The promise of the child

I read it in 2017 and gave it a very harsh review, see below. But I'm adding some thoughts below in 2022.

Review from 2017

I was very kindly provided with a review copy by the author. Of course I feel terrible for giving a negative review in return. I think it cannot be very damaging though, since the book has been released a good while earlier, and nobody reads my reviews anyway.

I can actually highly recommend the book as a cure for insomnia. Most of my reading happens on the dim screen of my phone under the blanket after everyone else has gone to sleep. (The life of a modern father!) Often I get so captivated by books that I stay up too late and regret it in the morning. Not so with The Promise of the Child! Reading a single paragraph is likely to put a grown man to sleep.

What could be the secret? I thought long about how this writing could be replicated, and here is my current theory.

1. Write a normal book.
2. Save the last 90% for the sequels.
3. We have a pretty light story now (just the beginning of one, really) but we need to blow it up to 500 pages. Add filler. Something needs to get from planet A to planet B? Why not add half a dozen other planets on the route? (Physics is not a consideration. It is not the kind of sci-fi that considers physics.) A character has nothing to do? Just have them stand around scratching their head. Still only 250 pages? Fill the rest with the inconsequential adventures of a character who has no impact on anything. If all else fails, drop the berry.

He leaned over the balcony and dropped the berry, watching it fall as he looked out over the pointed steeples of Sarine City, glorious capital of the First—some still pale with the morning’s frost—and the sharp white peaks of distant mountains.

4. Read through the book and collect any pages that explain something. Burn half of them, scatter the rest at random locations in the second half of the book. This will keep "suspense" in the first half.

Hint: The origin of the races is explained on page 109. The mysterious device is explained on page 293.

One review likened The Promise of the Child to [b:The Quantum Thief|7562764|The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur #1)|Hannu Rajaniemi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327950631l/7562764.SY75.jpg|9886333]. The two books could not be more different. (The Quantum Thief takes physics very seriously, has lots of original ideas, and is non-stop action.) But I understand why someone might make this comparison. To enjoy The Quantum Thief you must have a grip on some basics of our world, like know what a quark or a simulation is. To enjoy The Promise of the Child you must have a grip on some basics of their world, like know what the Firmament or a Melius is.

Another discovery for me is how tricky it is to capture the reader's imagination. It seems to just happen in most books. Granted, I pick my reading carefully and even among all the highly-recommended multiple-award-winning books I find enough to complain about. But here I just felt a continuous disconnect from the world. On page 494 there is a reference to a "gruff, bearded" character, and I have no idea which of the characters might have a beard. The physical descriptions of the many races of humanoids were unfortunately burned in step 4. But still some references are left to a "long proboscis" or some other feature that leave you wondering what these creatures may look like.

One thing the book is not missing is metaphor:

A curve of land like the inside of the world began to show through the moonlit clouds, all the falling bodies fading away in the new light like stars at dawn. Lycaste gaped, his eyes tracing the rivers that slithered between the emerald roots of mountains, their twists glimmering silver like streams of mercury.

PS: Why are there no female characters? (Except as romantic interests.)

More thoughts from 2022

I have a selective memory and easily forget stuff that didn't make much of an impression on me. But I keep thinking about this book 5 years on! I really didn't enjoy reading it. But I have to give it credit for exploring some ideas that I think are very cool:

— Being immortal in the sense that old age doesn't kill you. But you can still die from falling down the stairs. It's a fantastic setting, because it completely changes risk calculus. For me, the expected value of years of life lost from walking down a staircase is miniscule. For an immortal it's huge! (Infinite?) Becoming immortal like this would change us beyond recognition.

— What would an artificial paradise look like? There's the planet where everything grows on trees. If I remember correctly, it's an artificial paradise, where the inhabitants can live simple, joyful lives. The real world rewards contributions to society so we associate a good life with making progress. But for an artificial paradise you want it to be stable and comfortable and require no work from the inhabitants. This most likely means that the inhabitants would be unskilled and unable to recreate or even understand their world. Fascinating!

— The FTL device is some kind of weird tube that even a child can build. I found it ridiculous at the time. It's hard to believe we wouldn't have discovered something so simple. Do we have anything like this in the real world? A technical device that is easy to make and very useful, that long escaped discovery through intensive research? But even if it's ridiculous, it's novel and interesting. It fits the book too. And the possibilities along this line are infinite! Maybe we can put a banana in a microwave to travel through time! We just never tried.

— Dinosaurs in space. At the time it felt like I went through this whole boring book and then you try to pitch something cool on the last page. It has little connection to anything. But still. Dinosaurs in space.

How much I enjoy a book depends way more on my mood at the time than on qualities of the book. But it's a fact that these cool ideas are in the book.