the short distance between their plantation and the station is fraught with nearly impossible dangers for a pair of escaped slaves--what he and Cora find as their supposed path to freedom is a literalized metaphor.

The stairs led onto a small platform.  The black mouths of the gigantic tunnel opened at either end.  It must have been twenty feet tall, walls lined with dark and light colored stones in an alternating pattern.  The sheer industry that had made such a project possible.  Cora and Caesar noticed the rails.  Two steel rails ran the visible length of the tunnel, pinned into the dirt by wooden crossties.  The steel ran south and north presumably, springing from some inconceivable source and shooting towards a miraculous terminus.

So dry and matter of fact is Whitehead's tone as he describes this impossible feat of, among other things, engineering that it actually takes some time for that impossibility to register.  This is hardly a new approach for Whitehead--his first novel, The Intuitionist, took place in a world in which elevator inspectors were a prestigious and tradition-bound group, closely guarding the secrets of their profession and suspicious when a new member, who is not only a black woman but who espouses the newfangled philosophy of "intuitive" elevator inspection, joins their ranks.  It sounds like a joke, but Whitehead not only presents it seriously but manages to make something soulful and even elegiac out of his premise--the racism and resistance that his heroine meets are no less hurtful because the profession she's trying to break into is ridiculous (in fact, one might argue that this is precisely the point).  Something similar is happening in The Underground Railroad.  Whitehead isn't trying to make slavery ridiculous, but by having Cora and Caesar's escape from it take the form of what is essentially a trip on the subway--they go underground in one spot and emerge in another--he unmoors slavery, and its latter-day permutations into prejudice and oppression, from a specific time and place.

As Cora is told by her first conductor, the Underground Railroad of the novel has no fixed route, no promised path to freedom.  Trains arrive on a schedule that is erratic, and their destinations are often unclear.  "The problem is that one destination may be more to your liking than another.  Stations are discovered, lines discontinued.  You won't know what waits above until you pull in."  Whitehead thus sets himself up for a sort of dark picaresque, with Cora and Caesar sampling life for escaped slaves in different states, trying to make their way to safety and happiness.  (The structure put me in mind of The Odyssey, and Whitehead namechecks Gulliver's Travels.  Though, and as one of this characters points out, both of these stories are tales about men who are ultimately trying to get home, whereas for Cora and Caesar home is a hell they must escape.)  The first of these chapters, titled "South Carolina", sets up its normalized strangeness right from the start, when Cora emerges from under ground: "She looked up at the skyscraper and reeled, wondering how far she had traveled."  Once again, Whitehead plays it completely straight, and it takes a long time for the reader to be certain that the South Carolina that Cora and Caesar have arrived in--where they are housed in dormitories, educated, and given jobs, as part of a government program to "advance" former slaves--is not just counterfactual, but a place out of time.  When that confirmation comes, however, it brings the entire novel into focus.

His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments.  The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water.  In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.

"They think you're helping them?" Sam asked the doctor.  He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.

"It's important research," Bertram informed him.  "Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of the infection, and we approach a cure."

What Cora is traveling through, as she gets on and off the Underground Railroad, is not space, exactly, but history.  She experiences the different guises of American racism, the different faces it has worn and continues to wear, in a continuous physical space.  In South Carolina, Cora encounters what originally seems like kindness and liberal-mindedness, but which eventually reveals itself as self-serving paternalism.  The terms in which the authorities, who claim to be trying to help black people, actually end up restricting their choices and freedoms are taken not from the 19th century, however, but from the early 20th--forced sterilization, and proposed eugenics programs: "What if we performed adjustments to the niggers' breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency?  Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern white men."

This is not to say that The Underground Railroad's scheme is as straightforward as having Cora jump from one period to another.  Even within the South Carolina chapter there are elements that clearly come from different settings and time periods.  Later in the chapter, Cora is hired to appear in a display room at a recently opened museum of American history.  She plays roles in romanticized, sanitized recreations of a ship carrying slaves across the Atlantic, a slave auction, and a plantation.  Her predicament--glad for the easy work but aggravated by how it whitewashes the brutal, backbreaking labor she used to perform--echoes a modern complaint by reenactors in actual historical sites, as well as the broader discussion of how American history teaching tends to downplay the brutality of slavery and perpetuate the myth of happy, well-treated slaves.  A later chapter in which Cora, now in the hands of a slave catcher, makes a quasi-hallucinatory crossing of a desolate, burned-out Tennessee landscape lends itself less easily to historical reference, but is clearly designed to open a discussion of America's mistreatment and dispossession of Native Americans.

If there's a criticism to be made here--and to be clear, I'm not sure it rises to that level--it is that this device can have the effect of making The Underground Railroad feel programmatic.  At times it almost feels as if the novel is ticking talking points off a list--the introduction to the slave catcher Ridgeway, for example, includes a short history of the institution of slave patrols and their operation, whose language ("They stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes") seems designed to recall discussions I'd read recently about present-day police brutality, and how the history of policing in America has its roots in these slave patrols.  And though the fact that Whitehead has a character whom Cora meets muse that "Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation's government" a mere month after Michelle Obama made the same observation in a speech to the Democratic convention is surely a coincidence, it also speaks to the book's need to be topical.  At points, The Underground Railroad feels like a fictionalization of the conversation that we've been having for several years, about the place of African Americans in American society, the legacy of slavery, and the way that racism continues to manifest itself, even in a society that claims to have overcome it.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, especially given Whitehead's prodigious gifts as a writer, and the assuredness with which he manages his fantastic device.  But one effect that this approach has is that Cora seems to get lost in the shuffle.  This shouldn't happen--Cora is a wonderful creation, plucky but also deeply damaged, remarkable but also susceptible to the same pressures and traumas as anyone else.  One of the points Whitehead makes with her is to observe how the same courage and determination that make it possible for her to run, can also curdle into cruelty when subjected to enough mistreatment.  One of Cora's defining traumas is having been left behind by her mother when she escaped, and she is never able to forgive this betrayal.  She fantasizes about one day meeting her mother, "Begging in the gutter, a broken old woman bent into the sum of her mistakes.  Mabel looked up but did not recognize her daughter.  Cora kicked her beggar's cup, the few coins flew into the hubbub, and she continued on her afternoon errand".

The Underground Railroad is, in general, unflinching and unsentimental in depicting the psychic toll of participating, even unwillingly, in the system of slavery, whether it's Cora's myriad lingering traumas, over the things that were done to her and the things she's done, or the breakdown of even those slaves who seem inured to the hardships of slavery ("They joked and they picked fast when the bosses' eyes were on them and they acted big, but at night in the cabin after midnight they wept, they screamed from nightmares and wretched memories"), or the reluctance and terror of many of the white people who manage stations, most of whom come to terrible ends when they are inevitably discovered.  But though these points are typically well made, they also never feel like the point of the story, and this is particularly true of Cora.  By its very nature, Cora's journey can't have a destination.  If the point of The Underground Railroad is to take her (and us) through a guided tour of American racism, then the very fact that that racism is still at work--that books like The Underground Railroad are still necessary--means that she can't arrive in any sort of promised land.  Whitehead manages, with an elegance that is, by that point, unsurprising, to give the novel an ending that is satisfying without betraying his scheme, but the result is that Cora's journey loses much of its urgency.  She becomes, despite her vivid and deeply-felt humanity, more a viewpoint than a person.

What I think Whitehead is struggling with in The Underground Railroad is a problem that I've become more aware of, in recent years, in the context of fiction about the Holocaust.  At some point, you have to ask: what is the value of art about atrocity?  Can art exist merely for its own sake when it's discussing a real evil that blighted and claimed the lives of millions, or does it have to serve a purpose, be it educational or political?  Is it even right to impose a narrative--especially one that tends towards a happy ending--on an evil that by its very nature defies narrative, and which swallowed up the lives of so many?  Whitehead's choice--using the fantastic to detach his story from the conventions of narrative, and with it making the point that while slavery is over, it is also still with us--is not just brilliant, but inspiring.  But it also leaves The Underground Railroad feeling a little chilly.  It's a remarkable work, one that I am still, despite this review, struggling to describe and sum up.  But it's also one that I can't entirely love.

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

About a year ago, in preparation for the BBC miniseries adaptation, I reread Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.  This was the first time I'd revisited Clarke's novel since I first read it about ten years ago, and what struck me in this rereading--aside, that is, from its reminder that this is a special, unusual, and exceptional novel--was how very political Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is.  It's not something that one hears discussed very often--partly because Jonathan Strange is so much its own thing that, in the absence of a tradition that springs from it, one doesn't find it discussed very much at all.  And partly, because Clarke's handling of her political subtext is, depending on how charitable you want to be, either halting and incomplete, or, in keeping with the rest of the novel, not an easy fit with any of the templates we use for how genre fiction can address issues like racism, misogyny, and colonialism.

Nevertheless, Jonathan Strange, in which two upper class English magicians try to use their abilities to advance their nation's interests during the Napoleonic Wars, is as political as they come.  As the magicians try to redefine magic as something fundamentally English--and thus a tool of England's imperial expansion--they fail to notice the toll it takes on women, people of color, and people of lower class, or indeed to acknowledge that such people have magical power of their own.  The novel's ending, in which one of its leads prophetically announces that "England is full of magicians," seems to presage a profound change in its world, alongside the return of magic and re-wilding of England, in which the existing social order is upended.  But Clarke has also been criticized for not giving enough space to characters who are not white, upper class men, even as she acknowledges that this absence is a flaw in her protagonists' worldview--there are no female or non-white magicians in the novel, and the one lower-class character who practices magic often feels as if his own story has been pushed aside by the two main characters'.

Zen Cho's debut novel Sorcerer to the Crown (following her exceptional short story collection Spirits Abroad, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons last year), feels like both an homage and a response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.  Its setting is virtually identical to Clarke's novel: England in the late 18th century, in a world in which the normal progression of history has coincided with the development of magical abilities.  The style, an arch pastiche of early 19th century fiction in the vein of Jane Austen, similarly recalls Clarke.  As in Jonathan Strange, the source of magic in this world is fairies--though Cho expands on Clarke's use of English folklore; in her world, the fairylands of different nations exist side by side on another plane of existence from ours, which allows her to incorporate magical creatures from the mythology of her native Malaysia, as well as familiar faces like Titania and Oberon.  The fading of magic is an important question in both novels, as well as an ending in which magic is reintroduced to England, with unpredictable results.  But Cho has quite deliberately and consciously cast as the protagonists of her story a black man (who is also a former slave), and a biracial woman, whose social status, right to use magic, and very Englishness are constantly called into question.

Zacharias Wythe is the titular Sorcerer to the Crown, a role he inherited from his adoptive father Sir Stephen Wythe, who purchased and freed him as a child after recognizing his magical talent.  Sir Stephen hoped that by nurturing Zacharias's considerable gifts, he might explode the belief that only white people are capable of practicing magic.  It is thus up to Zacharias to "prove" his race's abilities and right to participate in civil society, which naturally complicates his role as Sorcerer Royal, the man responsible for ensuring England's well-being on the magical plane.  The resentment and scheming against Zacharias by jealous and racist colleagues is only intensified by the fact that English magic is fading, and that the fairy court has refused to allow English magicians to engage the services of familiars, who give them access to greater power and abilities.  On his way to investigate the cause of the drop of magical "resource," Zacharias stops at a school for young witches, where he encounters Prunella Gentleman, the quasi-ward of the headmistress, someone who has been tolerated because of her general competence and agreeable nature, but whose mixed-race heritage means that her social status is always precarious.  When an incident at the school causes Prunella's benefactress to downgrade her to the role of servant, the outraged young woman decides to seek out her own fortune, and seizes on Zacharias as a means of getting to London and launching herself into polite society.

The scenes at the girls' school give Cho her first opportunity to use her fantastic premise to reflect and discuss real-world prejudices.  A school for magical young ladies (or "gentlewitches," as they are called here) is not, as we might imagine, devoted to helping them develop their magical talent, but rather to teaching them how to suppress it, because using magic is considered unladylike: "Mrs. Daubeney knew just what parents desired her to inculcate in their inconveniently magical daughters: pretty manners, a moderate measure of education and, above all, a habit of restraint."  The official dogma of the English magical establishment, in fact, holds that women are too weak to control and handle magic, but behind the scenes, magic is practiced by all genders, so long as they do it in the right way and for the right reasons.

Zacharias had seen too many hags in kitchens and nurseries, too many herbwomen and hedgewitches in villages around the country, not to know that women were perfectly capable of magic--at least, women of the laboring classes.  Among their betters it was genteel to turn a blind eye to such illicit activities.  One would not like one's own wife or daughter to indulge in witchcraft, but it did not serve to be overscrupulous when feminine magic could prove so convenient in one's servants.

In other words, Cho is using magic as a metaphor for work, and for the double standard that takes it for granted that working class women can do backbreaking, day-long labor, but upper class women are too delicate to handle the kind of work that their husbands and brothers do.  That the girls in Mrs. Daubeney's school frequently break out in displays of uncontrollable magic feels like a reference to every novel and movie about the overheated, hysterical atmosphere at such schools, where girls are sent to have their wildness trained out of them, only to feed on each other's repressed emotions and anxieties.

Paradoxically, it is Prunella's race, and the precarious position it imposes on her, that allows her to escape this trap.  Neither a young lady, nor a servant, nor a real daughter to Mrs. Daubeney, she has a certain kind of freedom to break the rules (as Zacharias later says of himself "There are advantages to being outcast ... One is set at liberty from many anxieties.  There is no call to worry about what others will think, when it is clear that they already think the worst").  When Zacharias, who is already shocked by the punishing methods Mrs. Daubeney is employing to train the magic out of her students, discovers that Prunella has tremendous magical abilities, he seizes on her as his own counterpart--someone who will prove to society that women can do high-level magic, just as he has proven that it is possible for black people to do the same.  Prunella, meanwhile, is less interested in becoming a magician than in securing her own social and financial independence.  She agrees to submit to Zacharias's training, but only if he provides her an entrée into society so that she can find a husband.

Much as it owes to and references Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in the scenes in which Prunella and Zacharias clash about the wisdom and propriety of her plan to travel with him to London, it becomes clear that Sorcerer to the Crown has another, powerful antecedent, the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer.  The similarity only becomes clearer when the two arrive in London, and Prunella repeatedly steamrolls Zacharias's objections to her plan to present herself to high society as the mysterious daughter of an unnamed but supposedly wealthy gentleman.  It's a premise that repeats in several of Heyer's novel (the one I'm familiar with is Cotillion)--a determined, headstrong, unscrupulous-yet-basically-good young woman who is willing to do anything to achieve her place in society, and who imposes on a more proper, bewildered man through the simple expedient of refusing to take no for an answer.  Much of the novel's humor--and this is a deeply funny novel--comes from scenes that seem to channel Heyer, in which Prunella turns her laser-like focus and considerable ingenuity not to her magical training, but to questions of fashion, social standing, and matchmaking.

It had been her intention to avoid Zacharias if she could, since she presumed he was at the Ball, but in fact when she saw him she was so consumed by disaster that she hurried towards him, grateful to see a familiar face.

"Mr. Wythe, what is to be done?" she exclaimed.  "Mak Genggang assured me that the sky knew these things, but it is clear to me that the sky knows nothing of high society, and I wish I had never come!  It was very unwise--indeed, it is nothing less than a disaster!"

"I cannot but agree," said Zacharias.  "But if you think so, why did you come?"

Prunella was too troubled to attend.  "Only look at my dress!" she said.  "To think of wearing hoop skirts and silk taffeta when every other young female is in white muslin!  I do not know if the sky meant to be disobliging, or if it is merely ignorant.  Surely it must have seen that this not at all the thing.  I look a very guy!"

The basic conceit of Heyer novels like Cotillion is that a person with very little social capital or standing--women, and usually women with little financial wherewithal--attaches themselves to someone who has both, using them as a stepping stone to respectability and a chance at a good match (before, of course, falling in love).  Her heroines get to ignore propriety--the rules that say that they are compromising themselves by being around their reluctant rescuers, or the mores that frown on social-climbing and husband-hunting--because they know that those rules were created to keep them subservient and maintain a social order that they could never escape by behaving properly.  The fact that Zacharias and Prunella are both people of color complicates this story, because though Zacharias is privileged, in some ways, by his gender and wealth, he is also more disadvantaged by his race than Prunella, and more specifically by the combination of his race and gender.  It might, in some circumstances, be more acceptable for a woman of color to marry into high society, than for a black former slave to achieve high rank and office through his own abilities--the latter might pose more of a challenge to the racist underpinnings of Regency society.

That Zacharias and Prunella have such different reactions to that racism, and such different experiences in Regency society, is, however, only partly due to their genders or wealth.  In part, it's simply down to the fact that they are such different people, and one of the most interesting things that Sorcerer to the Crown does is to suggest that different people can experience racism and prejudice in very different ways, even in the same setting.  Zacharias is, as one of his friends says, "the most nice-conscienced, duty-bound fellow," devoted to the memory of his benefactor, even as he struggles with resentment of Sir Stephen, for separating Zacharias from his parents, and for being the representative of the very system that enslaved them in the first place.  As he says, he is "held by bonds of gratitude," and in addition, by bonds of respectability--having had it drummed into him since childhood that he represents his race and their ability to participate fully in society, Zacharias is unsurprisingly studied and careful in his behavior and reactions.  He suppresses his anger and resentment of the racism and suspicion that greet him, while at the same time, Prunella simply steamrolls over them by refusing to admit their existence--and by questioning the importance of the institutions and conventions that Zacharias is devoted to.

Though fascinating, the profound differences between Zacharias and Prunella, and how they deal with racism, are also the source of the novel's most significant imbalance.  The fact that the rules seem so different for them can make it hard to feel that they are part of the same story, and the fact that the emotional registers of their plot strands are so different can lead to feelings of whiplash.  Zacharias gets most of the novel's affecting, gut-punching moments--for example when we realize that, for all that his English contemporaries see him as a foreigner, to actual foreigners, be they fairies or people of color from other parts of the world, he is a European, and thus doesn't belong anywhere.  But at the same time, his determination to be respectable and not give into anger means that he is an essentially passive character, while Prunella is constantly acting on both his and her own behalf.  Cho is clearly making a point by juxtaposing such different characters with such different stories, whose problems nevertheless derive from the same place--and who are able to find in each other a friend who can understand their predicament--but the balance between the two characters, their stories, and their approaches to the challenges facing them feels a little wobbly.

I haven't, in fact, said much about the actual plot of Sorcerer to the Crown, which involves, aside from the already-discussed question of England's dwindling magic supply, a plot to supplant Zacharias as Sorcerer Royal, another plot to assassinate him, and a delegation from the island of Janda Baik, which throws Zacharias and Prunella into the path of Mak Genggang, a powerful, no-nonsense Malaysian witch who injects a great deal of humor into the novel, as well as a reminder that the characters' obsessions, both magical and cultural, are only the parochial concerns of one tiny corner of the world.  All of these elements tie together in a way that is satisfying, but perhaps a little too neat and easy--one never really fears that the dangers facing our heroes will come to pass, because the heart of the novel is clearly less in these elements, and more in the comedy of manners surrounding Prunella's introduction to society, and the difficulties that she and Zacharias have navigating that society as people of color.  In that sense, it's possible that the Heyer plot grates against Cho's choice of genre and story, because the fundamental attribute of a Heyer novel is that no one in it takes its events very seriously, whereas Sorcerer to the Crown ultimately concludes that its events are of utmost importance to England (though even then, not all the time--in the book's climactic fight scene between a dragon and a sea monster, the two turn out to be distant cousins, and pause their battle to do a bit of genealogy).

In its conclusion, however, Sorcerer to the Crown seems to use the disconnect between the tones of Zacharias and Prunella's stories--and their worldviews--to make a powerful statement against Zacharias's approach of appeasement and careful respectability.  Prunella turns out to have an amazing magical heritage, which allows her to take center stage in the English magical political system--a role to which, the novel implies, she is far more suited than Zacharias, because she doesn't share his obsession with "proving" that she is worthy of respect, but simply demands it.  The same unscrupulousness that makes it possible for her to shake off racism and the norms of polite behavior in her pursuit of social status, solidifies into something more serious, and a great deal scarier, when Prunella shows that she is willing to do whatever it takes to assume power.  To cement her power, and save Zacharias, she must take a ruthless, cold-blooded course of action, one that shocks the men around her.  There is the potential for a troubling reading here--the fact that Prunella is able to make this kind of sacrifice, or that Mak Genggang advises Zacharias, after he defeats a political rival, to "set fire to his house, too, and sell his children to pirates," can be taken as saying that these two women of color are inherently more bloodthirsty than the "civilized" white men around them.  It might have been good if the novel had more strongly stressed the point that the same English gentlemen who are scandalized by Prunella's actions are complicit in, and benefit from, acts of cruelty that dwarf hers--most obviously, the slave trade.  But even without that reminder from Cho, it's easy to realize that Prunella is merely bringing an already existing cruelty to the surface, using it to protect people of color for once instead of victimizing them.

This is, perhaps, to make Sorcerer to the Crown sound more serious than it actually is.  This is still a comedic, romantic novel, the kind of story that ends with a marriage proposal, and a fun, impeccably stylish read that recreates the tone of Heyer's novels perfectly.  That tone isn't always perfectly balanced with Cho's use of it as a delivery system for a darker, more serious discussion of slavery and colonialism, and ultimately this, as well as the too-neat resolution of many of its plot strands, leaves the novel feeling a little scattershot--still, perhaps, a little too indebted to its inspirations, both Clarke and Heyer.  (Some of this might be addressed in later volumes in the projected trilogy of which Sorcerer is the first volume, but I have to admit that, much as I enjoyed it, I should have been happier if it were a standalone volume.)  Nevertheless, Sorcerer to the Crown's response to and development of the ideas raised in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is impeccable--and necessary--and despite some shakiness, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.  I've been looking forward to Cho's work ever since I first read her short stories three or four years ago, and hoping that someone would pick up the threads raised in Clarke's novel and do something more with them for nearly a decade.  It's a delight, and not really a surprise, to find both coming from the same source.

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

The Lie Tree begins with a gloomy, wet boat journey to a gloomy, wet island in the English Channel.  Fourteen-year-old Faith Sunderly, our protagonist, is moving with her family to the Isle of Vane, so that her father, the Reverend Erasmus Sunderly, can consult on an archaeological dig.  It's the 1860s, and amateur natural scientists like Erasmus are grappling with the new, controversial theory of evolution, while trying to reconcile it with their ironclad belief in the Biblical stories of creation.  Erasmus's claim to fame is having discovered a fossil of an apparently winged man, but as the inquisitive Faith realizes soon after settling in the family's new house on the island, the reason for their hasty relocation is that the authenticity of this find--and of many of Erasmus's other discoveries--has been called into question.  When Erasmus is found dead, Faith's mother and uncle quickly scramble to protect him from the accusation of suicide, but Faith believes that her father has been murdered, and determines to find his killer.

All this--the 19th century setting, the bleak and isolated landscape, the small island community where currents of connection and enmity run beneath the surface, the murder mystery, the tone of barely-suppressed horror as our heroine peels back the supposed gentility of her family and neighbors--is very familiar, the stuff of novels going back at least a hundred years (I was particularly struck, while reading The Lie Tree, with how it recalls The Hound of the Baskervilles, though it no doubt has many other antecedents).  It's a little surprising--and, in the first half of the novel, a little disappointing too--for a story like this to come to us from Frances Hardinge, an author I fell in love with, in no small part, for her ability to construct elaborate, minutely-observed fantasy worlds.  Even Verdigris Deep, an early Hardinge novel set in the real world and present day, had more fantasy worldbuilding than The Lie Tree, which apart from one fantastic element is a thoroughly naturalistic novel (I have not yet read Cuckoo Song, Hardinge's previous novel, so I'm not sure where it falls on the fantasticness scale).

The problem--or perhaps I should qualify, my problem--with The Lie Tree's naturalism is that Hardinge is a writer who likes to explain her novel's worlds.  More specifically, she likes to explain the mores and conventions that govern them, the currents of prejudice, propriety, and artifice that make their societies run.  This is great when those societies have been invented from whole cloth--when she needs to explain how social class determines how many different emotions one gets to express in A Face Like Glass, or how the tensions between colonizers and colonists have forced an ethnic group despised by both to adopt curious social customs in Gullstruck Island--but to a reader of my age and experience (which, to be clear, are not the novel's target audience), it's a lot less tolerable when Hardinge needs to explain the rules by which Victorian society is governed.  I don't need Faith to explain to me what a curate is, or why On the Origin of the Species threw such a bombshell into Victorian society.  The first half of The Lie Tree, which sets up Erasmus's death and Faith's investigation into it, is littered with scenes in which Hardinge spells out the rules of the novel's world.  A lot of these passages have power, such as this scene, in which Faith is surprised when a strange man intrudes on her games with her younger brother:

Fourteen years of trained fears broke into full stampede.  A strange man.  She was a girl, nearly a woman, and of all things she must never be near a strange man without protectors and witnesses.  That way lay a chasm in which a thousand terrible things could happen.

Or this one, in which Faith's mother Myrtle explains to her the proper way to order a servant:

You phrased it as a question to be polite.  Will you fetch the tea?  Could you please speak with cook?  But instead of your voice pitch going up at the end, you let it droop downward, to show that it was not really a question, and they were not expected to say no. 

But taken together, they have the effect of making the first half of The Lie Tree feel obvious and over-articulated.  We do not, for example, need Faith to spell out to us, after the observation about speaking to servants, that "that was the way her mother talked to her."  It should be obvious from Myrtle's general air of distraction, and from the attention that she pays to her husband and son, and deprives from Faith.  The strongest portions of this half of the book come when we get a sense that there are things about Faith's world that she does not yet understand, such as the casual way in which she drops it into the narrative that there were five dead Sunderly babies between her and her younger brother Howard.  For Faith, who is young, devoted to her father, and casually dismissive of her mother for using her looks and coquetry to get what she wants, this is merely a statement of fact.  We see it as a sign of what's to come, Faith's growing understanding of what it means to be a woman in the novel's world.  But moments like these are the exception, not the rule.

After Erasmus's death, Faith discovers his most secret specimen, a tree whose fruit produces true visions.  But the tree only flowers if it is "fed" lies, which must then be spread among other people.  Faith, determined to prove that her father was murdered, decides to use the tree, spreading rumors that his ghost continues to haunt the island, angry at the villagers who have insisted that a coroner's inquest be held to determine whether Erasmus killed himself, or that the archaeological dig Erasmus was invited to is actually searching for hidden smuggler treasure.  These lies, helped along by the observant, manipulative Faith's careful nurturing of them, spread like wildfire, causing unrest and violence within the community, to Faith's mingled horror and exhilaration.

Like many other Hardinge heroines, Faith is someone who has been warped and stunted by her upbringing (in fact the warping and stunting of children appears to be a general theme in the book--Faith's brother is being "trained out" of his left-handedness by being made to wear a jacket with the left sleeve pinned up).  In Faith's case, what has stunted her are the restrictive gender norms of her society, which teach her that her only value is in being "good"--which is to say, obedient and meek--and that her intelligence and curiosity are aberrations, to be ignored and suppressed.  As in her other novels, Hardinge is too clever and too honest to promise that the effects of fourteen years of this learned self-hate can ever be fully cured.  The core of The Lie Tree is Faith coming to realize how much she's been shaped by a childhood that has taught her to see herself as worthless, and by a society that refuses to recognize her intelligence and capability, and calls her monstrous when she expresses any emotion other than demure, meek acceptance.  That the result has been anger and frustration isn't very surprising to us, but to Faith it is only further confirmation that she is a bad person.

Using the Lie Tree allows Faith to give free rein to her worst impulses, to the feelings of resentment and frustration that have been allowed to fester in her, and to the joy of having power over other people's lives instead of feeling powerless in her own life.  She ends up doing terrible things: tormenting the servant girl who first spread the rumor that Erasmus killed himself, and blackmailing a local boy into helping with her investigation.  One of her rumors even convinces the villagers to attack and seriously injure the local postmistress, Miss Hunter.  But at the same time, exercising her power allows Faith to see more of the world than she previous had--she goes below stairs, interacts with strange men, sees the seedy underbelly of her polite society, and learns to understand the adults in her family.  It's an experience that forces Faith to see herself for what she is, and to decide what kind of person she wants to be.  Again, as in many of Hardinge's novels, salvation is found not in overcoming your past, which is impossible, but in learning to live with it, and be the best person you can be within the limitations it has imposed upon you.

As you might have guessed already, The Lie Tree is fundamentally about gender, and its use of lies as Faith's weapon--in a society that leaves women no other tools but their words and their ability to manipulate and insinuate, and then castigates them for using those tools to get what they want and need--is an inspired choice that has many complicated nuances.  It is, for example, intriguing that the tree has such obvious Biblical associations, given how often the men in the novel use religion--and the Sin of Eve--to justify distrust and oppression of women.  It is equally intriguing that Faith seems to be so much better than Erasmus at spreading lies without them ever touching her, or having the kind of splashback that Erasmus's lies had on his family.  Once again, there's a lot here that older readers will have seen before--it will surely come as no surprise to such readers that Faith eventually realizes that Myrtle's use of flirtation to get her way is in service of protecting her family with the only means available to her (and Hardinge again hammers the point in just in case anyone misses it).  But there's also a more ambitious project, as Faith's investigations of her world reveal more and more women who are living in the chinks of the world-machine, invisibly breaking the rules, and only occasionally reaching out to each other to say that such a life is actually possible.

Hardinge is hardly the first one to point this out, but when a society defines "proper" feminine behavior as rigidly and as narrowly as Faith's does, it ends up producing a lot of women who are, by definition, monstrous.  And it's therefore up to those women to decide what kind of monsters they will be, to come up with mores of behavior where society has abdicated its responsibility to do so.  Faith starts the novel horrified by her own intelligence and curiosity, convinced that she is a bad person because she loves to spy and eavesdrop and figure things out.  And, to be fair, these are all propensities that can easily lead a person astray, and when she indulges them in her investigation of her father's death, Faith does terrible damage.  The hope that Hardinge offers, at the end of the novel, is that Faith can find out how to be herself, and use her power, in a way that is as honest and honorable as possible.  It's a mingled hope, however.  If Faith wants to be a scientist, she realizes, she is signing up for a lifetime of being discounted, distrusted, and derided, and an afterlife in which she will be forgotten and erased.  And it's a life in which she will always be in danger--from others, and from her own worst impulses.  When Faith tries to apologize to Miss Hunter, she gets the following complex response:

"We both played the gossip game."  Miss Hunter wielded the reins with the confidence of practice.  "After your mother upset Jane Vellet, I was angry and told everyone about that Intelligencer article.  You spread a rumor in turn, but you were not the one that set fire to my house.  A woman like me makes enemies."

Faith wondered what "a woman like me" meant.  Perhaps a willfully happy spinster with a sharp tongue and good salary.  In Faith's eyes, Miss Hunter had always seemed icily smug and unassailable.  Now Faith saw glitters of defiance, and a tightrope beneath her feet.

It's that tightrope that Faith--and, to a lesser extent, all the women in her society--will be walking for the rest of her life.  And it's an admission that makes the happy ending of The Lie Tree--which otherwise might have left me feeling, once again, that this is not a book for me--a lot more tolerable.  Yes, it's a little unbelievable that Faith can come to understand herself as quickly and as fully as she does, and it's a bit of a pipe dream that, at such a young age, she could come to such a full accommodation with her flaws and weaknesses (once again, this is the sort of thing that's easier to swallow in fantasy world than in one that, historical setting nothwithstanding, so closely resembles our own).  But this moment, in which Faith realizes that she will always be in danger of making a mistake, of becoming the monster that society sees her as, and of justifying the violence that is always on the verge of being turned against her, is a powerful statement that not a lot of books--for adults or children--are willing to make.  I still prefer Hardinge as a writer of secondary world fantasies, and I still feel that I was not quite The Lie Tree's ideal audience, but it's moments like this that remind me of Hardinge's brilliance, and her importance to the genre.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

When coming so late to a novel that has been as rapturously received as Ann Leckie's debut (it is the winner of--deep breath, now--the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, BSFA, Locus, and Kitschie awards, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick award, and noted in the Tiptree award honor roll) there's a temptation to focus one's critical thoughts on the obvious question: why this book?  What is it about Ancillary Justice that made it the science fiction novel of 2013?  This is, clearly, an unanswerable question, especially when coming to the novel so long after its debut, when the things that set it apart have been so thoroughly chewed over, celebrated, discussed, reevaluated, and taken for granted that the distance between you and the people who read the novel cold is basically unbridgeable.  But I think that probably the best compliment I can pay Ancillary Justice is to say that very shortly after starting to read it, I stopped trying to work out the answer to the question of its popularity, and got about just enjoying the book and its characters.

This, however, might be a roundabout way of answering the question: to put it very simply, Ancillary Justice is fun.  It's a clever, well-written space opera/adventure with an interesting world, memorable characters, and a plot that is quite literally ripped from the classics (more about that in a minute).  And, perhaps most importantly, it manages to be all these things in barely 400 pages of clear, plain-spoken prose.  Unlike other juggernaut award winners of previous years, Ancillary Justice doesn't do a great deal that is new or different (and the things that are new or different about it, such as the games it plays with gender, feel, well, ancillary to the thrust of its story).  But pretty much everything that it does is done well, and as well as a hefty course of fun, the novel offers significant nutritional value in the form of its well-drawn, thought-provoking setting.  That in itself feels revolutionary--I can't recall the last time that a meat-and-potatoes space opera was simultaneously a quick, effortless read, and a clever discussion of matters of gender, personhood, and politics.  (Not to beat a dead horse, but having finally read Ancillary Justice really brings home how bewildering it is that this is the novel that the Sad and Rabid Puppies latched onto as an example of how SF is becoming elitist, literary, and disconnected from its pulpy roots.  How anyone who has actually read the book could see it as anything but precisely that sort of SF that the Puppies claimed to want to reclaim the Hugos for is completely beyond me, but then it's possible that I've answered that question simply by asking it.)

That Ancillary Justice is as much fun as it is feels all the more remarkable when you consider that it is, essentially, a book-long infodump.  The action of the novel begins with protagonist Breq embarking on the very last step of a twenty-year-long quest for revenge.  We get hints throughout the novel of hardships that Breq has endured, and the adventures she's had, on her path to this point in her story, and I suspect that the next two novels in the trilogy will touch on those events (or perhaps Leckie will write a companion novel revealing that backstory).  But in Ancillary Justice itself, what Breq needs to accomplish is rather anticlimactic--she has to convince someone to give her a weapon that can get past the security measures guarding Anaander Mianaai, leader of the Imperial Radch, the space empire around which this series revolves.  This is accomplished with relatively little argument, and the most complicated thing that happens in this strand of the story is that Breq encounters Seivarden, a Radchaai officer she once knew, and saves her life despite previously having an acrimonious relationship, which leads to the two of them developing a friendship.  The purpose of most of the action of Ancillary Justice is to serve as a delivery method for Breq's reminiscences of the events twenty years ago that led to her quest for vengeance, and the purpose of those flashback scenes is to illustrate--sometimes through nothing more complicated than a bald recital of facts--the nature of the Radchaai empire, an expansionist, xenophobic society that stresses conformity and obedience above all other virtues.

Breq was once the Justice of Toren, a Radchaai troop carrier whose AI could manifest itself through "ancillaries"--the bodies of captured enemies who have been mindwiped and made to act as Radchaai troops.  The custom of creating ancillaries is one of the reasons why the Radch is feared and despised by the civilizations it seeks to "annex," and at the time of the twenty-years-ago flashbacks, it is falling out of favor.  Nevertheless, it is one of the many difficulties that need to be smoothed over by Lieutenant Awn, the officer whom Breq (the ancillary who will one day become Breq, that is) accompanies to the newly-annexed planet Shis'urna to act as the head of the local garrison and Radch representative.  When Awn discovers a plot to inflame tensions between the planet's ethnic groups that seems to come from within the supposedly impartial Radch, she lands herself in the middle of a conspiracy that leaves her dead and Justice of Toren destroyed along with its entire crew.  All save Breq, who vows revenge against Anaander Mianaai herself, despite the fact that this is an impossible goal--like Justice of Toren, Mianaai is a distributed personality, existing simultaneously in thousands of bodies spread throughout all of Radchaai space, and Breq could only possibly hope to kill a few of them before being caught and executed.

(A word about pronouns.  As has been widely reported by this point, Radch society does not distinguish between genders, and when Breq "translates" the Radch language into English, she chooses the female pronoun by default, rather than the male one as we're accustomed to.  This is actually a lot less important to the novel than the discussion of it might lead you to expect.  Some Radchaai characters, such as Seivarden, are biologically male, but neither they nor Breq are bothered by being referred to as "she," since they don't think of themselves as male or female, and have simply chosen one pronoun as a matter of convenience; in other cases, such as Lieutenant Awn, we never find out the character's gender.  This is a clever consciousness-raising exercise, but also one that feels disconnected from the novel's main themes and preoccupations.  The whole point of the device, after all, is that gender is not a big deal to these characters, and so it ends up not being a big deal in general.  There are interestingly wrong-footing moments when we see Breq's blindness to gender through the eyes of non-Radch characters--when she tells a local doctor that "I can't see under your clothes.  And even if I could, that's not always a reliable indicator," and has to contend with their incomprehension of her inability to deduce gender from social cues--but these feel like a neat aside rather than the point of the story.  For the sake of convenience, and in keeping with Leckie's choice, I will continue referring to the novel's characters as "she" in this review, but it's worth remembering that this isn't entirely accurate.)

Most of what we learn about the Radch in the flashback chapters comes to us through speeches or Breq's internal narrative.  We learn, for example, that for a thousand years the Radch has struggled with the legacy of the botched annexation of the planet Garsedd, whose leaders, armed with alien weapons, made a last-ditch attack against Anaander Mianaai, leading to horrific reprisals by the Radch against the planet's population.  We also learn that shortly before Lieutenant Awn's death and Justice of Toren's destruction, a Radch governor in a far-flung outpost was discovered to have been engaging in widespread corruption and abuse, something that both the Radch's guiding philosophies and its overbearing system of government ought to have made impossible.  Leckie's straightforward prose, and the fact that the world she's constructing is interesting and complex, help to make all this infodumping digestible, but mostly the reason that it works is the characters through which this history is filtered.  Lieutenant Awn is an interesting example of a colonial representative.  Born to a lower-class family, she's benefited from reforms that have opened up military service to people of her lineage, and as a result she buys into the Radch's central philosophy, and its claim to be bringing civilization and enlightenment to the people it annexes.  But she can't ignore the resentment felt by her newly-annexed subjects, or the disdain with which she's held by some of her fellow officers.  When she's forced to justify historical atrocities like the choice to make half of Garsedd's population into ancillaries, or admit to recent failures, including the fact that the officer who exposed the corrupt governor's crimes was executed by the Radch central authority for disobeying an order, it's easy to see the struggle between her belief in the Radch's rightness, and her own sense of right and wrong.

None of this is particularly original, of course, but the fact that it's seen through Breq's dispassionate eyes--more than two of them, in fact, as at this point in the story the Justice of Toren has dozens of ancillaries assigned to Awn--puts a unique spin on this familiar story.  Breq's obvious and yet deeply suppressed fondness for Lieutenant Awn, and Awn's own fundamental decency, which is increasingly challenged as the plot to foment unrest on Shis'urna develops under her nose, create a sense of tension in these chapters despite the fact that the person telling the story is only barely human, and is sardonic and unemotional even at her most human-like moments.

Despite its space opera trappings--and the fact that both the protagonist and her would-be victim defy our definitions of personhood--there's something very familiar about Breq's quest for vengeance.  It is, after all, a very old trope--the faithful retainer enraged by the mistreatment of their honorable commander by a system that turned out not to abide by its own stated ideals, who is forged by the fires of vengeance into something finer than their humble origins had destined them for.  The scenes late in the novel, in which Breq meets some of Lieutenant Awn's old friends, who now know her only as a wealthy traveler, have a particularly Dumas-esque feel.  It's got me wondering why there doesn't seem to have been any discussion comparing Ancillary Justice with Gwyneth Jones's 2009 novel Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant.  While Jones wears her influence more prominently--Spirit is a straight-up space opera retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo--the similarities between the two novels run deep.  Both center around a highly stratified space empire with a wide-reaching bureaucracy, whose participants are driven not just by the desire for advancement, but by genuine belief in a system of thought and philosophy that convinces them of the rightness and morality of their actions, and of the infallibility of their superiors.  In the Radch, these are the tenets of Amaat, the belief that all action should be Just, Proper, and Beneficial--and that through the annexation of worlds, the Radch is helping their inhabitants achieve this goal.

Inevitably, in such stories, the corruption of the system is revealed when a mid-level functionary who believes in it--all the more so because they have climbed the social ladder by buying into their society's central philosophy--is destroyed by a ruling class that turns out to be not just corrupt but cynical, willing to suborn their stated values for the sake of temporary or even personal advancement.  Ancillary Justice turns the screw even further when it reveals that the corruption at the heart of the empire is the literal corruption of Anaander Mianaai, whose constituent bodies have split into two factions--two personas--according to whether they believe that the Radch should continue expanding or slow its conquest, whether the social mobility of the low-born should be encouraged or discouraged, whether they buy into the self-serving myth of human superiority, or recognize that the aliens with which the Radch borders are advanced and extremely dangerous.  The empire, which sells itself on the basis of its conformity and singularity of purpose, turns out to be irrevocably split, at war with itself over the basic tenets of its beliefs and self-definition.

Interesting as all this is, it can't get around the fact that Ancillary Justice feels as if its primary purpose is laying groundwork.  This is particular problem in the book's final chapters, after Breq's flashbacks conclude and she makes her final moves towards a confrontation with Anaander Mianaai.  Far from the climax of a grand quest for vengeance, these chapters feel like setup for the next part of this saga, their main purpose to get Breq recognized by the "right" Mianaai faction so that she can be placed in a position of power and take up her next role in the story.  Even before this, however, Ancillary Justice's discussions of the Radch often feel more like a primer than anything tending towards a conclusion.  There are some intriguing ideas--such as a local priest who suggests to Lieutenant Awn that, as horrifying as the ancillaries are, at least they can be trusted not to engage in the kind of abuses that human soldiers are prone to, from petty humiliation to rape--but on the whole it feels as if Leckie is working to acquaint us with what the Radch is so that later novels in the trilogy can use that information to decide what is to be done with it, and how it needs to change.  It's a marvelous bit of worldbuilding, and Leckie is to be commended for creating a conformist hegemony whose members nevertheless feels human and distinct, but it leaves Ancillary Justice feeling as if it's missing a point.

Or maybe the problem is that the novel seems a little inconsistent about which tropes it wants to challenge and which it wants to indulge in.  The story of the disenchanted avenger is a trope meant to question blind obedience and the conventions of honor, but the way in which Breq's revenge quest concludes works to undermine its message.  Late in the novel, Breq watches a popular Radch entertainment about

a young woman of humble family with hopes of clientage to a more prestigious house.  A jealous rival who undermines her, deceiving the putative patron as to her true, noble nature.  The eventual recognition of the heroine's superior virtue, her loyalty through the most terrible trials, even uncontracted as she is, and the downfall of her rival, culminating in the long-awaited clientage contract and ten minutes of triumphant singing and dancing

She mentions it to Seivarden, who has been frozen for a thousand years, and who finds much about the altered Radch society bewildering and foreign:

"Let me guess!"  Seivarden raised an eyebrow, sardonic.  "The one everyone is talking about.  The heroine is virtuous and loyal, and her potential patron's lover hates her.  She wins through because of her unswerving loyalty and devotion."

"You've seen it?"

"More than once.  But not for a very long time."

By this point, we've learned enough about the Radch and its stratified, class-conscious society to view the popularity of these kinds of stories with distrust--their narrative of virtue triumphing over social convention is intended to paper over the real issues of class prejudice that hinder most capable lower class citizens from climbing the social ladder (or the pitfalls that trip them up even once they've achieved a higher status, as in the case of Lieutenant Awn).  It's less clear whether we're meant to notice that Ancillary Justice is also one of these stories--Breq isn't just lower class, by the standards of the Radchaai she isn't even human, and yet by the end of the novel her courage and devotion to Lieutenant Awn have not only gained her the respect of several high-ranking Radch officials, but she has been granted citizenship and the command of her own ship.  All that's missing is the love story with a high-born Radchaai (and I'm betting rather heavily on that for the sequels).  Is it even possible to question the very idea of empire through what is essentially a Horatio Hornblower story?

Some of this will no doubt be addressed in the sequels, and though I'm generally wary of trilogies (I realized a while ago that I tend to read first volumes in trilogies, enjoy them a lot, and then never get around to reading the next volumes, because there are so many other self-contained novels that I'd rather read first) it's hard not to turn the last page of Ancillary Justice and immediately want to know what's next for all its characters.  I'm not sure that I would have crowned Ancillary Justice the science fiction novel of 2013, but I can also see why it ended up that way.  There's something here for everyone, and all in a compact, effortlessly readable package.  One of the problems with coming so late to a novel as rapturously received as Ancillarly Justice is that you have to resist the urge to damn it with faint praise--to say, "this isn't actually as great as you've been led to believe (because what could be), but it's still quite good."  When actually, it is really hard to do everything that Leckie has done with this book, and to do it as well, or as seemingly effortlessly.  If Ancillary Justice is not as revolutionary as its reception might have led a late reader to expect, that's not the fault of the novel, nor does it take away from what it actually accomplishes.

The Iain M. Banks Master List

As I wrote earlier this week, my review of The Hydrogen Sonata completes a decade of reading and reviewing Iain M. Banks's science fiction, and it seemed appropriate to put together a master list where all of these reviews can be found in order.  Not all of these are full-length reviews (though most are) and there are several books I might end up revisiting, in which case I'll update this post.

The next obvious step, however, is Banks's non-genre writing.  I don't know if I'll be as inspired to write about those books as I was by his SF--I've never gotten the sense that his mainstream writing was as groundbreaking as his work in genre--but time will tell.

The Culture Novels

• Consider Phlebas (published 1987, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - Part of me wants to revisit this novel, which isn't very good but is so very important to setting the tone and preoccupations of the Culture sequence.  The other part of me remembers what a dour slog it was.
  
  
• The Player of Games (published 1988, reviewed 2010, full-length review) - In hindsight I think my review of this book, though generally positive, ends on a more negative note than it deserved.  It's a fantastic novel with a great plot, and a necessary counterpoint to the negativity of some of the other Culture novels.
  
  
• Use of Weapons (published 1990, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - I wrote recently that Use of Weapons is a perfectly-formed novel undermined by a ridiculous final twist.  That's undeniably true, but this is still one of the most important, and best, Culture novels.
  
  
• Excession (published 1996, reviewed 2008, short review) - Of all the Culture novels, this is the one that probably most deserves a second look.  In hindsight its importance to the overall tone of the series (and particularly the later novels) seems obvious, and I'd like to revisit it and maybe give it the consideration it deserves.
  
  
• Inversions (published 1998, reviewed 2014, short review) - This, on the other hand, has probably gotten all the consideration it's going to get.  A stealth Culture novel, it's an interesting experiment but doesn't do much that the other books don't do better.
  
  
• Look to Windward (published 2000, reviewed 2013, full-length review) - It's hard to call this my favorite Culture novel since it is so bleak, but it's definitely one of the best, and this is probably my favorite Banks review.
  
  
• Matter (published 2008, reviewed 2009, full-length review) - The first of the three later, and lesser, Culture novels, and in hindsight the best of the unimpressive bunch.
  
  
• Surface Detail (published 2010, reviewed 2011, full-length review at Strange Horizons) - The only time I've reviewed Banks for an outside publication.  I wish it could have been a review of a better novel, but Surface Detail is baggy and unfocused.
  
  
• The Hydrogen Sonata (published 2012, reviewed 2015, full-length review) - The last of the Culture novels and, sadly, the worst.  There's still a lot here to enjoy but it's not the ending the sequence deserved.
  
  
• The State of the Art (published 1991, reviewed 2016, short review) - Banks's only short story collection, which mainly demonstrates that he wasn't really suited to the short form. Valuable for completists, and for the title novella, but most of the interesting ideas in his work are explored better elsewhere.

Non-Culture Novels

• Against a Dark Background (published 1993, reviewed 2013, short review) - This was the first Banks I read after his death, and that perhaps fueled an overly-negative reaction.  It isn't great--it revels in its bleakness and is much too long--but the knowledge that there were only so many of his books left for me to read made it seem worse than it was.
  
  
• Feersum Endjinn (published 1994, reviewed 2006, very short review) - Like Inversions, this feels like an experiment, and though it's probably a more successful one, there's also not much to say about it.  There's a giant castle.  It's neat.
  
  
• The Algebraist (published 2004, reviewed 2005, full-length review) - Where it all started.  My first Banks, and in hindsight my favorite of the non-Culture novels.  I don't know how well it would stand up today, now that I'm more familiar with the tropes of his writing (in fact looking back I'm not certain why Banks felt the need to create a new universe for this story; perhaps he simply felt the existence of the Culture would make the novel's events impossible).  I might end up revisiting it as well, though that feels less urgent.

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

Whichever book ended up being the last stop in my meandering progress through the SF novels of Iain M. Banks--a journey that began nearly ten years ago--it was bound to be a bittersweet experience.  That that book has ended up being The Hydrogen Sonata only makes it more so.  Banks could not have known, when he sat down to write this novel, how little time he had left, or that it would turn out to be the last entry in the Culture sequence.  And yet The Hydrogen Sonata is suffused with death, with questions about the meaning of life, of how (and when) to leave it, and with anxiety about what comes after it.  If the book itself is not quite the capstone that the Culture sequence deserved, then the coincidence of its timing and subject matter lends it significance and weight.

Like the other recent Culture novels, Matter and Surface Detail, The Hydrogen Sonata is not properly a story about the Culture, which plays a supporting role only.  The focus here is on the Gzilt civilization, a contemporary of the Culture, who very nearly became a founder race but instead chose to strike their own path.  Now, ten thousand years later, the Gzilt have decided to Sublime, ascending to a higher dimension where the truly advanced civilizations of Banks's universe live an enternal but only dimly-understood existence.  It's a time of celebration, of settling accounts, and accordingly the remnants of the long-Sublimed Zihdren, a race who shepherded the Gzilt onto the galactic stage, send an emissary to reveal that the Book of Truth, the religious text which has strongly shaped the Gzilt's worldview, was actually an experiment by a Zhidren scientist.  The reactions to this revelation are swift and extreme--the forces loyal to the Gzilt leadership, represented in the novel by Septame Banstegeyn, the most powerful Gzilt politician and the man most directly responsible for the decision to Sublime, ruthlessly seek to suppress it, killing the Zihdren emissary and even going so far as to murder thousands of Gzilt citizens.  A group skeptical about the Subliming project, meanwhile, recruits one of its members, the musician Vyr Cossont, to track down Ngaroe QiRia, a Culture citizen who claims to have been alive at the time of its creation, and find out from him whether the Zihdren's claim is true.

The Hydrogen Sonata's story proceeds in several concurrent plot strands.  In one, Vyr is rescued from an attack by Banstegeyn's forces by the Culture ship Mistake Not..., who takes it upon itself to help her with her mission.  In another, a Contact agent who knew QiRia is reactivated in the hopes that she can find him.  The third follows Banstegeyn as he goes to increasingly extreme and immoral lengths to keep the Subliming on track, while also revelling in his own power and the fruits of it.  The fourth largely revolves around the discussions of the group of Culture Minds who have witnessed the destruction of the Zihdren ship, and who form a cabal dedicated to investigating the matter and deciding what, if anything, should be done.  There's a lot of zipping back and forth between the various planets in Gzilt space, a few space battles, and the requisite feats of Banks-ian invention--I was particularly fond of the hedonist Ximenyr, who has been preparing for the Subliming by throwing a years-long party, and who has modified his body to give himself fifty-something penises, with four hearts to power them.

What's oddest about The Hydrogen Sonata's structure, and about the book in general, is how closely it mimics that of Surface Detail.  As in that novel, there is a plucky but clueless woman from outside the Culture who teams up with a sardonic and unexpectedly lethal ship's avatar; a Contact agent who ends up doing a lot less than we'd expect; a villain whose evil is signposted by making him arrogant, vain, and sexually rapacious; and a group of Culture Minds who are trying to manage the situation from afar (this plot strand recalls Excession as much as Surface Detail, and indeed that novel's Interesting Times Gang is even namechecked).  But then, perhaps this mirroring is less surprising when one considers that the two novels' subject matters are themselves mirror images.  Surface Detail was a novel about a manmade hell--about civilizations that try to manufacture justice by condemning the stored mind-states of their deceased citizens to virtual torment.  The Hydrogen Sonata is a novel about an actual, provable heaven--even if, as the novel is at pains to note, no one knows what the Sublime is like, and all attempts to study it have failed.  Both are, fundamentally, stories about death and what comes after it.

The problem with The Hydrogen Sonata--which becomes even more glaring when you notice its similarities to Surface Detail--is that the subject of the Sublime isn't actually very interesting.  Especially in comparison to the elaborate, baroque hells in Surface Detail, and to the chewy questions they posed--what does it say about a society that it chooses to enact justice through torture?  Is revenge ever justified?  What level of violence can be excused in the pursuit of justice?--the Sublime, and the decision to end one's existence in this plane and ascend to another, are frustratingly vague.  (To be clear, I didn't think Surface Detail did a particularly good job of answering these questions, but merely raising them made it more interesting than The Hydrogen Sonata.)  Partly that's by necessity--describing heaven is a lot trickier than inventing hell--but even when Banks has the chance to write around the problem, by discussing the attitudes of those about to Sublime, he doesn't seem to know how to handle the question.  Our windows onto Gzilt society are Vyr, who is conflicted about Subliming but seems content to go along with it; Banstegeyn, who is as far from an evolved consciousness as one might imagine and who seems to have instigated the Subliming largely because it flatters his sense of self-importance (in one scene, he extracts a bribe from the representative of a species hoping to gain access to Gzilt planets and technology in the form of a promise to name a star after him); and various military officers, who have no qualms about committing atrocities (among other things, causing the real deaths of thousands of fellow citizens who were days away from living forever) because they're just following orders, and anyway, soon none of it will matter.

All of this points to a larger problem with The Hydrogen Sonata, and with the later Culture books in general: Banks never managed to create another alien civilization as interesting as the Culture.  The Gzilt are extremely undeveloped, unconvincing as a civilization distinct from the Culture but equal to it in technological and cultural complexity, and not particularly interesting.  They're meant to have reached a civilizational pinnacle--to have decided, as a culture and by popular vote, to leave this plane of existence, and yet it's never clear why.  A civilization that made this decision should, it seems, have something special or different about them.  Its citizens should behave differently--tired of life, inward looking, excited about the future, anything.  Instead, the Gzilt feel like placeholders, their existence justified merely by the fact that the Culture would never make the choice they are making, so another species has to be invented in order for Banks to tell a story about it.

Late in the book, someone finally says what any sensible reader will have been thinking for hundreds of pages--that whether or not the Book of Truth is a lie doesn't actually matter.  If the Gzilt have truly made the monumental decision to Sublime, this revelation (which many of them will anyway surely have guessed) isn't what's going to stop them.  But because we have no idea why the Gzilt wanted to Sublime in the first place, the fact that the central question of the novel turns out to be meaningless only makes the novel as a whole feel even more so.  In his review of the novel, Adam Roberts suggests that the Gzilt's ordinariness is part of the point--that Banks is poking fun at the SF trope of ascending to a higher plane of existence (and of the religious concept of the Rapture) by making the people about to achieve it as ordinary as we are, and perhaps even less admirable (for one thing, none of the villains of the novel are ever punished or even exposed, and no one in Gzilt society seems interested in an accounting for the thousands of deaths that result from the novel's events).  But the kind of satire he's suggesting, if it was indeed Banks's intention, requires a much sharper, more focused novel than The Hydrogen Sonata, which like most later Culture novels is baggy and meandering.

Of course, all Culture novels are ultimately about the Culture.  Surface Detail's fixation with the hells offered a contrast to the Culture's decision to address injustice in the here and now, before people die, and offered yet another opportunity to muse on the costs of that determination.  If The Hydrogen Sonata doesn't have much of interest to say about Subliming, that's probably because the Culture itself isn't interested in it.  And in the absence of that final frontier, what's left to it?  What's left to anyone, in fact, in a post-scarcity society, where life can be as long as you like?  The answer that Banks has always given, where the Culture is concerned, is "self-satisfied do-gooding," and The Hydrogen Sonata offers a particularly cynical take on that truism when the Minds who have been pursuing the answer about the Book of Truth--and who have caused, albeit indirectly, a great deal of damage and death in that pursuit, as they compelled Banstegeyn's forces to use ever more extreme force in order to suppress it--decide to do nothing with it, and leave Gzilt space, congratulating each other on a job well-done.  Like everyone, The Hydrogen Sonata seems to be saying, the Culture is just filling up time, and if its actions aren't leading up to a grand act of good (or evil), who cares?  It's something to do.

Perhaps the reason that The Hydrogen Sonata has left me so unsatisfied is that it's impossible to read it without being aware of the counterpoint to that conclusion.  In the world of Banks's novels, everyone can live forever.  In the real world, so many people live shorter lives than they deserve.  Some people die when they still have so much left to give to the world.  Some get a prognosis of a year, and then die two months later, robbing them and their loved ones of even those brief, paltry months.  For a Culture novel that is so much about death to have so little to say about this heartbreaking truth, especially now, feels like a waste.  The Culture has always been a civilization that did not have to deal with our problems, but rather with the ones that emerge when poverty, suffering, and inequality are eliminated.  For once, that feels insufficient.

I didn't expect The Hydrogen Sonata to be very good--the buzz was against it, and none of the recent Culture novels have been on the level of the earlier ones.  But I hoped that it would have more meat on it, more that it wanted to say or do.  I wanted to have more to say about it, even if it was all bad.  Instead, the most cutting criticism I can make of the novel is this: in my paperback edition, there is a publisher's interview with Banks.  In it, he refers briefly to his future plans for more SF books, to further ideas about the Culture that he'd like to write about.  In an entire novel about death and leaving the world, there is nothing that moved and saddened me as much as that interview, and the knowledge that its promise will never come to pass.