entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

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Review: On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs

On Vicious Worlds is a science fiction thriller with bits of cyberpunk and a direct sequel to These Burning Stars. This is one of those series where each book has massive spoilers for the previous book and builds on characters and situations from that book. I would not read it out of order. It is Bethany Jacobs's second novel.

Whooboy, how to review this without spoilers. There are so many major twists in the first book with lingering consequences that it's nearly impossible.

I said at the end of my review of These Burning Stars that I was impressed with the ending for reasons that I can't reveal. One thread of this book follows the aftermath: What do you do after the plan? If you have honed yourself for one purpose, can you repurpose yourself?

The other thread of the book is a murder mystery. The protectors of the community are being picked off, one by one. The culprit might be a hacker so good that they are causing Jun, the expert hacker of the first book, serious problems. Meanwhile, the political fault lines of the community are cracking open under pressure, and the leaders are untested, exhausted, and navigating difficult emotional terrain.

These two story threads alternate, and interspersed are yet more flashbacks. As with the first book, the flashbacks fill in the backstory of Chono and and Esek. This time, though, we get Six's viewpoint.

The good news is that On Vicious Worlds tones down the sociopathy considerably without letting up on the political twists. This is the book where Chono comes into her own. She has much more freedom of action, despite being at the center of complicated and cut-throat politics, and I thoroughly enjoyed her principled solidity. She gets a chance to transcend her previous role as an abuse victim, and it's worth the wait.

The bad news is that this is very much a middle book of a trilogy. While there are a lot of bloody battles, emotional drama, political betrayals, and plot twists, the series plot has not advanced much by the end of the book. I would not say the characters were left in the same position they started — the character development is real and the perils have changed — but neither would I say that any of the open questions from These Burning Stars have resolved.

The last book I read used science-fiction world-building to tell a story about moral philosophy that was somewhat less drama-filled than one might have expected. That is so not the case here. On Vicious Worlds is, if anything, even more dramatic than the first book of the series. In Chono's thread, the slow burn attempt to understand Six's motives has been replaced with almost non-stop melodrama, full of betrayals, reversals, risky attempts, and emotional roller coasters. Jun's part of the story is a bit more sedate at first, but there too the interpersonal drama setting is headed towards 10. This is the novel equivalent of an action movie.

Jun, and her part of the story, are fine. I like the new viewpoint character, I find their system of governance somewhat interesting (although highly optimized for small groups), and I think the climax worked. But I'm invested in this series for Chono and Six. Both of them, but particularly Six, are absurdly over the top, ten people's worth of drama stuffed into one character, unable to communicate in anything less than dramatic gestures and absurd plans, but I find them magnetically fascinating. I'm not sure if written characters can have charisma, but if so, they have it.

I liked this entry in the series, but then I also liked the first book. It's trauma-filled and dramatic and involved a bit too much bloody maiming for my tastes, but this whole series is about revolutions and what happens when you decide to fight, and sometimes I'm in the mood for complicated and damaged action heroes who loathe oppression and want to kill some people.

This is the sort of series book that will neither be the reason you read the series nor the reason why you stop reading. If you enjoyed These Burning Stars, this is more of the same, with arguably better character development but less plot catharsis. If you didn't like These Burning Stars, this probably won't change your mind, although if you hated it specifically because of Esek's sociopathy, I think you would find this book more congenial. But maybe not; Jacobs is still the same author, and most of the characters in this series are made of sharp edges.

I'm still in; I have already pre-ordered the next book.

Followed by This Brutal Moon, due out in December of 2025 and advertised as the conclusion.

Rating: 7 out of 10

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Review: Ancestral Night, by Elizabeth Bear

Ancestral Night is a far-future space opera novel and the first of a series. It shares a universe with Bear's earier Jacob's Ladder trilogy, and there is a passing reference to the events of Grail that would be a spoiler if you put the pieces together, but it's easy to miss. You do not need to read the earlier series to read this book (although it's a good series and you might enjoy it).

Halmey Dz is a member of the vast interstellar federation called the Synarche, which has put an end to war and other large-scale anti-social behavior through a process called rightminding. Every person has a neural implant that can serve as supplemental memory, off-load some thought processes, and, crucially, regulate neurotransmitters and hormones to help people stay on an even keel. It works, mostly.

One could argue Halmey is an exception. Raised in a clade that took rightminding to an extreme of suppression of individual personality into a sort of hive mind, she became involved with a terrorist during her legally mandated time outside of her all-consuming family before she could make an adult decision to stay with them (essentially a rumspringa). The result was a tragedy that Halmey doesn't like to think about, one that's left deep emotional scars. But Halmey herself would argue she's not an exception: She's put her history behind her, found partners that she trusts, and is a well-adjusted member of the Synarche.

Eventually, I realized that I was wasting my time, and if I wanted to hide from humanity in a bottle, I was better off making it a titanium one with a warp drive and a couple of carefully selected companions.

Halmey does salvage: finding ships lost in white space and retrieving them. One of her partners is Connla, a pilot originally from a somewhat atavistic world called Spartacus. The other is their salvage tug.

The boat didn't have a name.

He wasn't deemed significant enough to need a name by the authorities and registries that govern such things. He had a registration number — 657-2929-04, Human/Terra — and he had a class, salvage tug, but he didn't have a name.

Officially.

We called him Singer. If Singer had an opinion on the issue, he'd never registered it — but he never complained. Singer was the shipmind as well as the ship — or at least, he inhabited the ship's virtual spaces the same way we inhabited the physical ones — but my partner Connla and I didn't own him. You can't own a sentience in civilized space.

As Ancestral Night opens, the three of them are investigating a tip of a white space anomoly well off the beaten path. They thought it might be a lost ship that failed a transition. What they find instead is a dead Ativahika and a mysterious ship equipped with artificial gravity.

The Ativahikas are a presumed sentient race of living ships that are on the most alien outskirts of the Synarche confederation. They don't communicate, at least so far as Halmey is aware. She also wasn't aware they died, but this one is thoroughly dead, next to an apparently abandoned ship of unknown origin with a piece of technology beyond the capabilities of the Synarche.

The three salvagers get very little time to absorb this scene before they are attacked by pirates.

I have always liked Bear's science fiction better than her fantasy, and this is no exception. This was great stuff. Halmey is a talkative, opinionated infodumper, which is a great first-person protagonist to have in a fictional universe this rich with delightful corners. There are some Big Dumb Object vibes (one of my favorite parts of salvage stories), solid character work, a mysterious past that has some satisfying heft once it's revealed, and a whole lot more moral philosophy than I was expecting from the setup. All of it is woven together with experienced skill, unsurprising given Bear's long and prolific career. And it's full of delightful world-building bits: Halmey's afthands (a surgical adaptation for zero gravity work) and grumpiness at the sheer amount of gravity she has to deal with over the course of this book, the Culture-style ship names, and a faster-than-light travel system that of course won't pass physics muster but provides a satisfying quantity of hooky bits for plot to attach to.

The backbone of this book is an ancient artifact mystery crossed with a murder investigation. Who killed the Ativahika? Where did the gravity generator come from? Those are good questions with interesting answers. But the heart of the book is a philosophical conflict: What are the boundaries between identity and society? How much power should society have to reshape who we are? If you deny parts of yourself to fit in with society, is this necessarily a form of oppression?

I wrote a couple of paragraphs of elaboration, and then deleted them; on further thought, I don't want to give any more details about what Bear is doing in this book. I will only say that I was not expecting this level of thoughtfulness about a notoriously complex and tricky philosophical topic in a full-throated adventure science fiction novel. I think some people may find the ending strange and disappointing. I loved it, and weeks after finishing this book I'm still thinking about it.

Ancestral Night has some pacing problems. There is a long stretch in the middle of the book that felt repetitive and strained, where Bear holds the reader at a high level of alert and dread for long enough that I found it enervating. There are also a few political cheap shots where Bear picks the weakest form of an opposing argument instead of the strongest. (Some of the cheap shots are rather satisfying, though.) The dramatic arc of the book is... odd, in a way that I think was entirely intentional given how well it works with the thematic message, but which is also unsettling. You may not get the catharsis that you're expecting.

But all of this serves a purpose, and I thought that purpose was interesting. Ancestral Night is one of those books that I liked more a week after I finished it than I did when I finished it.

Epiphanies are wonderful. I’m really grateful that our brains do so much processing outside the line of sight of our consciousnesses. Can you imagine how downright boring thinking would be if you had to go through all that stuff line by line?

Also, for once, I think Bear hit on exactly the right level of description rather than leaving me trying to piece together clues and hope I understood the plot. It helps that Halmey loves to explain things, so there are a lot of miniature infodumps, but I found them interesting and a satisfying throwback to an earlier style of science fiction that focused more on world-building than on interpersonal drama. There is drama, but most of it is internal, and I thought the balance was about right.

This is solid, well-crafted work and a good addition to the genre. I am looking forward to the rest of the series.

Followed by Machine, which shifts to a different protagonist.

Rating: 8 out of 10

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Review: Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart is a former British diplomat, non-profit executive, member of Parliament, and cabinet minister. Politics on the Edge is a memoir of his time in the UK Parliament from 2019 to 2019 as a Tory (Conservative) representing the Penrith and The Border constituency in northern England. It ends with his failed run against Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.

This book provoked many thoughts, only some of which are about the book. You may want to get a beverage; this review will be long.

Since this is a memoir told in chronological order, a timeline may be useful. After Stewart's time as a regional governor in occupied Iraq (see The Prince of the Marshes), he moved to Kabul to found and run an NGO to preserve traditional Afghani arts and buildings (the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, about which I know nothing except what Stewart wrote in this book). By his telling, he found that work deeply rewarding but thought the same politicians who turned Iraq into a mess were going to do the same to Afghanistan. He started looking for ways to influence the politics more directly, which led him first to Harvard and then to stand for Parliament.

The bulk of this book covers Stewart's time as MP for Penrith and The Border. The choice of constituency struck me as symbolic of Stewart's entire career: He was not a resident and had no real connection to the district, which he chose for political reasons and because it was the nearest viable constituency to his actual home in Scotland. But once he decided to run, he moved to the district and seems sincerely earnest in his desire to understand it and become part of its community. After five years as a backbencher, he joined David Cameron's government in a minor role as Minister of State in the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. He then bounced through several minor cabinet positions (more on this later) before being elevated to Secretary of State for International Development under Theresa May. When May's government collapsed during the fight over the Brexit agreement, he launched a quixotic challenge to Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party.

I have enjoyed Rory Stewart's writing ever since The Places in Between. This book is no exception. Whatever one's other feelings about Stewart's politics (about which I'll have a great deal more to say), he's a talented memoir writer with an understated and contemplative style and a deft ability to shift from concrete description to philosophical debate without bogging down a story. Politics on the Edge is compelling reading at the prose level. I spent several afternoons happily engrossed in this book and had great difficulty putting it down.

I find Stewart intriguing since, despite being a political conservative, he's neither a neoliberal nor any part of the new right. He is instead an apparently-sincere throwback to a conservatism based on epistemic humility, a veneration of rural life and long-standing traditions, and a deep commitment to the concept of public service. Some of his principles are baffling to me, and I think some of his political views are obvious nonsense, but there were several things that struck me throughout this book that I found admirable and depressingly rare in politics.

First, Stewart seems to learn from his mistakes. This goes beyond admitting when he was wrong and appears to include a willingness to rethink entire philosophical positions based on new experience.

I had entered Iraq supporting the war on the grounds that we could at least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein's. It was one of the greatest mistakes in my life. We attempted to impose programmes made up by Washington think tanks, and reheated in air-conditioned palaces in Baghdad — a new taxation system modelled on Hong Kong; a system of ministers borrowed from Singapore; and free ports, modelled on Dubai. But we did it ultimately at the point of a gun, and our resources, our abstract jargon and optimistic platitudes could not conceal how much Iraqis resented us, how much we were failing, and how humiliating and degrading our work had become. Our mission was a grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and democracy.

This quote comes from the beginning of this book and is a sentiment Stewart already expressed in The Prince of the Marshes, but he appears to have taken this so seriously that it becomes a theme of his political career. He not only realized how wrong he was on Iraq, he abandoned the entire neoliberal nation-building project without abandoning his belief in the moral obligation of international aid. And he, I think correctly, identified a key source of the error: an ignorant, condescending superiority that dismissed the importance of deep expertise.

Neither they, nor indeed any of the 12,000 peacekeepers and policemen who had been posted to South Sudan from sixty nations, had spent a single night in a rural house, or could complete a sentence in Dinka, Nuer, Azande or Bande. And the international development strategy — written jointly between the donor nations — resembled a fading mission statement found in a new space colony, whose occupants had all been killed in an alien attack.

Second, Stewart sincerely likes ordinary people. This shone through The Places in Between and recurs here in his descriptions of his constituents. He has a profound appreciation for individual people who have spent their life learning some trade or skill, expresses thoughtful and observant appreciation for aspects of local culture, and appears to deeply appreciate time spent around people from wildly different social classes and cultures than his own. Every successful politician can at least fake gregariousness, and perhaps that's all Stewart is doing, but there is something specific and attentive about his descriptions of other people, including long before he decided to enter politics, that makes me think it goes deeper than political savvy.

Third, Stewart has a visceral hatred of incompetence. I think this is the strongest through-line of his politics in this book: Jobs in government are serious, important work; they should be done competently and well; and if one is not capable of doing that, one should not be in government. Stewart himself strikes me as an insecure overachiever: fiercely ambitious, self-critical, a bit of a micromanager (I suspect he would be difficult to work for), but holding himself to high standards and appalled when others do not do the same. This book is scathing towards multiple politicians, particularly Boris Johnson whom Stewart clearly despises, but no one comes off worse than Liz Truss.

David Cameron, I was beginning to realise, had put in charge of environment, food and rural affairs a Secretary of State who openly rejected the idea of rural affairs and who had little interest in landscape, farmers or the environment. I was beginning to wonder whether he could have given her any role she was less suited to — apart perhaps from making her Foreign Secretary. Still, I could also sense why Cameron was mesmerised by her. Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of any of this for the way that government would work, she didn't reveal it.

And finally, Stewart has a deeply-held belief in state capacity and capability. He and I may disagree on the appropriate size and role of the government in society, but no one would be more disgusted by an intentional project to cripple government in order to shrink it than Stewart.

One of his most-repeated criticisms of the UK political system in this book is the way the cabinet is formed. All ministers and secretaries come from members of Parliament and therefore branches of government are led by people with no relevant expertise. This is made worse by constant cabinet reshuffles that invalidate whatever small amounts of knowledge a minister was able to gain in nine months or a year in post. The center portion of this book records Stewart's time being shuffled from rural affairs to international development to Africa to prisons, with each move representing a complete reset of the political office and no transfer of knowledge whatsoever.

A month earlier, they had been anticipating every nuance of Minister Rogerson's diary, supporting him on shifts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But it was already clear that there would be no pretence of a handover — no explanation of my predecessor's strategy, and uncompleted initiatives. The arrival of a new minister was Groundhog Day. Dan Rogerson was not a ghost haunting my office, he was an absence, whose former existence was suggested only by the black plastic comb.

After each reshuffle, Stewart writes of trying to absorb briefings, do research, and learn enough about his new responsibilities to have the hope of making good decisions, while growing increasingly frustrated with the system and the lack of interest by most of his colleagues in doing the same. He wants government programs to be successful and believes success requires expertise and careful management by the politicians, not only by the civil servants, a position that to me both feels obviously correct and entirely at odds with politics as currently practiced.

I found this a fascinating book to read during the accelerating collapse of neoliberalism in the US and, to judge by current polling results, the UK. I have a theory that the political press are so devoted to a simplistic left-right political axis based on seating arrangements during the French Revolution that they are missing a significant minority whose primary political motivation is contempt for arrogant incompetence. They could be convinced to vote for Sanders or Trump, for Polanski or Farage, but will never vote for Biden, Starmer, Romney, or Sunak.

Such voters are incomprehensible to those who closely follow and debate policies because their hostile reaction to the center is not about policies. It's about lack of trust and a nebulous desire for justice. They've been promised technocratic competence and the invisible hand of market forces for most of their lives, and all of it looks like lies. Everyday living is more precarious, more frustrating, more abusive and dehumanizing, and more anxious, despite (or because of) this wholehearted embrace of economic "freedom." They're sick of every complaint about the increasing difficulty of life being met with accusations about their ability and work ethic, and of being forced to endure another round of austerity by people who then catch a helicopter ride to a party on some billionaire's yacht.

Some of this is inherent in the deep structural weaknesses in neoliberal ideology, but this is worse than an ideological failure. The degree to which neoliberalism started as a project of sincere political thinkers is arguable, but that is clearly not true today. The elite class in politics and business is now thoroughly captured by people whose primary skill is the marginal manipulation of complex systems for their own power and benefit. They are less libertarian ideologues than narcissistic mediocrities. We are governed by management consultants. They are firmly convinced their organizational expertise is universal, and consider the specific business of the company, or government department, irrelevant.

Given that context, I found Stewart's instinctive revulsion towards David Cameron quite revealing. Stewart, later in the book, tries to give Cameron some credit by citing several policy accomplishments and comparing him favorably to Boris Johnson (which, true, is a bar Cameron probably flops over). But I think Stewart's baffled astonishment at Cameron's vapidity says a great deal about how we have ended up where we are. This last quote is long, but I think it provides a good feel for Stewart's argument in this book.

But Cameron, who was rumoured to be sceptical about nation-building projects, only nodded, and then looking confidently up and down the table said, "Well, at least we all agree on one extremely straightforward and simple point, which is that our troops are doing very difficult and important work and we should all support them."

It was an odd statement to make to civilians running humanitarian operations on the ground. I felt I should speak. "No, with respect, we do not agree with that. Insofar as we have focused on the troops, we have just been explaining that what the troops are doing is often futile, and in many cases making things worse." Two small red dots appeared on his cheeks. Then his face formed back into a smile. He thanked us, told us he was out of time, shook all our hands, and left the room.

Later, I saw him repeat the same line in interviews: "the purpose of this visit is straightforward... it is to show support for what our troops are doing in Afghanistan". The line had been written, in London, I assumed, and tested on focus groups. But he wanted to convince himself it was also a position of principle.

"David has decided," one of his aides explained, when I met him later, "that one cannot criticise a war when there are troops on the ground."

"Why?"

"Well... we have had that debate. But he feels it is a principle of British government."

"But Churchill criticised the conduct of the Boer War; Pitt the war with America. Why can't he criticise wars?"

"British soldiers are losing their lives in this war, and we can't suggest they have died in vain."

"But more will die, if no one speaks up..."

"It is a principle thing. And he has made his decision. For him and the party."

"Does this apply to Iraq too?"

"Yes. Again he understands what you are saying, but he voted to support the Iraq War, and troops are on the ground."

"But surely he can say he's changed his mind?"

The aide didn't answer, but instead concentrated on his food. "It is so difficult," he resumed, "to get any coverage of our trip." He paused again. "If David writes a column about Afghanistan, we will struggle to get it published."

"But what would he say in an article anyway?" I asked.

"We can talk about that later. But how do you get your articles on Afghanistan published?"

I remembered how the US politicians and officials had shown their mastery of strategy and detail. I remembered the earnestness of Gordon Brown when I had briefed him on Iraq. Cameron seemed somehow less serious. I wrote as much in a column in the New York Times, saying that I was afraid the party of Churchill was becoming the party of Bertie Wooster.

I don't know Stewart's reputation in Britain, or in the constituency that he represented. I know he's been accused of being a self-aggrandizing publicity hound, and to some extent this is probably true. It's hard to find an ambitious politician who does not have that instinct. But whatever Stewart's flaws, he can, at least, defend his politics with more substance than a corporate motto. One gets the impression that he would respond favorably to demonstrated competence linked to a careful argument, even if he disagreed. Perhaps this is an illusion created by his writing, but even if so, it's a step in the right direction.

When people become angry enough at a failing status quo, any option that promises radical change and punishment for the current incompetents will sound appealing. The default collapse is towards demagogues who are skilled at expressing anger and disgust and are willing to promise simple cures because they are indifferent to honesty. Much of the political establishment in the US, and possibly (to the small degree that I can analyze it from an occasional news article) in the UK, can identify the peril of the demagogue, but they have no solution other than a return to "politics as usual," represented by the amoral mediocrity of a McKinsey consultant. The rare politicians who seem to believe in something, who will argue for personal expertise and humility, who are disgusted by incompetence and have no patience for facile platitudes, are a breath of fresh air.

There are a lot of policies on which Stewart and I would disagree, and perhaps some of his apparent humility is an affectation from the rhetorical world of the 1800s that he clearly wishes he were inhabiting, but he gives the strong impression of someone who would shoulder a responsibility and attempt to execute it with competence and attention to detail. He views government as a job, where coworkers should cooperate to achieve defined goals, rather than a reality TV show. The arc of this book, like the arc of current politics, is the victory of the reality TV show over the workplace, and the story of Stewart's run against Boris Johnson is hard reading because of it, but there's a portrayal here of a different attitude towards politics that I found deeply rewarding.

If you liked Stewart's previous work, or if you want an inside look at parliamentary politics, highly recommended. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

Rating: 9 out of 10

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