This was a wonderful, delightful ride. This series is shaping up to be one of my favorite space operas of all time.
We get all of the original cast of eclectic characters back, but now their paths all converge and they go on missions together—albeit reluctantly on the part of Moon Sostenti.
We pick up the plot of the war between the Hegemony and the Ansurrection. The war escalates explosively, and our ragtag group of friends are mere specks compared to the sheer magnitude of the events happening. And yet they take actions that affect the course of history, which isn’t unique in the space opera genre (which this undoubtedly is, although it’s notable for being a space opera epic where very little occurs in actual space).
But unlike in many other books, I actually buy that this group has such profound impact on the happenings of the universe (or the multiverse in this case). And it all boils down to Rupshi, the AI that Hadiz released from its programmed restraints, which can think freely for itself, for which a word is invented: untethered.
That fact is key because in the Pandominion, there are no untethered AIs. That is strictly verbotten, even more so now that they are at war with the machine hegemony, which is essentially one massive untethered AI.
And so Rupshi has a special status in the multiverse. She’s an untethered AI who is able to go after and procure massive resources and think deeply on different problems. She has an outsider’s perspective on the Pando, the Ansurrection, and the war, as well as everything else…
And now I’m being intentionally vague because in that “everything else” are a couple of very very key facts about the universe which has been mentioned before but ends up being key to understanding the history and future of the multiverse.
Gah! I struggled with whether to write this review with spoilers or not, but decided not to. Suffice it to say there is a lot of sheer awesomeness at the moment when Rupshi unlocks for them a really key understanding on the war that ties in previously mentioned fascinating details about the universe that now become extremely relevant. And Rupshi comes up with a way of solving the problem that only someone with an outsider’s perspective and a very creative mind would come up with. It’s the most exciting direction I could have thought of for the second book to go in.
Essentially, an apocalypse of such extreme proportions is coming that it is at an existentially profound scale. And only our group of “heroes” has a chance to stop it.
I put “heroes” in quotes because, and this leads me to another thing I love about this book, our cast is diverse in terms not just of biology and origins but also motives and personalities. I love that they aren’t all perfect paragons of virtue. Paz is cute and cuddly and endearing and very relatable, and arguably becomes the main protagonist in this story, but among the group are very selfish individuals who are also relatable in their own ways. I love just how amazingly diverse the viewpoints are of the main cast, which really adds to the effect of feeling that we are in a setting of grand scope, akin to Star Wars or the Expanse.
There’s also a sheer profusion of fascinating worldbuilding ideas in this series. Actually, I was disappointed to learn from Orbit’s site that this is the only other book that will be in this series. I really wish we got more books in this universe actually, in order to cover the breadth of ideas that are quickly touched on.
First, you have fascinating differences between machine intelligence and organic intelligence. For instance, one point that I love that they make is this: in the same way that biologic organisms struggle to believe that silicon-based organisms could be truly “alive,” silicon-based organisms struggle to believe that biologic organisms are truly alive. They would think of themselves as living, but why would they believe that we are actually living and not just the equivalent of advanced slime molds?
Second, you have the evolutionary origins of different sentient organic species being relevant to the plot and those things affect the cultures of those peoples and therefore how they interact with and view each other. For instance, I love how the implications of Pax's rabbit-like body is continually explored throughout the story. How would people see you differently if they were homonids and you weren't?
Third, you have machine intelligence being explored in multiple ways. What if AIs were joined into a hive mind? What if they were created by organic civilizations but then untethered? Or what if instead, they arose on their own with no prior knowledge of organic intelligences and had to figure out how to analyze them when they did? What might they think of us?
All of these and many more are touched on in a way that is very interesting, and yet it’s also only in passing as we go on the ride of the plot. Many of my favorite books are this way: this really intoxicating blend of worldbuilding and fast plot, this nice mix that’s not too fast, not too slow. Overall, I could stand for the pace to be just a little slower to explore even more of these fascinating thoughts MR Carey has on all of these topics that are of great interest to me. But it’s really delightful.
In summary, it’s really satisfying to see all of the main characters from the previous book now coming and working together on a grand mission. It’s satisfying to explore the most interesting parts of the multiverse and go in the most interesting directions. It’s epic and fun to have a romp across the multiverse while saving it all from certain destruction. The dialogue and interactions are pretty fun, and just about everything about this was delightful. The ending is epic on many levels.
So we could stop there. It’s really great; go out and buy it!
But if I’m nitpicking, the book isn’t perfect. The prose doesn’t impress. Also, I’m not completely satisfied with some of the character arcs which feel too sudden or black and white. And when interacting with a less advanced culture, or with some people group who plainly believes differently than the author, it sometimes feels as if they are painted as an ugly caricature.
And then there’s the pronoun thing, about which I have mixed feelings, and because of my peculiar type of nerdiness as an amateur linguist, I really want to divert to discuss. The normal review is over here, but stick around if you want to hear about linguistics.
In the book, they use a made-up pronoun, “et,” to refer to sentient artificial selves. Oh by the way, they use the word “self” when “person” would perfectly suffice. And “et” when “it” would perfectly suffice. Well, I say “perfectly suffice.” The point is made in the first book, Infinity Gate, that a machine consciousness would be very different from our own and using “it” denotes non-sentience.
Now, I do see his point, but at the same time, there’s really no reason that “it” couldn’t be co-opted to include sentient machine consciousnesses. And I like that option better, because no matter how many time this book uses the words “et,” “ets,” “etself,” etc., over and over, it just never comes to feel natural. It just rattles against the mind and sounds and feels weird, and therefore is a perpetual distraction.
There is an actual scientific reason for this. As someone who’s taken a few graduate-level linguistics classes, it reminds me of one of the interesting things about how the brain stores and processes language.
The brain divides all words into two types. Linguists call the first type “content words,” and they include nouns, adjectives, adverbs. “Cat,” “pretty,” “fast.” The second type they call “functional words,” and they include articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and—saliently to our discussion—pronouns.
Content words and functional words are stored in separate parts of the brain. It uses them differently. And if you think about it, it makes sense…in multiple ways, both from an evolutionary perspective as well as an efficiency standpoint.
You see, there are many animals that have a system of signals. When people say that bees have a language, or ants, etc., that’s not true. They don’t have true language, they have a limited set of signals, usually a small handful, with very specific meanings, and they aren’t able to really combine them together.
One of the definitions of language is the ability to combine words, to make an infinite amount of sentences—which we do spontaneously on the spot—as well as decode an infinite number of sentences, which we also do spontaneously on the spot. And the reason we can do that is the power of functional words. Functional words are basically the things that allow you to combine content words into complex thoughts.
Why did I go into that? Well, the brain not only stores these separately but processes them differently. Content words are easily added to the lexicon. Every year, scores of them are added to the global consciousness. Someone starts referring to pizza as “za,” and next thing you know, lots of people are. The brain is very accepting of new nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. For all intents and purposes, the amount of these in the human language is infinite—not in reality, mind you—but from the perspective of an individual speaker of a given language. You can spend your whole life learning new nouns every day and still never learn all the nouns in the English dictionary. The brain easily accepts new entries into these categories because it knows exactly what to do with them. It knows what you can do with something that’s a noun and furthermore, there are all kinds of subcategories of nouns. If I tell you a new color you didn’t know—fuchsia or what have you—it’s easy for you to immediately comprehend how to use that in sentences. It’s easy! You just use it in all the exact same ways that you would use blue, green, yellow.
But for functional words, it’s a different story. This is one of the key differences between the human brain and all other animal brains that we know of: we have functional words. And that is so key because each one of them is essentially like learning a new operator. By analogy, when you learned math, every new number you learned was just a new content word and learning it was trivial. But learning a new operator? Do you remember when you only knew how plus and minus worked, and then you had to learn how multiply and divide work? Or the exponent? Or integrals?
So, I have majorly digressed, but the point is this. The reason it feels so weird in your brain to try adapting to these new pronouns that various people try to proliferate is that your brain actually does react differently to them.
Pronouns are a type of functional word. You might think that pronouns are just a subset of nouns, but they really aren’t. Nouns always have a specific referent; only with pronouns the referent (the actual thing referred to) changes depending on context. If Levi and Bob are talking to each other and Levi says “I” he means Levi, but if Bob says it he means Bob. And “you” could mean all kinds of people, anyone so long as you are talking to them. Pronouns are essentially a way of combining conversational context (speaker/addressee/other) with noun-ness, gender, plurality, possessiveness, reflexiveness, and sentience (or whatever you want to call the distinction between “it” and the other pronouns). There is only a very small number of pronouns relative to the number of nouns, adjectives, or adverbs, and they are relatively static in English as well as all other known languages.
To be clear, every part of a language does change given enough time, but it has been shown that throughout the history of a language, functional words change orders of magnitude slower (or less frequently) than content words. Old English had another set of pronouns (thee, thy, thine, thineself) that have since been dropped. So pronouns can change given enough time. But it’s really rare.
This is mostly just a long observation, but if I had any “point” to this, I guess it would be this. If people want to be successful at changing the English language, they need to recognize the actual difficulties with getting something like that to change in the mass consciousness and approach the problem appropriately. It’s not going to be something that just easily catches on because one person started doing it, like “on fleek.” I don’t think it will be a single book that will a new pronoun change catch on. I think there would have to be a very coordinated if not centralized strategy.
Anyways. That really doesn’t majorly detract from the book, but I thought I would write it down and find out if it was interesting to anyone else besides me.
