Review: A Trade of Blood

A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the series formerly titled "Shadow of the Leviathan," but now known simply as "Ana & Din Mysteries." That is indeed what the books are, but I much prefer the previous series title. These mysteries are set in a fascinating fantasy world, with giant kaiju monsters that come ashore every year, and an empire that kills them to fuel an economy based on genetic engineering, made possible by substances extracted from the creatures' bone and blood. The Empire of Khanum has a centuries-old history, and the books are slowly pulling back the curtain on that history, most of which seems to be dark indeed.

This book, for example, tackles Khanum's meat industry, and the giant cattle they engineer to meet the demand for beef. Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol are again our protagonists, the former a genius who tries to hide away from the world, the latter with an altered brain that forgets nothing. Din gathers information and reports, and Ana analyzes, evaluates and finds the hidden truths in everything Din witnesses. They work for the Imperial institution tasked with bringing justice, the Iudex. But there are also secrets both held by Ana and Din, and in particular this time around we are given more hints as to who--and what--Ana really is. (The author has been hinting and dancing around this revelation for the past two books, and I hope in the next one he blasts Ana's true identity wide open.)

There is a lot of body horror in this book, of the fungal Last of Us kind, so if you're sensitive to that, be warned. But the central conflict is far more familiar: family. A younger generation that wants to throw off what it views as the shackles of the elder, and an older generation that does terrible things for the younger--a father preparing for his son to inherit via manipulation, murder and mayhem, all the things his son never asked for.

"He will not come," I said to him.

"N-no," he whispered. "He must. He must come."

"He will not. He was clear."

He swallowed,eyes swirling in his head as he thought. "Will you carry a message for him, then, Iudex? Tell him..." Again he swallowed, face wrinkling with pain. "Tell him it was...it was all for him. I did it for him. And it did work, yes? She has...she made him heir."

I said nothing.

"I knew it would be so," whispered Trikao. "And I knew my...my sister would not live long. I fade, yes. But I fade victorious at least."

"Your son will not come, sir," I said. "But he has a message for you."

"Oh? Please, t-tell me."

"He says he intends to sell all the Armenta spread when he inherits."

His eyes opened wide. A low, creaking cough came from deep within him.

"Wh-what?" spat Trikao.

"Ippeas will sell it all. He intends to sell it and leave this place. He will not sell it to one buyer, either. He intends to sell it to many different holders. Many families, many drovers, many operations. He shall split it all up into dozens if not hundreds of little farms and put an end to the house of Armenta."

A weak, unhappy wheezing came creaking out of Trikao's mouth. "But...no. No, I...did it for him. Doesn't he see that? I,I did it for him..."

"So you say," I said. "But he wished me to tell you--I never asked for it."

This theme of the tangled web of families is also bleeding over into our main characters, with what is revealed about Din and especially Ana. But the main draw for me is the worldbuilding: this horrifying, fascinating world, with its dark history and darker secrets, including an apparent genocide. This third entry in the series is leaner and meaner than the second, and every bit as good as the first book, The Tainted Cup (and that book won both the Hugo for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award), if not better. There's not a lot of authors I auto-buy in hardback, but Robert Jackson Bennett is one of them.

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Review: The Killing Spell

The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pretty interesting fantasy debut, dealing with language and magic, assimilation and colonization. The author is a native Hawaiian. I think this book illustrates the value of so-called "Own Voices," or people other than generic white authors publishing stories reflecting their ethnic groups and cultures. I doubt a white person could have written anything like this.

In this future, the Hawaiian Islands have been destroyed by an apocalyptic Flood, and the native survivors are living in and around Los Angeles. The Flood also released magic into the world, a magic that depends on languages and linguistics. The future federal government cannot cope with this at all, and a governing Board and Guild is established in LA to police and ultimately control magic users. There are eight recognized magical languages: Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese. Magical practitioners speaking these languages are highly regulated, and Casters or Smiths (the two designated levels of magical users) must be licensed within city limits to be able to practice their magic.

Our protagonist is Kealaokaleo Petrova, a young unlicensed Smith living on Homestead, a coastal region where the last remnants of the Hawaiian people settled after they were displaced. Homestead is rife with magic (called "mana" in this world) and magic-spawned monsters, and Kea is the struggling leader of her clan, trying to work and help her family survive. She is abruptly dragged in to see the Board (by the other protagonist, the Chinese Caster Sora Kaiser) because a murder has been committed: murder by magic, by someone spellcasting in an unregulated language. They have no proof it was done by Kea, but suspicion is falling her way, and she agrees to hunt down the murderer to spare her people from the Board's wrath.

There's some interesting worldbuilding here, built on languages and particularly the Hawaiian language, which does not have a written form. The author herself being Hawaiian gives the story an extra authority, as the reader can trust she knows what she's talking about. The impacts of colonization are also explored, along with the greed and hubris of those who have power and think they can dictate to others they view as "lesser."

This is a first novel, so it does have some hiccups, but overall it's a promising debut. It will be interesting to see what the author comes up with next.

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Review: Fold Catastrophes

Fold Catastrophes by Peter Watts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(The reason I'm able to review this early is because I have a legitimate copy: I just came back from this year's Worldcon in Anaheim, CA. The publisher, Tachyon, had a booth there and I was able to pick up a copy of the book.)

In 2006, Peter Watts wrote a novel I consider one of the best SF books so far this century: Blindsight. This is a hard SF tale of first contact mixed with a philosophical discussion of consciousness and self-awareness, and boasting some of the strangest protagonists (including a scientifically justified vampire) you'll ever run across. This pretty much sums up what Watts tends to explore in his work, which carries over to almost all of these stories--and adding, in this book, a greater emphasis on climate change, artificial intelligence and privacy concerns. These stories also boast Watts' trademark bleakness: I don't believe the man could construct a happy ending to save his life. As a former marine biologist, he knows just how screwed humanity is because of climate change, and this pessimism tends to show up in whatever he writes.

That's certainly the case with the stories here. My favorite, "The Twenty-One Second God," chronicles the aftermath of a mass interlinked mind that existed for all of the titular twenty-one seconds, and what happens when those who were briefly part of a hivemind drop out again. "ZeroS" chronicles a Black Ops squadron made up of (again, scientifically justified) zombies, and how they realize that their subconscious, which has been promoted to a sort of "evil twin" taking over during their raids, is committing war crimes. A new story, "Game Theory," has another of Watts' typical fascinating premises: a future where it has been proven that the known universe is nothing but a giant virtual-reality computer simulation, run by....what? Cross this with an examination of religion in the aftermath of this world-shattering discovery, with a focus on the Catholic Church (and an examination of its sins as well; one character says it fits the definition of a "terrorist organization").

None of these stories are cheerful or uplifting, but their ideas are followed through, even though in most cases they go to the darkest of places. It's a testament to Watts' genius that you still want to read them, even if you want to crawl into the corner and shake afterwards. Granted, this collection may be a better place to start with his work than his novels, if only because the length restrictions don't allow for his usual dense, layered, crunchy prose. So, yes: read this first, and then, if you think your brain can handle it, dive into Blindsight. Either way, you're in for a treat.

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Review: Foundling Fathers

Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story is an SF cloning story with a "d," with the Founding Fathers re-created Jurassic Park style in our time, hence the titular Foundling Fathers. It's also a novella, which means that the book is too short for the author to get into the nitty-gritty of how this was done--presumably digging up their bones to extract their DNA? That mystery is left unsolved, and for very good reason: it's not the author's focus and point. This story is a sometimes vicious satire and skewering of the myth of American exceptionalism (sorry, there is nothing "exceptional" about a country built on slavery and genocide, a country that refuses to reckon with its bloody past to this day), as well as the people who are trying to bring back an idealized past that never existed.

Our titular protagonists are four teenaged clones of the Founding Fathers: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, raised on an island off the coast of Virginia in total ignorance of the modern world. They think it is the year 1750. Everyone around them is forced by non-disclosure agreements to go along with this fantasy, and the pre-Revolutionary War culture and level of technology is painstakingly re-created--even down to the servants, who appear to be undocumented immigrants forced into this little charade. The women in particular are denied modern birth control. This, of course, plays right into the hands of one Thomas Jefferson, who is just as much of a rapist in his second incarnation as he was in his first.

The four boys are sharply and expertly drawn for as short as this book is. It also features one of the best opening lines I've read in a while, right up there with "It was a pleasure to burn" and "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel":

"It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet."

This revelation comes via a cell phone left in the privy by the boys' mother--or at least the woman who carried and bore all of them, which isn't quite the same thing. This sets off a chaotic twenty-four hours in which the boys discover their entire lives are based on lies, and the world out there has advanced more than two hundred and fifty years beyond them. When the servants have finally had enough of being imprisoned on this island, break into the armory and start shooting, the boys manage to escape on the supply ship. They are abruptly dumped into the modern world, and meet up with the narcissistic billionaire who financed their cloning, where they are told why they were made:

"And that's why you need us to lead," Jefferson said. "That's been taught to us all our lives. And also the lie that's been fed to us. We are the founders of the past; not the builders of the future. You need us so that you can reverse the arrow of time."

"We need that. Desperately," Stephens said, turning to face Jefferson. "That's it exactly. We have to go back. We must regain the vision we've lost. We need you to lead, and it's got to be now."

"You want us to change this country," Washington said slowly, "by deriving power from the way it is now. Remake it in the way it was made before, some three hundred years ago. But you want us to do it in the way that you tell us to. Because we're special and we can do it in a special, very old way. Because we've been bred from preserved stock like so many showhorses. And you think we won't refuse because of benefits we've never been shown, in a country we've never properly lived in, and have been lied to about every day of our lives. Does that make any sense to you, Tom?"

Needless to say, that does not work out. The reader ends up feeling sympathy and pity for these poor kids, born into a strange world they know nothing about, bred to spearhead some egomaniacal billionaire's revolution against all the progress made in those two hundred fifty years. (And at the end, we find out he has more clones ready to go, another fresh batch to replace these "duds.") The ending is rather a downer, as you realize there is a non-zero number of people in this country, some of them in the higher echelons of government, who want to return this country to its mythical founding hierarchy, when white land-owning males were on top and everyone else knew their place.

This gives you a very uneasy feeling as you close the back cover, which is exactly what the author intended. Maybe it's a good thing the book is short, as it could easily have descended into a dystopian horrorshow. But the broad, brief sketches of what she draws here are more than enough.


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Review: Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This second book in the Emily Wilde fantasy series continues the saga of Professor Wilde, dryadologist who studies the many species of fae, and her fellow professor/secret exiled king of Faerie Wendell Bambleby. This could also be called a "cosy" fantasy series (although this storyline gets a bit dark), with a focus on the science of dryadology in this alternate universe where faeries and alternate realms exist.

The highlight of the series is the prickly, sometimes hilarious relationship between the rational, matter-of-fact Emily and the fussy, eccentric (and often terrifying, when he lets his Faerie powers loose) Wendell. Wendell is trying to find a back door to return to his kingdom, and his evil stepmother has sent assassins after him. Wendell has also asked Emily to marry him, which prospect occupies a good deal of the plot because, as Emily says, marrying a Faerie king would be most unwise. Nevertheless, I suppose love in the end does conquer all, as she agrees to marry him, in between her efforts to open a door into his realm and the various hijinks that ensue.

These books are quite charming. The author hadn't been on my radar before, but now I am trying to track her books down. That's one of the great delights of reading, when you stumble upon someone you never heard of before and realize their books are right up your alley. If you like something along the lines of Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent, this series is similar and worth checking out as well.

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Review: Ode to the Half-Broken

Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Suzanne Palmer has written several award-winning stories, including the Hugo Award-winning "The Secret Life of Bots." Many of her stories involve robots and artificial intelligence, and she excels at depicting nonhuman characters. I've read and enjoyed several of her stories, but I haven't sought out her novels--until now. The quality of this story is such that she gets bumped up to my "auto-buy" list.

This book is loaded with nonhuman characters. It's in a near-future setting, about forty years from now when a combination of environmental collapse, war, famine, and pandemics (both natural and, as we find out, artificial) have reduced the human population to a billion. A post-collapse society is in the process of being formed. Before the civil war that tore apart the US, great breakthroughs were made in artificial intelligence, courtesy of one Dr. Milton. Milton is a genius--but we also discover he is a ill-tempered misanthrope who is disillusioned with the human race generally and also feels he has been screwed over by the corporation he has been working for. This leads to him creating four war mechas, which he names for the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--Death, War, Famine and Pestilence. These are nigh-unstoppable killing machines, and he sends them out into the world, with the express purpose of bringing the human race down.

Twenty years later, our protagonist is one of those war mechas who threw off its original programming/control and tried to reverse the harm it did before it gained free will. It has been living in isolation for twenty years. As the story opens, it wakes up in a bathtub in a trashed apartment in mostly abandoned New York City with one leg missing. Its quest to find its missing limb, and the friends and purpose it discovers along the way, is what makes up this lovely story of identity, responsibility, and coming to terms with one's past and changing the future.

This is mostly told from the first-person POV of the war mecha, who later names itself Be, and is a very good example of an author's thinking through how an artificial intelligence would think and react to the world. Another important character is the dog Atticus (who does not die by the way, so you don't have to worry about that), who is a cyborg--a combination being with an artificial intelligence implant. Atticus' true identity is revealed later on, and ties in to the discussions about personhood and responsibility:

"You could have told me," I say.

"Tell you what? I am not that mech you knew anymore, even less so than you are the mech you once were. Why can't I just be me and you be you?" he says. "We can choose not to live in our pasts. Isn't that the very thing you and Ver tried to convince me of, back before everything went to hell?"

Be goes through quite the journey with its friends (including some delightful rail mecha, one of which ends up inhabiting an old VW bus). Along the way, it discovers two of its siblings it thought was dead are not deceased at all. One sibling, formerly known as Pestilence (who created one of the artificial nanotech-based pandemics still plaguing humankind), has been captured and imprisoned by Derek Litchfield, who used to be Milton's boss. This Litchfield is a pretty nasty character, who tortured Be's sibling and forced it to use the manufacturing facility run by post-humanity free mechas to manufacture chips that will be used to enslave them and bring them under Litchfield's control. Be's quest to find both its sibling and Litchfield and stay out of the clutches of one General Sawyer, representing the last remaining dregs of the US government, come to a climax in Dr. Milton's ruined underground lab where Be was created.

This book is a little bit on the "cosy" side in that the new society the mechas are creating is based on cooperation and helping one another, and helping the humans they associate with. In fact, one important point that Be makes in talking to Sawyer (who keeps trying to kill it), is that Sawyer, basically, represents the past and the free mechas the future, and she is the one who needs to change:

"Since I left my santuary, I have had occasion to spend a lot of time contemplating the nature of my own existence and purpose," I say. "I have also had time to observe the world, and all the people in it, and how much has changed since the days when you and I were on opposite sides of a war."

"We still are," she [Sawyer] says. "No conversation is going to change that."

"I also," I say, "have observed many things that have not changed, that should have. Please do not take offense, but you are one of them. And if you are going to save your people, you need to evolve, because I cannot stop what is happening to your people and fight you at the same time. On the contrary, I need your help. And you need mine."

(These are not Terminator-style artificial intelligences, for the most part. In fact, Be's other surviving sibling, Ver, has a planetwide network dedicated to rebuilding a more ecologically-friendly civilization and cleaning and rewilding the planet.)

This is an altogether delightful story, with complex characters and thought-provoking themes, and a triumphant, satisfying ending. I loved it. It's one of the best books I've read this year.

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Review: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I hadn't read any of this series before or even heard of it, but I ended up really enjoying this book. That's one of the best things about voting for the Hugos--you find gems you might have otherwise overlooked.

This is in much the same vein as Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent--a Victorian-era woman of science fighting sexism and studying fantastic creatures. In this case, it is fantastic magical creatures: the Fae. Emily Wilde is very much a female scientist of her era, rational and mostly unemotional (twice as much to be considered half as good). She is dedicated to the scientific method, even in the midst of crises, which makes for some pretty funny scenes, sometimes:

"Wendell!" I lunged forward, trying to wrench the roots away from him. They showed no interest whatsoever in me, nor Shadow, who pounced and worried at them until they fell away. But more rose to take their place.

"Why does it want you?" I cried.

"Why do you think, you cold-blooded lunatic of a woman?" he yelled, clawing at the ground. This was followed by a series of curses in what I assumed to be Irish.

I stabbed at the roots with my pocketknife. At the same moment, though, my mind was racing through stories, texts, journals. "Can you not--can you not say it?"

He gave me one of his impossibly green glares. We were nearing the base of the tree, where a hollow like a mouth had yawned open, black and writhing with roots like white worms. "No!"

"Oh," I breathed. My pocketknife was having little effect, but I kept up the stabbing nevertheless--I believe I stabbed him once, accidentally, for I had gone back into my mind. "You can't reveal to me that you're Folk--it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world. Isn't that it? I've heard of that--yes, that account of the Gallic changeling. And isn't it a peripheral motif within the Ulster Cycle? Bryston's theory was that--"

"Oh, God," he moaned. "She wants to discuss theory at a moment like this. I am doomed, aren't I?"

The "Wendell" mentioned here is Emily's colleague, Wendell Bambleby, a vain, insufferable professor at Cambridge, who we eventually discover is an exiled Faerie king. Wendell follows Emily to her research assignment in the far-off country of Ljosland, and adventures and hijinks ensue. Wendell and Emily have a combative relationship, with much exasperation on Emily's part and plenty of razor-sharp dialogue flying back and forth. Of course, it comes out that Wendell is head over heels in love with Emily--in a typical understated, British stiff-upper-lip way and an even more traumatized king-of-Faerie way--and later on in the story he asks her to marry him. Emily doesn't turn him down, and at the end, at the scientific conference where they are presenting their joint paper about the discoveries they made in Ljosland, she seems to be entertaining the idea.

In between, Emily discovers more about Faerie and makes actual friends in Hrafnsvik, the village where she and Wendell spend the winter. She is a curmudgeon at the beginning of the story and a curmudgeon at the end, but she is beginning to understand the value of reaching out to other people.

I really liked this. It's told in a meticulous, journal-entry style, with footnotes, as befits a serious scientist. I doubt I would have paid attention to this had I not been reading it for the awards, but now that it's on my radar I'm going to pick up all three volumes.

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Review: Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe

Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is another entry in the so-called "cosy" trend, as in "cosy young-adult fantasy romance." The spoiler is right there in the title: the two protagonists, Brenda Nguyen and Katherine "Kat" Woo, live in parallel universes linked by periodic fluctuating portals. Brenda's universe is ours; Kat's is our world, more or less, with an industrial revolution of magic instead of the internal combustion engine. (Which also means, for Kat's world, the existence of dragons, pixies, and other magical creatures, and nearly non-existent climate change, although capitalism is as rapacious in her universe as ours.)

Now, this could have been a very interesting scenario, with some thoughtful examination of the contrasts between the two universes, and an appreciation of the roads not taken in the magical one. Unfortunately, the author doesn't choose that route, instead settling for a meet-cute frothy romance between Brenda and Kat and some pretty thin, superficial worldbuilding. Which is obviously the direction she wanted to take, and more power to her. But in the end, that makes this story happy and bubbling with kambayas, and utterly forgettable. I did finish it, but I spent all of the back half longing for some grit in the gears, and a villain less cartoonish than the portal-crossing Shannon Mayfield. The book didn't necessarily need to be grim, but it did need a little more darkness than the author wanted to give it.

(Also? The silly subplot about reducing a dragon to the size of a cat and, conversely, making Brenda's friend Erica's cat Fancy the size of a minivan nearly threw me out of the story altogether. Because, really? Any house cat suddenly enlarged to be as big as a sabertoothed tiger would not be sweet and cute, but utterly terrifying. Look, I have two cats myself, and I love them, but I know for a fact if my fifteen-pound Mocha grew as large as a fucking Smilodon [maybe 1,000 pounds], I would run from him screaming, not try to ride him.)

That's pretty much the problem with the cosies I've tried to read, I think. They're okay while I'm turning the pages, and the characters usually hold my interest...and they vanish from my mind the instant I close the back cover. I like stories that are thought-provoking, and layered, and take some effort to tease out all the subtleties and facets. Those kinds of books stick with the reader long after they're finished. This one, unfortunately, didn't.

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Review: Radiant Star

Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I normally love Ann Leckie's books, but I could not get into this one. Part of that is that this is written in omniscient POV, and I am not a fan of head-hopping. Also, despite being set in the Imperial Radch universe, the worldbuilding felt thin. Finally, I could not figure out what the heck the titular object/MacGuffin the Radiant Star actually was (which probably would have been answered further on, but I didn't get that far). I persevered for nearly a hundred pages, but in the end, I didn't care enough about any of these people to continue.

Which is okay. Not every author's book is for every reader, and I love the original Imperial Radch trilogy enough to make up for this.

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Review: Children of Strife

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the fourth book in the Children of Time series, a far-future saga of humans' expanding into the stars, leaving behind a dead Earth, and terraforming other planets. These particular books (as are most of the author's books) are chunky both in the sense of sheer page counts and the weight of the ideas those pages hold. This particular story boasts three timelines set centuries apart, which nevertheless braid together neatly at the end. It's also a somewhat bleak cautionary tale of what happens when a group of entitled megalomaniac sociopaths are set free to indulge all their selfish baser instincts--at least until the climax, when they run up against a stronger force with no fucks left to give, which ends up restraining them for the good of everyone.

(One almost wishes there was an alien Mira on Earth right now who could stop the techbros, corporations and other conservative baddies currently wreaking havoc on our present timeline. But I digress.)

Despite this being the latest book in the series, this is more or less a stand-alone story. It helps to have read the other books, but it is not necessary. The author provides just enough background on the characters to bring the reader up to speed. What this book does is expand on events only given a passing mention in the previous volumes. (The reader is caught up on all this at the beginning of the story, in a nice precise three-page summary that sets the scene for what is to follow.) There are a few returning characters, in particular the sapient Portiid spiders Portia and Fabian, and the AI Avrana Kern, but the main focus is on the said group of rich sociopaths who end up terraforming an alien Earth-like planet with their own brand of genetically engineered, accelerated-evolution ecosystems. This becomes the planet Marduk of the present-day timeline, with its endlessly mutating monsters and plant life that can exist in vacuum. This planetary ecosystem, which is manipulated into becoming an organic computer capable of holding the uploaded minds of its creators after they die, takes over both the generation ark ship arrived from Earth's past and the present day Dissenter, an exploration ship captained by the best of the new characters (and the best character in the book, as far as that goes): the sapient mantis shrimp Cato.

I must stop to tout Cato in particular, because he really should have been the hero of this entire book. I realize the author was using multiple POVs to tell his story, and with the three separate timelines this was absolutely necessary--but I still wish Cato could have gotten far more page time than he did. His character journey was fascinating. The uplifted Stomatopods, in this universe, are bad-tempered, belligerent, pugnacious crustacean heavyweight fighters who would just as soon punch your head off as look as you, as Cato aptly demonstrates when he meets another of the main characters. But as we discover more of Cato's past and realize the genocide he was a part of, he reaches a turning point where he has a chance to give in to his primal urge to battle--and he backs down. In many ways, this is the most important plot point in the story, what Cato has learned because of what he did:

The feeling of failure and weakness burns through every segment of him. Only one sensation is worse. How he'd felt when the Portiid ships had found him. Sitting alone in his ship after the orgy of glorious battle that had been the Escalation. Coming to a realization of what they'd all done. The communal madness that had taken them, so they'd fought and fought. Seeking the searing inner reward of victory, which the weaponry and the distance attenuated, meaning instead of one defeated enemy they required ten, a hundred, a thousand. Chasing the hit, the dream of warrior greatness until...until...

Seventy-two survivors. Out of how many hundred thousand? And only that many still living because, by then, they were so far-spaced they couldn't find each other. Cato remembers.

He remembers that, when they found him, he would have fought them. Fought them and, in that madness, avoided facing up to what he'd done. Lost himself to the delusion of martial triumph. As with his own language, though, the Portiid communications let their emotional state bleed through. Incredulity, horror. Seeing himself through their many eyes.

His people were the best warriors, the hardest hitters. The stories they told themselves of their prowess, to cover for the fact that all the knowledge, all the tech, all the interstellar travel was the province of other species. So in that moment, he understood the Portiid rescue party saw things he'd blinded himself to. They saw the truth of what the Stomatopods had done with the star system they'd claimed. Turned it into a charnel house, drifting with wrecks and corpses. The old ways and the new technology; a terrible combination. He'd seen himself as they saw him, and realized he was a monster.

(It's too bad some of the other characters in the book couldn't have similar epiphanies--in particular the Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos knockoff, Gerey Hartmand, the ego-driven "Great Man" who sets all the genetically-engineered horrors of Marduk in motion. But don't worry, Hartmand gets what's coming to him, yes he does.)

This book is dense and chewy, both in story and theme. There are characters who attain godhood, and reject it to become human again; polar opposite characters who merge consciousness to find the two of them together are greater than either one alone; a devouring alien fungus who gives her all to hold on to her sense of self and recognition of the worth of other individual people; the guilt-ridden war criminal who manages to find another life; and, at the end, the rich sociopath who cannot, will not, change, only to find himself banished from everything and whose only future is to die alone. I've read plenty of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books, but this is one of his very best. You should not miss it.

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