Reviews and Comments

I read this over a few months with an in-person book club, and it was a great choice for that because it has a lot to discuss. It opens with an incredibly harrowing description of the sort of heat wave disaster that the world hasn't seen yet but I think is plausible not far in the future. And from there it basically follows three interwoven threads: * The UN establishes a climate change super-org that gets dubbed the "Ministry for the Future" because its official name is far too unwieldy government-speak * India decides after the heatwave that it can't afford to wait for the world to get its shit together, and starts going it alone on geoengineering, to global consternation but also spurring some more serious action from other parties * The character from whose point of view we saw the disaster is very deeply scarred by the experience and devotes the rest of his life to climate action by any means necessary

In true KSR style, the book is very long on research and loving descriptions of places (mostly Switzerland this time; he's made me want to visit Zurich), and relatively short on three-dimensional characters. I think this one does a better job with the characters than Red Mars, because he picked a couple (Frank and Mary) to focus on and managed to bring those to life somewhat, while letting others just be functions in the story. But it's definitely still his weak point as a writer.

The book goes through a grim ride, in which there's a lot more loss, and it takes a huge amount of work and delay to get to meaningful global action. All of which seems sadly realistic to me. I think KSR's also right that in the end the levers will be social and financial system changes, not some amazing new technology. But his proposal for those changes feels weirdly credulous about Bitcoin, and thin on details about how it would actually achieve its social objectives - which would be fine for a straight work of fiction, but is jarring compared to how much deep research there clearly is in the climate system and technology parts of the story.

It eventually leads to a sort of optimistic conclusion, a somewhat believable scenario of humanity living within its means at last, and some aspects of that vision being genuinely appealing. But that end state has two glaring omissions which ultimately detracted a lot from the book for me.

One is that there's been a triumph of this "half Earth" movement about physically limiting human habitation to half of the land surface, to rewild the rest. But... everywhere habitable is someone's ancestral land. What happened to those people? Were they consulted, compensated, persuaded, or moved along yet again? And most of those ecosystems' stable pre-industrial states were ones of dynamic equilibrium actively maintained by humans - simply withdrawing wouldn't do what this book seems to assume it will.

The other is that there's this lovely vision of long haul travel being done by boat and airship, which in turn is practical because people get to work on their laptops. Which would be great for me! But what's a plumber supposed to do? I can only be so happy about a future in which migrants' ability to see our families is contingent on us having remote work compatible jobs. And the way that's not discussed left me feeling like KSR had only really thought about this future for himself.

I read this with #SFFBookClub, and probably wouldn't have done otherwise because IRL I find both election superfans and "too clever for elections" antis tiring, and their arguments tedious. I'm glad I was prompted to read it, because I enjoyed the majority of the book a lot, but in the end it felt sort of hollow.

The good: Older has the skill to make a thriller about an election actually... well... thrilling. I was very sucked in, at times finding it hard to put down. I think a key part of how is that she made me care about the characters much more than about the election itself. And the world itself is interesting - she ran with an idea that 20-30 years ago I would probably have considered a utopia, and has really chipped away at many ways in which it would not be. Plus the general background of different understandings of reality being what manifests social reality while also prone to being manipulated feels... prescient.

The bad: this book replicates a lot of aspects of Cyberpunk that I find a turn-off. The tone of the first couple of chapters almost made me give up, and there's this sort of simultaneous glamourisation of travel and flattening of difference that feels like a weird tic of the genre - even though this book at least modulates that a bit by travel still being clearly a hassle and a privilege. Ken's relationship with the various field offices didn't seem believable to me: how would he always know better than the locals, and why would any of them listen to him? And the last couple of chapters felt like a hurried wrap-up that just sort of forgot some of the potentially-interesting complications that were being introduced before them.

I found The Fall Of The House Of Usher intriguing but ultimately frustrating, and judging by the author's note at the end of this book, so did Ursula Vernon. Her reworking does a great job of keeping the atmosphere of the original while filling it out to be much more of a satisfying story, with clearer reasons behind what happens and much more compelling characters.

I love how the narrator has so much of their own story, and it's mostly made relevant to the core story of the book. And the mystery aspect is very well done, with that tantalising sense that we as readers are just slightly ahead of Easton & Denton in figuring out what's going on and what will have to happen. I also appreciated how Roderick gets to be more of an actor in this telling rather than a pure victim, and I'm intrigued by the ambiguity of whether Madeline also is one or whether we're purely hearing from the fungus towards the end of the book. It must be tempting when writing a story that fills in so many gaps from the original to fill in every gap, and I think stopping short of doing that was a very good move.

I think I might like this sequel even better than the first in the series. As hinted at by the end of Jade City, Lee expands the world in book 2, bringing outside events to bear on Kekon and entangling the Kauls in things beyond its shores which they might prefer to ignore. But she has the good sense to do so mostly as a couple of tightly focussed subplots.

My favourite of them is Anden's time in Espenia. In Jade City I found it very entertaining how that place was clearly a stand in for the US, but it was totally flat seen through xenophobic Kekonese eyes. This was a fun inversion of the usual trope, but also would have been a bit much to continue, so instead we get to experience Espenia through Anden first being banished there and gradually making a bit of home in it. Port Massy feels very true to the NYC of the big wave of Jewish immigration in the early 20th Century, and his host family alternately remind me of the host family that put up my uncle when he first moved to Peoria, or of that uncle & aunt themselves in their early days in NYC living at the end of a subway line. All of it, the place, the community, the distance, and the pressures felt very real and well observed, and it provided a great chance to turn Anden into a fully realised character; one of my favourites now.

Wen also became much more of a whole character, and I enjoyed her arc in itself and for the ways her relationships with Shae and Anden developed. Shae remains the person I'm really cheering on through the book, and I found Hilo to be the one weakness: so much of the drama is driven by his actions, aptitudes, and mistakes, but he still feels more like an idea than a person.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Jade Legacy.