John C. Wright, 2002
Two Line Review: Strange. Very strange. Unpolished, but interesting.
First and foremost, let me state that this is the first in a series of two volumes. It's noted as such in the inside of the dust jacket, but I somehow managed to miss this when I bought the book. Note also that this is not a book that wraps anything up; rather, it ends as a rather large cliffhanger with many more questions left unanswered than are actually resolved.
So if that mode turns you off, don't buy this book for another year (I'd guess.)
Now then, to review: I'm really not sure where to start. The book follows the actions of the main character, named Phaethon, who happens to be the sone of Helion. Actually, the main character's name is Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconsciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043 (the "Reawakening.") This is not only a name, but a description of what Phaethon is in a physical sense, and a description of legal standing.
His full name is mentioned in the first few pages, and by the end of the book, most of that jargon will actually make sense. In Phaethon's society, the so-called Golden Oecumene, that sort of precision is justified-- the Golden Oecumene is an extremely distant future earth world, which seems to have run through not just one cultural singularity, but perhaps as many as three, and come crashing out the other side leaving nothing but a vapor contrail. The precision is justified because the technologies which exist allow thinking beings to have almost unlimited control, not only over the physical world, but over their own consciousnesses.
At the opening of the book, Phaethon is present at his father's home at the beginning of a milennial celebration intended to set the tone of society and its endeavors for the next thousand years... and he is absolutely bored out of his skull. Moreover, he shortly becomes convinced that he is quite literally living a lie, and that either vast amounts of memory has been stolen from him, or worse, at some point in the past he had agreed to have those memories excised from his consciousness.
The book which follows is Phaethon's quest to rediscover what he has forgotten about his personal history, and even more important, to determine why it was done and what his own hand in this activity was. At the end of the day, I liked this book, and I'll buy the concluding volume when it comes out in hardback. But oh, Lord, there are flaws here.
The first flaw is the amazing embarassment of riches in this book. There are, quite possibly, too many nifty ideas for a volume of this size. And there are some ideas which aren't so much nifty as they are silly. It's hard for me to suspend disbelief enough to accept a suit of armor made out of element 900 ("Chrysadamantium"-- it's in the unpredicted "Continent of stability" dontchaknow.) A fe of the other physical technologies were somewhat silly, too, and could have been excized, I think, without much danger.
Most of the other innovations and ideas were more directly related to the story, but still dizzying, especially for the first half of the novel. There are more varied forms of consciousness, on and off stage, than I can ever remember seeing, and Wright describes them in detail, as much as he can. There are the base neuroforms-- that is, people more or less like us, but augmented. There are the Warlocks, who have managed to integrate their consciousness and subconsciousness, dreaming and waking worlds; and the Invariants, who are near automata in their devotion to logic. There are Compositions and other forms of massminds. There are Cerebellines, who have tinkered with their brains to allow resolution of multiple patterns and hierarchies of meaning; there are non-standard xenoforms. Then there are the strictly artificial "sophotech" intelligences, ranging from the relatively puny Harrier (with the capacity of a mere hundred thousand humans) through the great Earthmind, as intelligent as a trillion humans at once.
Then, add that the characters, though still having physical substrates, live most of their lives in a completely artificial (or at least augmented) mostly-consensual reality. Add that the consensual reality has multiple levels, from unadorned, through several stages, into a full immersion where the master of whatever space you're in is allowed to manipulate not simply your senses but, if you allow it, your emotions, your thoughts, and your identity.
(And, for that matter, your memories, which is really the driver of the plot-- the story is predicated on 'sophotech' technologies which have made an exact science of cognition: Consciousness can be sliced, diced, folded and chopped into paper-snowflake patterns, and in many cases restored to normal if the resulting consciousness is willing to be restored. And this is all an old enough development that there are vast bodies of custom and law to deal with it all.)
Despite Wright's eager explanations of all these effects through the books, though, it can be overwhelming, especially in the first half of the book.
Another flaw is that Wright really needs to get a handle on characterization and voice. By the second half of the book, it's clear who, or at least what sort of person, Phaethon is. But for the first half of the book, Wright hasn't hit his stride and Phaethon seems to morph into whatever the scene's tone demands. It's unsettling and deistracting.
On the good side, this lends itself to a bunch of very nice ideas and very nice set pieces, even they don't always dovetail with the rest of the story. On the other hand, it also makes for some pretty goofy scenes. For example, we are beaten over the head with the "middle Dreaming" level of consensual reality, where information tags around objects flood the user's mind with contextual, symbolic and factual information. But when Phaethon is called to a court proceeding in which he igures highly, he completely fails to take advantage of anything remotely similar to download the appropriate legal information into his mind. It was a glaring example of plot-induced stupidity-- or perhaps the author forgot about the implications for a scene or two.
Still, by the second half of the book, things were beginning to settle into my head, and I was able to concentrate more on the themes of the book (more Gnostic in tone than "The Matrix" could ever think about being) things went better.
I believe this is Wright's First book, or at least his first SF book. It reads like it. He should perhaps have written a few less ambitious books before this one. But I'll still buy the next one, and anyone who likes Vernor Vinge, David Zindell, Walter Jon Williams (for _Aristoi_) and similar works might want to read a chapter or two in the bookstore to sample it.
[This review was originally posted to Usenet, and is archived through "makeashorterlink" on Google Groups.]
Posted by John Novak at November 23, 2003 11:33 AM