Quarter, Half, and Full Share by Nathan Lowell

Quarter Share

This book works for me, and that also surprises me, because the narrative structure here follows the episodic, vignette style that Terms of Enlistment follows. Where this structure did not work there, it works here. And I want to figure out why.

Plot Summary: A young boy, 18 and just about to go to college, lives in a future economic dystopia. His mother dies unexpectedly and he is about to be deported. He has three options: find a job and stay on the company planet, join a military, or ship out with a trader fleet. (and if you think for a second that this isn’t going to be a libertarian trader fleet, then welcome to science fiction! Enjoy your first book.) He chooses a Libertarian trading fleet, and the rest of the book is simply his onboarding and a couple of their first stops at stations. He starts each day, he does some stuff, he ends each day.

Some people who dislike this book seem to point to a perception that nothing happens and nothing is at stake. However, those two linked complaints don’t hold water for me. I appreciate works where “nothing happens” like Raymond Carver or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In Solzhenitsyn the stakes stay low compared to end of the world or human extinction plots that science fiction sometimes uses. Though I appreciate plots that shove humans into extreme situations—they often allow us to examine basic premises and structures of perception or belief by stripping away layers of civility—I don’t need those plots to stay interested. One person’s rock-bottom is another person’s success. But these linked complaints do show a lack of engagement on the readers’ parts: they struggled to engage with the main character’s growth, maybe because they struggled to find it. It shows the author not communicating in ways they understand. And that’s fine to me—not every book is written for me and I’m not going to like every book another person likes.

Here, specifically, I appreciate the exploration, the growth—at least of knowledge—of the main character. These vignettes show days of his life that exist, that he did not expect, where he learns something or does something to help those around him. Rather than battle scenes followed by a boss battle like Terms of Enlistment showed, Quarter Share shows the main character living. It’s more slice of life, and less skipping over interesting aspects to get back to shooting things. I’m pretty sick of shallow video games that skip over interesting implications of the plot, and books that do the same thing also bore me. As such, the lack of an overarching plot did not bother me here, I thought it was an asset for the type and style of tale that the author wanted to tell.

And that core concept will determine whether anybody else appreciates this book or not. The main character is a little too good/lucky, sure, and the others are not fleshed out enough. But I actually found this quite engaging. It surprised me.

I believe there are some missed opportunities in this short book, but these missed opportunities merely excite me, fire my imagination, and drive home questions about presumptions I didn’t think I held. I think that’s probably more on the reader than the book, but maybe it isn’t.

Half Share

To give this book credit, the first half was simply a strong continuation of Quarter Share. I enjoyed it. And then the other shoe dropped. Literally, his name is Ishmael: I should’ve guessed. Let me put it to you this way: the ship goes through an actual emergency where death is a very real possibility in about five ways—a rarity in this world, as the prior parts of this story clearly show. Ishmael is the one who solves all five, despite being in space for only 9 months, being possibly concussed at the time, being the lowest on the totem pole, and everybody else having grown up in space with way more knowledge and experience. I laughed out loud. After this “Ishmael Idiot Savant Saves Everybody at Everything” scene, or scenes, it got worse.

He then becomes a sex idol.

I should’ve put it down right then and there, but I had a couple hours left in my drive and no other audiobooks loaded onto my phone. So, the wish fulfillment adolescent fantasy took over the narrative and didn’t work. It’s unconvincing and it’s regrettable considering how Quarter Share worked so unconventionally.

Full Share

OK, Quarter Share worked and I want more of that. The first half of Half Share also worked before Ishmael started solving everything no sweat and became a sex idol. Maybe the author realized that the adolescent wish fulfillment fantasy was not the right track?

Nope. The author didn’t realize. To quote one part, one astrogator asks another to do something else “while I have a long conversation with our savior here”. Ishmael space savior slash sex idol continues and not in any engaging or interesting ways. It’s not worth it. At all.

(And then I read the reviews on Goodreads to see if anything worthwhile was coming. Apparently the next book in this fumbling series deals with sexual violence in dismissive ways and oh boy do I not want to read that.)

Death's End by Cixin Liu

Translated by Ken Liu.

0. This is the second novel that I’ve read this year that was nominated for the 2016 Hugo Awards. The first was The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin, which won, but it wasn’t the best book I’ve read.
—Preamble: Okay, the guiding question to the notes for the two prior books in this series: “I don’t know how much of my confusion is from translational ambiguity, unknown differences in narrative traditions between Western and Chinese stories, or this tale itself being told poorly.” The first book was a mess. I enjoyed the second book. Between reading The Dark Forest and this novel, I asked around for some input. My friend Peter told me that Chinese narrative tradition usually focuses less on plot and character, and more on mood or theme or idea. With that in mind, on to discussing Death’s End, the final book in the trilogy.

1. This novel follows Cheng Xin in her life, pausing when she sleeps in suspended animation, and tracking with history when she is awake. It’s organized in terms of the time periods involved—split between these sections by headers and Cheng Xin's sleep cycles. But she is not just a lens to view the events through, she is a character with some depth. She struggles with guilt pretty heavily, having—in her mind—doomed the whole human race. But her guilt faces off against the reasons she failed at holding off the Trisolar invasion fleet: namely, love and her application of it to the whole world—empathy, or motherly feelings towards the whole human race. (As a reminder, her suspended animation sessions leave her vastly older than the people who surround her every time she wakes.) This central wrinkle to her character is present even before she is elected swordholder: her failures and successes all hinge on her empathy and brilliant contributions to science. For instance, one of the things she does earlier in the book, not her failure as a swordholder, leaves her thinking:

She had done nothing that she ought to be ashamed of, nothing that should trouble her conscience. But she also understood that this was how someone could sell their mother to a whorehouse.

This central wrinkle of intertwined guilt and love carries a lot of the book, and it is partly solved near the end when prior swordholder, and total badass, Lou Ji forgives her by saying,

“Love isn’t wrong. A single individual cannot destroy a world. If that world was doomed, then it was the result of the efforts of everyone, including those living and those who had already died.”

This time, she cried not only for Tianming. She cried out of a sense of surrender. She finally understood how she was but a mote of dust in a grand wind, a small leaf drifting over a broad river. She surrendered completely and allowed the wind to pass through her, allowed the sunlight to pierce her soul.

She finally comes to terms with her actions after this conversation with an aged Lou Ji, perhaps the man who has the most reason to not forgive her. But that tension does not entirely leave—like it did in the weird section of the second book. Rather, her personal tension over Yun Tianming—the terminal cancer patient whose brain she sends to the stars—and her tension over the fate of humanity still doesn’t leave. So, this conversation with Lou Ji becomes merely a way for her to look at this event, this failure as a swordholder, in a different way; a way for her to learn the proper places of empathy and love and guilt. Yet, she still feels that her empathy applies to every human: her failure to save one, Yun Tianming, still haunts her for most of the book.

Even though both crews were in the cold vastness of space, voyaging in the same direction at approximately the same speed, the natures of their voyages were completely different. Gravity had a spiritual anchor, while Blue Space was adrift.

2. A couple of secondary characters also held my interest: Wade and Sophon. Sophon is an animatronic embodiment of Trisolaris. She embodies the other side of Cheng Xin’s empathy: not caring for the individual human, but for humanity as a whole. What is best for the whole is what is best for the one, even the one who has to die. At one point, during the resettlement of all humanity to Australia, humans are swarming a supply drop, at which point Sophon jumps out of a helicopter onto the pile, and takes out a katana, killing a few of the refugees. Then,

Sophon jumped back onto the pile and pointed at the line with her bloody katana. “The era for humanity’s degenerate freedom is over. If you want to survive here, you must relearn collectivism and retrieve the dignity of your race!”

In other words, Sophon views collectivism in light of empathy for the whole instead of the individual. She sees the necessity for all rather than one. Sure, she doesn’t much care for humanity, but her statements seem more in line with realism, or reasonable action for a group in extreme situations.
—Wade, on the other hand, exemplifies a brash, results driven, buck the rules when you can get away with it, Western stereotype. The line I quoted earlier references selling one’s mother to a whorehouse, which is something he believes is a positive in his secretive, espionage based career. He tries to murder Cheng Xin mostly because he believes she will fail as a swordholder, but maybe partly because he wants that prestige and power. In some sense he echoes Sophon in this group-focused, screw the individual mindset. But he seems more selfish in his application: rather than shouting, “relearn collectivism” while waving a bloody sword at a bunch of refugees, he tries to shield Cheng Xin from the necessities of selling one’s mother to the whorehouse, while still being willing to sell his own mother to a whorehouse. Like Sophon, Wade acts like a foil to Cheng Xin. And he gets really interesting when he ends up aligning with Cheng Xin in some aspects later in the novel.

It appeared that there were other low-entropy entities with even sharper intuition than he; but that wasn’t strange. It was as the Elder said: In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.

3. The writing alternates between the plot, characters, and themes—but also scientific exposition of these fantastical goings on. For instance, all of the solar system is turned into a two-dimensional area of space. Don’t ask me how it works, but Liu Cixin will tell you:

As soon as the Sun began to two-dimensionalize, a circle expanded on the plane. Soon, the planar Sun’s diameter exceeded the diameter of the remaining part of the Sun. This process took only thirty seconds. Based on the mean solar radius of seven hundred thousand kilometers, the rim of the two-dimensional Sun grew at the rate of twenty thousand kilometers per second. The planar Sun continued to grow, forming a sea of fire on the plane, and the three-dimensional Sun sank slowly into this blood-red sea of fire.

These expositional, scientific portions are less engaging to me, but if you really liked Seveneves, then these portions will be right up your alley. Narrative maths is not what gets me hot about writing. The rest of the writing is fine. More fine than the translation of The Three-Body Problem. Less interesting than the translation for The Dark Forest.
—A problem with the structure of eras is that each new awakening by Cheng Xin needs a couple of pages of exposition to catch the reader, and Cheng Xin herself, up to the present. It’s told in the classic amnesia trope and gives the book an uneviable, stop and go pacing. One of these portions I noted was this:

Ever since the Great Ravine, although history had taken multiple big turns, humanity, as a whole, had always lived in a society that was highly democratic, with ample welfare. For two centuries, the human race had held on to a subconscious consensus: No matter how bad things got, someone would step in to take care of them. This faith had almost collapsed during the disastrous Great Resettlement, but on that darkest of mornings six years ago, a miracle had nonetheless taken place. They were waiting for another miracle.

By having clear headers for each new section, Liu Cixin effectively billboards the pacing, but the reliance on exposition doesn’t keep the whole flowing in a way I appreciate as a Westerner.
—The only other annoyance with the writing is a translational thing of not transliterating two names throughout the book: two people have a Chinese character in their name. This is a book published in English, and it makes sense to get as close in English in the translation, not leave some Chinese characters in there for the reader to try and remember. I had a couple of deaths in the family while reading this book, and did not remember how the Chinese characters were supposed to be pronounced when I returned to this novel.

What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.

4. The mood oscillates between hope and despair. Some of the discussions deal with these topics too, but to me the main theme is what makes humans human—though this comes out in part through their experiences of hope and despair. This theme makes sense as it’s related to Cheng Xin’s central tensions and the novel follows her, but it’s also a book with both aliens and humans in it, so that humanity question seems destined to come up. Where this theme became most interesting to me was in the way humans apply love: to the whole or to the parts, like the difference between Wade, Sophon, and Cheng Xin. The reason this thread interests me the most is because it’s the most varied: both positives and negatives are shown for all three main sides to this argument, and these three examples are shown against a background of selfishness and other points of view like Lou Ji and Ai AA. Cheng Xin endangers the world, killing millions through her actions which are based on love, but she is torn apart by her guilt; Sophon kills individuals to help the whole, but never makes many close, personal connections and seems to regret that lack; Wade endangers trends within humanity, but allows his personal connections to undo most of his plans. These complex glimpses of applying love sustain much of my interest in the novel.
—The novel also ties up the themes from the prior two novels—Dark Forest thinking is obliterated by both the four dimensional alien encounter, and the three dimensional alien bombing team that leaves the solar system two dimensional, tying it into the entropic nature of matter; while the hopelessness that has been dogging the whole series is finally banished by both the Galactic Humans and faster than light traveling Cheng Xin, because though humans end up making a wrong choice about how to avoid dark forest strikes, they still manage to survive and thrive.

He waved his cane around in a circle. “At every moment in history, you can find endless missed opportunities.”

“Like life,” said Cheng Xin softly.

“Oh, no no no.” Luo Ji shook his head vigorously. “At least not for me. I don’t think I’ve missed anything, haha.” He looked at Cheng Xin. “Child, do you think you’ve missed out? Then don’t let opportunities go by again in the future.”

5. In all, I think I’ve finally answered my central question with these books. After reading Death’s End, I cast about and came across a 1977 collection of essays usefully named Chinese Narrative, published by Princeton, which helped contextualize my friend Peter’s helpful statement about the topic:

Chinese stories and novels no doubt belonged to a minor tradition rather than to the central elite culture of historiography, philosophical prose, and lyric verse. [...] One problem is certainly unique to the Western reader. Conditioned by his own culture, he has certain expectations that Chinese fiction will not necessarily meet. The kind of suspense he is used to may not occur. Concluding chapters may give a sense of anticlimax instead of a resounding resolution to the action. Rather than develop, individual characters may appear throughout a work as “whole” as they will ever be. [...] Even the category of novel as such may be inappropriate to the fiction of China prior to the twentieth century.
(Foreword by Cyril Birch)

These essays further imply that some plots can be chronicles instead of leading the reader along a concise plot like Western novels do. This makes sense in regards to the first novel and my reaction. After reading this third novel, I believe I have answered this central guiding question:
● First, Ken Liu’s translation of the first book is ambiguous, but not terrible in terms of reflecting the Chinese narrative tradition. He is better as a translator here. I’ve read his published book of short stories and have many of the same complaints about his writing there as I do his translation here.
● Second, the story strikes an engaging balance between Western and Chinese narrative traditions: this third book is less Western than the middle book, and less Chinese than the first. Yet the tale itself may be no greater or worse than any other Hugo winner, an awards tradition that is as full of hits as it is misses.
● Third, I think Liu Cixin is not a great writer, but he has a shotgun blast’s way of embedding interesting ideas and discussions into his works that I enjoy. And there are a couple of phrases here or there that do make for nice touches. Like this paragraph:

Cheng Xin was taken aback by the chaotic arrangement of the pipes. It wasn’t the result of carelessness; on the contrary, to create this kind of utter chaos required great effort and design. The arrangement seemed to find even the hint of a pattern to be taboo. This suggested an aesthetic utterly at odds with human values: Patterns were ugly, but the lack of order was beautiful.

—In short, I like this book, but it isn’t perfect. The pacing annoys me, as do the scientific exposition sections; but Cheng Xin carries many of these annoyances out of mind with her depth, which Liu uses to set up the main theme of the novel. It’s a strong final novel, even if the ending is a little cosmically “so what?” The whole series starts with an ant crawling on a tombstone, and ends with the universe barreling towards heat death, a progressive expansion of scope that I do appreciate as a writing tactic because Liu Cixin keeps cutting from micro to macro and back. I look forward to reading Liu Cixin in the future, and to watching Ken Liu grow as a translator. But I’m not going to immediately buy the next Liu Cixin novel that hits America until I’m in the right mood. Though I am glad that I now have some experience with Chinese narrative tradition to base future book buying decisions off of. I should finally read Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

“But we’ve long been called on to think about matters that belonged to the province of God.” They sat by the brook until the moon turned into the sun again.

+++

All my life has been spent climbing up a flight of stairs made of responsibility. When I was little, my only duty was to study hard and obey my parents. Later, in high school and college, the responsibility to study hard continued, but there was also the added obligation to make myself useful rather than a drain on society.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

For Kelly.

1. The structure is the most unusual thing she does here. At all levels, the lens given to the reader looks like milk stirred into coffee. There are these eddies and whirls of time and characters apparent throughout.
—At the macro level, each chapter exists alone, as a short story; yet each contains characters that cross-pollinate the other stories. Most of these stories exist in different time periods—from the 1970s and 1980s to maybe the late 2020s. Egan’s non-chronological arrangement of the text means that at one level, the stories disconnect themselves from each other through being disconnected in time. To aid this tactic, Egan excludes main and supporting characters consistent through every single story, but allows enough cross-pollination that the time jumps drive the disconnection home. So, in general, her whirling tactic works at the macro level though I imagine it would be hard to pick this book up again in the middle, after a couple weeks break from reading it—I would be asking myself, "who is Jules again?" But I wonder why she arranged the chapters the way she did. Is there a thematic or philosophical argument being laid out by this sequence of reading? If so, I think I missed it. Though she does seem to back-end the the book with some of the most poignant stories (Basically, Selling the General through the end, except Goodbye My Love).
—At the micro level, each short story also includes moments outside the narrative, asides that explore the timeline of this or that character. For instance, an unnamed African musician playing music to the safari tourists:

“The warrior smiles at Charlie. He’s nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten. But he’s sung for enough American tourists to recognize that in her world, Charlie is a child. Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He’ll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions). He’ll marry an American named Lulu and remain in New York, where he’ll invent a scanning device that becomes standard issue for crowd security. He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather’s hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas, directly under a skylight.”

The text promptly forgets this musician. His grandson, Joe, comes back up later, but only in passing. Essentially, this diagram of two lives spun out of the story gives evidence of Egan’s overall tactic in a single paragraph. Her descriptions echo this specific, micro application: at times she spins off into glimpses into the future or the past instead of establishing physical appearances through pseudo-blazon. Does it work? This micro application toes a dangerous line of humor that wouldn’t fit into the feel of the novel, while stepping carefully between over-foreshadowing and being uninformingly tangential. I don’t believe she succeeds in every situation. To subvert a quote from the book, at times it feels like “we’re getting off the subject.” At the same time, I’m bored of blazon-like descriptions serving to set up all characters, and I appreciate her efforts here. (Also, my wife’s comments here were simply that she hates it when authors do these glimpses into characters' pasts or futures, but she doesn’t hate it when Jennifer Egan does it.)
—So, an ensemble novel composed of interlaced short stories arranged non-chronologically. I’m not sure this book would convince anybody new to the concept that a novel of related short stories is worthwhile, but it is a treat for this fan of these types of books (Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson). The trick with these books is that each story needs the strength to stand alone. I find four at least that look weak.

1. A to B seems a sort of connecting story more than its own thing—Forty Minute Lunch would’ve been odd to include without A to B.
2. Goodbye, My Love looks tangential in that I understood more about Sasha in Naples from Out of Body.
3. Ask Me if I Care sets up more than it interests in its own right.
4. X’s and O’s serves the other stories rather than taking control of its own destiny. (Although this is one of my wife’s favorites, so maybe I missed something there.)

So, not every single story works as well as the others, relying on interconnection to pull these four along: in other words, I was only interested in these four stories because of their effect on the others. Whereas a largely unconnected story, Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake, is one of the more poignant moments in the book, but its strength as a stand-alone short story overshadows how it plays into the rest of the novel.

The elderly bird-watching ladies trade a sad smile. Lou is one of those men whose restless charm has generated a contrail of personal upheaval that is practically visible behind him.

2. The writing itself works wonderfully. From that perfectly tone-setting first sentence, “It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel,” through “Time’s a goon”, some fantastic phrases exist in this book.

“How could so much devastation have been silenced?”

“Life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape.”

“Suicide is a weapon; that we all know. But what about an art?”

These words are a joy to read.
—She shifts between perspectives in stories: first, second, and third person perspectives are all used, and I’m not sure why. A lot of complaints I read about this novel talk about how every post-modern writing trope presents itself here. It’s a fair complaint—people not interested in writing could easily skip this novel. Not all her tactics work as brilliantly as her short, declarative sentences, and her listing sentences. But at least the perspective shifts do help increase the disconnect between the stories and characters. Other than that though, I’m not sure why they’re there.
—My wife’s thoughts about the writing were, “Who wrote this book? Yeah, she’s a good writer.”

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

3. However, the writing itself is not the point. Optimistically, the question with these interconnected short story books is whether the characters are deep and complex enough to carry the whole as a novel. Pessimistically, these books function as garbage bins where all the writer’s characters, the ones cut from other works, the half-conceived ones, they gather to let a number of exciting plots carry them along.
—Egan’s characters typically wrinkle themselves through competing desires. Tom desires his wife, but he also fears the power she has over him, so he shuts her out of his life slowly over time. The tragic tale of Rob and Sasha affected me. Bennie puts gold flakes into his coffee to increase his physical sexual potency, but he’s conflicted:

“The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Bennie want to live in such a world?”

In other words, he’s obsessed with sex, mentally, but can’t get it up and is kind of thankful he can’t.
—The flipside of this would be what critics complain about: many of these characters are wrinkled in cliche ways. Whether I believe these cliches exist in life may put down this critique, but the characters don’t all interest me as much as some do. Sasha’s interest lies more in her effect on others than in herself. Drew holds my attention less than Rob. Lou bores me, as does Bosco and Kitty and some of these other celebrity cliches. Jules overshadows his sister Stephanie by far. I have read Stephanie before. I’ve read her written well. Does Egan add anything to the "Stephanie" discussion? No, not really. But does she need to? No, because she uses Stephanie mainly as the foil to illuminate Jules, who is interesting. So, for two reasons I’m not terribly upset by how much these characters seem familiar from fiction: first because these cliches are common to life, second because Egan usually applies the boring ones usefully. But I still wish some of these characters were more interesting.

“I don’t get it, Jules,” Stephanie said. “I don’t get what happened to you.”
Jules stared at the glittering skyline of Lower Manhattan without recognition. “I’m like America,” he said.
Stephanie swung around to look at him, unnerved. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Are you off your meds?”
“Our hands are dirty,” Jules said.

4. The book’s themes speak to longing, desire, mistakes, and interpersonal perspectives—more so than interpersonal relationships. That distinction between interpersonal perspectives and interpersonal relationships is founded on the longings, desires, and mistakes of the characters, keeping a tight, consistent theme throughout. Yes, Egan touches on suicide, sexual violence, lust, love, death, childhood, loss of innocence, aging, war, and most of the other major writing themes, but the book focuses on that perspective-relationship distinction.
—Clearly, Egan states that relationships are better than perspectives. Lou has a perspective on all women and how they relate to him, and this keeps him from forming any meaningful relationships. Jules' frustrated search for a relationship leads to rationalizing sexual violence. Sasha’s potentially happy relationship with Rob is ruined by her perspective of her father and Rob becomes yet another missed opportunity for her. But Egan also uses positive examples to reinforce her value judgment. Lulu and Joe are shown as good characters full of promise, and they have what appears to be a solid relationship. Drew and Allison form a deep bond and their tale ends on a positive note, despite the world turning bad around them. When Stephanie gets past her perspective of her tennis partner, she finds an unexpectedly rewarding relationship. I found this distinction between perspective and relationship to be the main theme here—reinforced heavily by the last story in the book.

You make a clumsy leap, your body crashing onto the water, your knee hitting something hard under the surface. The cold locks in around you, knocking out your breath. You swim crazily to get away from the garbage, which you picture underneath, rusty hooks and claws reaching up to slash your genitals and feet. Your knee aches from whatever it hit.

5. In closing, the potential for a pretentious book exists here. But Egan pulls a lot of it off. I’m not watering at the mouth until I buy my next Egan book, but her writing is above average in quality, her characters are mostly used to their strengths, and the structure intrigues me.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within.

Surface Detail by Iain M Banks

1. This Culture novel strikes me as a solid book, and I can’t quite tell why I like it this much. It’s solid: the whole thing is well put together, well executed, an enjoyable read, but nothing really stands out much. There is no one thing Banks does exceedingly well here that I can marvel at and praise and ramble on about for pages and pages. But in a sense, that’s why I love this book so much: everything fits well together. This is a comfortable Banks, writing what he knows and doing it well.

2. Like much of Banks’ works, this novel is about international relations on the surface, and personal philosophy, relationships, and motivations on a deeper level.
—The science fiction theme here is Culture being betrayed by allies that imitate Culture to betray them. They’re little pan-human beings that are perfectly beautiful and childlike, but hide evil plots behind that facade. Including their imitation of Culture in order to frame Culture for some mischief they want to get up to.
—In essence, this is the applicable theme as well: the surface details don’t give the whole picture. Vepers, the main antagonist, is a perfect example of this: a popular, fiercely wealthy oligarch who uses his wealth to buy privacy and privilege in order to do whatever he wants—murder, rape, and double deal. But the rest of the main characters also hide behind facades: Led is tattooed to her atoms, never really being seen as a human being until she finds the Culture, but the novelty of that deeply upsets her; Prin turns into a hell demon in order to escape hell after posing as an inmate; Chay pretends to be a mother superior when she has not a religious belief in her body, finding peace through this subterfuge; Yime is a Special Circumstances plant in Quietus who has forgotten that she is SC; Vatueil has changed his mind in the virtual war over the hells and is a traitor time and time again; while Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints both pretends to be Torturer class when really it’s an Abominator class, and hides a heart of kindness behind a facade of brusque lack of political correctness. In these ways, and others, the main characters and most of the secondary ones hide behind constructed surface details in order to gain advantage over their situations.
—It’s the most conspiratorial of the Culture novels, so far—and there are multiple conspiracies on multiple sides. These tiny pan-humans aren’t the only group to hide things from another. Culture, at the end, hides their capabilities to allow the little pan-humans some success that the Culture wants, but still making it look like the pan-humans are the perpetrators.
—The point is to not trust things as they first appear to be. Banks gives both positive and negative examples of this hiding, not judging that people do it, just stating that they do and we better find a way to live with it. The book effectively uses this theme without telling the reader outright that this is the theme. Instead, these situations that I cataloged above show the theme adequately without Banks breaking into some melodramatic monologue illuminating the whole. Often, a book with a weak theme will only reveal its theme through the plot, but here it feels intentional due to how consistent it is in almost every situation. This “theme through showing” tactic is well done and might perhaps be the one thing that Banks does best within the book.

In Valley 308, which was part of the Thrice Flayed Footprint district of the Pavulean Hell, level three, there was an old-fashioned mill with a tall external over-shot wheel, powered by blood. It was part of the punishment of some of the virtual souls in that place that each day they be profusely bled for as long as they could without falling unconscious. There were many thousands of such unfortunates to be bled during each session and they were duly dragged screaming from their nearby pens by grotesquely formed, irresistibly powerful demons and strapped to canted iron tables with drains at their foot. These tables were arranged in serried ranks on the steep banks of the arid valley, which, had one been able to look at it from far enough above, would have been revealed as a ridge forming part of a truly gigantic footprint; hence the district’s name.

3. The characters are all very engaging here, through each having a positive and a negative main characteristic—and both are linked. Often the negative stems from the positive. Led, though bent on revenge, doubts her own ability to enact the revenge that consumes her desires. Prin is so profoundly affected by his experiences in hell that kidnapping, people showing up in his dreams to threaten him, threats to the lives or wellbeing of anybody he ever cared about—nothing fazes him anymore. Chay finds a way to live in hell, but is so changed that she chooses to not go back to the physical reality. Yime thinks highly of herself as this incredibly unique person who turned down SC for Quietus—but she isn’t and once she finds that out she never finds a place to truly belong again. Vatueil finds the side he believes in, but by doing so he betrays his old side and is never trusted again by either. Vepers throws monkey wrenches into everything, shakes things up in unexpected and interesting ways, but it’s all for his own benefit. These internal conflicts allow each character—and each section that focuses on a character—to be incredibly interesting. And Banks shifts back and forth between the characters at a perfect pace, keeping each scene succinct and important, with some rumination, but not so much it bogs the book down. Each of these main characters is allowed space to flourish and find footing in the reader’s mind. This effectively allows each character an interesting conflict that keeps Banks’ structure interesting all the way through.

4. Okay, by this point in the series, I expect the Banks structure of disparate situations and characters slowly converging before everything gets crazy. And Banks doesn’t disappoint. But the start was unexpected: the first three chapters end in three deaths. These three characters come back—two were in virtual worlds, of which one is reborn in the physical world and the other in another virtual world, while the last one was surprised by being reborn in Culture, where she had never been. All three rebirths end up being central parts of the novel, but it is strange when it happens, especially with Banks’ usual tactic of not naming characters right away. It made me think the novel was about death, not subterfuge. This bait and switch is unfortunate, but it does set up the novel nicely in terms of world building. I think this might be an inherent problem with Banks’ typical tactic: the first few chapters introduce the reader to the main characters by jumping between them, and are confusing because they do not immediately link together—though they did in Matter, which might be why that book stands on its own so well.

5. I loved this book. It’s a solid Culture novel and it works well in that context. But it also works well with the applicable theme of dealing with people who are hiding things behind surface details. The characters are all quite engaging and interesting while the story clips along nicely with a great mix of adventure and rumination. It’s not my favorite Culture novel, but I can’t quite figure out why.