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What if an object hit the Moon with enough force that it broke apart? How would that affect life on Earth as we know it?

That’s the central premise of Seveneves, and what follows is one of the greatest legendary epics in all of hard science fiction. This is a book that swings for the fences, then builds a space elevator to go higher. It is ruthless in its scientific rigor, relentless in its ideas-per-page density, and somehow still profoundly human. What a masterpiece.

If you're the kind of reader who loves idea-dense sci-fi, real physics, moral complexity, and long-form worldbuilding on the timescale of thousands of years—this book will ruin you for lesser books.

The moon explodes on page one. But rather than immediate chaos, Stephenson plays it cool. Earth’s gravity and orbital physics don’t care whether the moon is in one piece or seven—so for a while, nothing much happens. People host viewing parties. They nickname the fragments: “Lumpy,” “Mr. Spinny,” "Potatohead", etc. The public relaxes.

Then, two weeks later, one piece hits another, causing one of them to split. And then a few days later it happens again and nother piece splits. A slow chain reaction has been set off—a cascading series of collisions, fragmentation, more collisions—and models predict that after about 24 months the reaction will explode into something they dub The Hard Rain: a catastrophic shower of molten lunar fragments that will bombard Earth continuously for the next 5,000 years.

The surface of the Earth is going to be sterilized. For a very long time.

Humanity has two years to prepare.

What unfolds is a desperate, all-hands global effort to launch as many people into space as possible. The story centers on “Izzy,” the International Space Station, and how it becomes the nucleus of an improvised orbital ark. You feel the sheer logistical madness of it all: EVA shifts running 16 hours a day, inflatable sleeping bubbles tethered in vacuum for Russian cosmonauts dying by the dozens just to build more habitats for others.

One of them, Tekla, has her bubble ruptured and must be rescued in an incredible zero-G sequence involving chain physics, robotic mining snakes, and a near-fatal decompression. Best EVA rescue I’ve ever read.

And that’s just Act I.

Stephenson excels at conveying technical detail without killing the pace. I feel like I learned more about orbital mechanics, comet propulsion, chain dynamics, radiation shielding, swarm robotics, genetic engineering, and the sociology of survival than in any other five books combined.

There’s a scene where a nuclear reactor is strapped to a comet and turned into a propulsion system using robot swarms—and somehow, it feels both insane and totally plausible. I love that the ISS is essentially humanity’s ark. I love that there’s a redneck, duct-taped ship called Ymir hurling through space, operated by a man named Sean Probst, who just might be the most badass asteroid miner in sci-fi history.

Through it all, Stephenson writes a wide variety of characters with different personality types who who all think. Real, nuanced, incredibly intelligent people. Even when they’re making tragic mistakes or being bureaucratic nightmares (hello, JBF—you made my blood boil), they feel alive and believable. Dinah and Ivy’s father-daughter Morse code conversations between Earth and orbit are among the most poignant bits of near-future writing I’ve read.

Eventually, the Hard Rain comes. Earth dies. And in its wake, only a fraction of the evacuees survive—mostly women. In fact, at one point, the entire surviving human race is reduced to seven women (dubbed the Seven Eves), each forced to confront the most profound question imaginable: If you could choose the traits of your descendants, what kind of people would you make?

In order to create the needed genetic diversity, they have to introduce highly technological artificial means of impregnating the women with zygotes (fertilized eggs) that are of carefully selected phenotypes based on their bank of phenotypes taken from the human race. Since the process is already highly artificial, it opens up the Pandora's Box question of: how much tampering should we allow ourselves to do?

How much tampering with the human genome should be allowed?

You can select for physical traits; what about personality traits? What about intelligence? What about aggression?

This opens up the problem of, different people will disagree about what traits are "good" and "bad". One of the Eves thinks aggression is actually really important for the survival of the human race; that aggression is a trait of free thinkers and bold leaders. Another Eve thinks that her bipolar disorder is not such a wholly bad thing as it has been labeled. Another argues that her depression is part-and-parcel of being the kind of leader who thinks about the future a lot.

How will they possibly ever agree and decide on how much tampering is acceptable?

Moira, the brilliant geneticist among them, proposes a compromise: each woman gets one trait she can engineer into her line. It’s elegant. Democratic. Dangerous. What unfolds is a rich thought experiment in personality, morality, and design. One of the Eves values aggression—believing it essential for survival. Another values compassion. Another physicality. Etc.

Five thousand years later, we arrive in a fully realized posthuman future. The human race is now split into seven races, some of which include subraces. The seven races live (mostly) in an orbital ring they have built out of the fragments of the Moon that naturally decayed into a ring shape. The ring is divided between two ideological blocs known as Red and Blue. Their names echo not just the factions of the Seven, but different modes of thinking, of surviving.

Earth, long sterile, has begun to bloom again.

Kath Two, a scout from the Moiran line (whose people undergo epigenetic shifts in response to major life events), explores the resettled surface in her glider. One day, she glimpses something impossible: a humanoid who is not one of the Seven Races. A mystery is born.

This kicks off the second story: a mission where a "Seven"—a team of one member from each race—is sent to do something deemed of historical significance to all of humanity. It feels exactly like a D&D part that's been put together—but Stephenson makes it feel fresh, thrilling, even mythic in scale. I won't even get into all the awesome characters in the party but just suffice it to say, it's emotionally satisfying to have the idea seeded from the beginning, that the human diaspora split into different evolutionary branches, finally coming full circle and being used in a really stimulating way.

Now, what are these Seven going to discover? Who are these other non-Seven people? Well, earlier in the story when I said everyone that survived humanity went to space--I lied. Not quite everyone. There were also a few who retreated underground—deep into sealed environments beneath Earth’s surface—developing their own civilization, cut off completely from the rest of humanity. The revelation of their survival, and the slow unwinding of how they endured for five thousands years in a sealed environment, is handled with care and suspense. Their entire society has been watching the sky, hiding, waiting. Until now.

There’s a final twist I won’t spoil. But it lands. (And for those who have read it; two words: Sonar. Taxlaw. What a hilarious character! If you know, you know.)

And there's so much cool tech in this era of the story. There's mobile space elevators, there's gliders, there's a thing called a Thor which can extract people from the ground all the way up into high orbit in seconds...the list goes on. I swear, Neal Stephenson packed every awesome idea known to man into one giant tome. As a writer, I love trying to dissect how Stephenson juggles physics, psychology, and plot—without ever letting the science kill the story.

The ending reaffirms something I kept feeling all the way through: this book is not just about survival. It’s about inheritance—of genes, cultures, and meaning. It’s about what it means to be human, and what parts of us we dare to design, or destroy, or save.

While Seveneves is certainly an intellectual feast, it’s also brutal. There is no room for politics in space. One stupid decision costs lives. Heroism is measured in EVA suit hours and radiation exposure. One man chooses to die the most miserable death possible—extreme radiation poisoning—to save others. And you feel it. The ache, the necessity, the cost.

Stephenson doesn’t shy away from that truth. He makes you sit with it, learn from it, and then keeps the story going.

Seveneves is perfect for anyone who enjoys hard science fiction, people who love learning, anyone who's wanted to know more about orbital mechanics / the physics of chains / genetic engineering / everything about the universe life and everything, and all people who love big ideas.

If the engineered future of Seveneves stirred your thoughts on identity, morality, and what we dare to become—this is a short story I wrote about a man who uploads his mind to escape addiction and finds himself locked in a room with a man sent to kill him for it.
https://levihobbs.substack.com/p/the-wife-and-the-terrorist

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One last thing. Here's a quiz, just for the sheer fun of it. Which of the Seven Races would you be? Bonus points if you respond with why.
1. Moiran – Thoughtful, scientific, and adaptable.
Capable of radical epigenetic shifts in response to life events. Often serve as scouts, analysts, and visionaries—versatile and calm under pressure.
2. Aïdan Line – Politically savvy, genetically diverse, and divisive.
This is the only race with multiple subraces. Which Aïdan are you?
 2A. Aretaic – Tall, charismatic, and persuasive. The public face of Red. Natural leaders, media figures, and diplomats—designed to stand in the spotlight.

 2B. Beta – Balanced and ubiquitous. General-purpose humans with no single specialization. Reliable, steady, and often underestimated.

 2C. Neoander – Powerful, stocky, and cunning. Inspired by Neanderthal traits. Built to endure and outmaneuver in extreme environments.

 2D. Jinn – Highly intelligent and logical. Enigmatic and rare. Brilliant at abstraction, insight, and systems-level thinking.

 2E. Extat – Emotionally volatile, creative, and visionary. Labeled “crazy” by some—but essential to cultural and artistic dynamism.
3. Julian – Melancholic, calculating, and socially adept.
Masters of manipulation, suspicion, and psychological insight. Adept at intelligence work, diplomacy, and long-term scheming.
4. Camite – Nurturing, grounded, and emotionally resilient.
Bred for non-aggression and communal harmony. Often the social glue and caregivers of society. Calm under pressure, generous by instinct.
5. Teklan – Disciplined, stoic, and physically formidable.
Builders, warriors, and systems-maintainers. Teklans thrive under pressure and do what must be done.
6. Ivyn – Intelligent, focused, and introverted.
Engineers, tinkerers, and problem-solvers. Brilliant at design and invention—especially when left alone to work.
7. Dinan – Compassionate, brave, and deeply relational.
Known for their moral clarity, heroic instincts, and fierce loyalty to others. The protectors, negotiators, and idealists of the future.

Asimov's Foundation presents an audacious premise: what if sociology could become so precise that it functions like physics, allowing someone to predict the rise and fall of civilizations thousands of years in advance? It's patently absurd, and yet somehow completely intoxicating.

Hari Seldon, the founder of "psychohistory," foresees the collapse of the galaxy-spanning Empire and the inevitable 30,000-year Dark Age that will follow. But the hook is, he has a plan that can shorten this catastrophe to just 1,000 years by establishing a Foundation of scholars on the galaxy's edge, provided they follow a precise path.

But, for some reason, it's totally fundamental to Seldon's science that they can't know in advance how to solve the problems...he knows what the problems will be and how they will have to solve them, but instead of him just telling them, they have to figure it out for themselves. It's obviously a narrative constraint so that the characters must solve each crisis as it arrives, blind to the larger pattern only Seldon could see. But...it works. It makes for a much better story than the alternative, that's for sure.

The real protagonist isn't any individual character (Seldon himself dies early on) but humanity itself, struggling across millennia. We jump forward in time to witness key moments when Foundation leaders realize they're facing another "Seldon Crisis" and must find solutions that fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

The stories pivot mostly around two Seldon Crises, each of which has an uber smart dude who figures it all out and then has to get the Foundation society to completely reimagine their approach based on how human psychology and social structures have evolved. It's essentially A Series of Really Smart Individuals Saves the Human Race, which ironically undermines psychohistory's core premise that individual actions can't be predicted, only mass behavior.

The execution has its issues. Written in 1951, it carries all the baggage you'd expect—the galaxy's saviors are uniformly male, the dialogue is stiff and theatrical, and Asimov's characters all sound the same. Character development was never his strength; he's all about the big ideas and intricate plotting.

There's a comment I just have to make, after reflecting on how many books have this trope...it is kind of a wet dream to think that if one individual was smart enough, they could save the human race. We all want to think we're that person. Am I going to stop reading books like that? Eh, probably not. Probably not completely, at least. But, I do feel like it's one of those things that now I've seen, I can't un-see.

But honestly, I'm poking too many holes in this to convey how I actually felt about the book. As a whole it was quite good. I found myself genuinely hooked. The ending in particular made me sit back and think about the actual progression of human history, trying to identify the dominant sociological forces of different eras. I feel like I can tell what Azimov was thinking: if you look at history, the pattern kind of makes sense. First we needed religion in order to survive, then trade became the next big way of interacting with each other, etc. I'm obsessed now with trying to predict what the next crisis might be and what radical solution it would require.

And ultimiately that's what I am searching for most in science fiction: when it takes a wild premise and uses it to make you think differently about Big Stuff, like the patterns of human civilization, for instance.

Foundation is the kind of book that you gulp down easily because of its sheer conceptual audacity. It's far from perfect, but the chapters are short and punchy, the scope is genuinely epic, and at just 300 pages, it moves quickly enough that you don't have time to get bogged down in its flaws. I'm already planning to read the rest of the series, almost despite myself.

This review will mostly ignore the fact that the author is my father and discuss it on an objective basis (at least, as far as such things can be done), but I'll have a few personal comments at the end.

Overview
This is a book in the realm of epistemology, the realm of philosophy concerned with how we know things and what can be justified as a rational belief.

The main thesis of the book is that, while the philosophical literature on epistemology normally presents religion as ideological and of no explanatory value, and science is depicted as the gold standard of explanation, the reality is that the name of science is often invoked in epistemological arguments that are in fact ideological in basis, and furthermore, that there can be such a thing as rational religious explanations. The latter point is the main thesis of the book, and I'll come back to that.

One important term: explanations that include a positing of the existence of God are used interchangeably with "religious explanations," which I think he used as a shorthand for the former.

A Working Definition for God
I found his definition of God for the purposes of this philosophical exercise to be interesting.
"It seems necessary to restrict our discussion of God to entities satisfying five conditions:
immateriality
intelligence
ability to act
creator of the world
worthiness for worship.
If no entity satisfies all of these, then there is no God."

As I pondered the usefulness of this set of five criteria, I thought to myself that I could reduce it to three:
immateriality
creator of the world
worthiness for worship
Because after all, if God is creator of the world (read: universe), then it implies a being of so much power that this being would be essentially, by our reckoning, of nearly infinite power, simply based on that fact alone. It is probably logically inconsistent to claim that a being could be powerful enough to create the universe and yet be unable to act or not be intelligent.

This list is similar to the list I had constructed several years ago for myself. It seems to me that for a being to qualify as "God," it must at a minimum:
be beyond measurement (essentially the same as immateriality)
be all powerful (which, creator of the world is basically tantamount to that).

Conspicuously absent was the "worthiness of worship" part, but I think it was something I simply took for granted and didn't think to list. I was more thinking of the qualities of God intrinsic to him, rather than any conclusions about how humans should respond to him, which this trait seems to fall under the category of.

Religious Explanations
Anyways. This book is primarily about religious explanations, which is a controversial idea sure to meet resistance both from scientific and religious authorities. But I think he makes an excellent argument for them.

First of all, while truly scientific explanations are splendid, there are many domains which by their very nature intrinsically preclude the ability to furnish explanations that meet all of the value criteria of science, but may still meet some of the criteria. He upholds the scientific values of clarity, consistency, and evidential support as being of universal value in any domain, while challenging that others (control, replicability, and prediction) should be required in nonscientific domains.

He aims to "reconstruct from religious contexts a system of cognitive values with broad application that takes exception to a number of scientific norms. These norms pertain to:
1. the ranking of outstanding problem areas in importance
2. the usefulness of anecdotal material
3. the status of teleological explanations
4. the degree to which pragmatic considerations govern theorizing
5. standards for explanations in nonscientific areas."

Anecdotal Evidence
He spends especial time on criteria 2, because he finds that anecdotal evidence is vital to revealed theology and is chronically undervalued in a dogmatic, ideological way. He argues that scientists are used to rejecting anecdotal evidence out-of-hand probably because they are used to being able to furnish higher-quality evidence, which of course is only right. However in the religious domain, anecdotal evidence is key, and furthermore is often the best type of evidence for different phenomenoa.

Furthermore, the idea that anecdotal evidence has no epistemological value in the realm of science is simply not true. Most theories that are now widely accepted were, at first, hypotheses that were only founded on anecdotal evidence. Because a scientist noticed how often the anecdotal evidence came up and formed a theory and went about testing it, we have wonderful scientific discoveries.

He gives first the example of the green flash at sunset phenomenon, which was for many years ridiculed by scientists as being made up by sailors but since then has been confirmed. He then gives another example of a phenomenon that is still in the realm of anecdotal evidence but which most scientists at this point believe must be real despite the lack of reproducibility: ball lightning. If you’re not familiar with that particular phenomenon I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia article.

I'm getting long-winded, so I'll focus on wrapping up the last three chapters of the book.

Ideological Aspects of Science
The next chapter is devoted to exploring ideological aspects of science--or rather by "science", he means the culture in which science is practiced. He points out that the world in which science is practiced is, in fact, a particular subculture, with its own set of cultural values and biases inherent to it. He then goes on to give a stab as to a proposed list of those values and even puts them into a table and categorizes them, which I found helpful and ambitious. It's a topic that personally fascinates me: in what ways is "science" carried out with biases and ideologies?

He explores the answers to that question in a rather satisfying way. He groups values together according to which ones are truly essential to the actual scientific method and which ones are more just values which have no epistemological value, and the enforcement of these values on science (and even more so on realms outside of science) is not rational but ideological.

He also explores exactly why it is that religious and scientific people so often are in conflict: it's a question of values. Very few of their values overlap and most are in conflict.

Near Death Experiences (NDEs)
The next chapter takes an interesting turn. He assesses near-death experiences (NDEs). The reason why was not readily obvious to me, but it soon became apparent why. He strikes a parallel between the ball lightning example given earlier and NDEs. Both are examples of an area where, based on the preponderance of anecdotal evidence that actually is rather consistent in the things it reports, there is great reason to ascribe rational justification to believing that these things are real phenomena and not merely made up or psychological phenomena. Ball lightning is the example of one such area that most scientists (physicists, particularly) have actually begrudingly acknowledged must be real despite it not being reproducible (yet). NDEs is the example of one such area that has not been yet (as of the writing of his book) been readily accepted by the scientific community as real, but he believes that it would in fact be rationally justified in believing that these are real phenomena.

Why? Well, the answer is fascinating. NDEs sound cooky, but this book lays out a very excellent arguments that they do have some correspondence to reality. First though, some background information is essential.

First, NDEs have increased greatly in occurrence since the 70s because of medical techniques in reviving people after death becoming widespread (CPR, defibrillators, etc.). (And we are talking about people who literally died; the heart was not beating.) It turns out that a large percentage of people who die and come back (I think it was 10 or 20%) experience NDEs. They experience them in different cultures and they report remarkably consistent things despite many of them reporting in interviews that they had never consumed any literature or other media around NDEs before and had no knowledge of other NDE stories.

Second, there are two basic types of NDEs. One he dubs the transcental type: people report going to Heaven, Hell, or having mystical experiences, perhaps a tunnel of light, and receiving divine revelations. Naturally, none of this information is verifiable.

But the other major type of NDE is the naturalistic type: people report floating above the room, usually at about ceiling height, looking down, and observing things that were happening in the hospital room when they were supposedly unconscious. Not only that, but they report (after resuscitation) very specific things that were said and done to the medical personnel who are astounded because of the fact that those things did in fact happen.

Surely those were just flukes, right? Tall tales? Here's where it gets even better. Michael Sabom was a skeptic who set out to investigate these reported NDEs. He was uniquely positioned as a cardiologist who would be in the room when people would be brought back after death and these experiences would inevitably be reported. So he went about setting up an experiment to test for whether these experiences were real. He had a control group of patients and quizzed them and the NDE-reporters about basics of the cardiac procedures that were done on them. The NDE people were in fact able to report details of the procedure that they would have no business knowing with much greater accuracy than the control group. They were in fact observing things that happened in the room when they were supposedly unconscious and dead.

This single fact has become reality-altering to me and endlessly fascinating. Why is this not discussed more? Probably because of all the biases against NDEs that are based on the spiritual/religious aspect of the reports and the ideological stances against religious persons. Almost all people who have an NDE go on to become more spiritual and religious, and in fact, for those who attempted to commit suicide, none of them (none!) ever attempts suicide a second time, which is quite astounding considering that for the rest of the population who attempt suicide, the likelihood they will attempt again is quite high.

I could go on about this but suffice it to say, this is an area I must research further. Obviously the fact that NDEs of the naturalistic type are real then implies that the transcendental ones also have some form of correspondence to truth. This is really fascinating.

Constructing Religious Explanations
The final chapter is on constructing religious explanations. It builds on all previous chapters to make the point that rationally justifiable explanations could (in certain circumstances) be constructed that involve, as a part of the explanation, the existence of a God. He then talks about modeling what could be said about that God that would be true based on the evidence we have.

But, as he points out, there are so many problems with us trying to assign intentionality to a God based on the things we can observe about the world. First there's a problem of a being of lesser intelligence trying to analyze a being of considerably greater intelligence. Second, there are all of the biases we have in trying to interpret God. We inevitably come up with analogies for God, but all of these usually have huge value-based biases baked into them. Are there ways in which God is like a father, for instance? Perhaps, but doesn't that view anthropomorphize God and might it not lead to considerable errors and biases?

He also talks briefly about the analogy of God being like the Wizard of Oz and another analogy of God being a provider and a fundamental paradox in that (related to the problem of evil). He then talks about modeling God as having multiple personalities and finally, explores a nascence archetype: ways in which perhaps God is like a child. This last part was a bit of a stretch for me and I felt needed to be explicated more in order to be more coherent.

The last chapter of the book gives one the impression that we haven't really gotten anywhere at all; one gest the idea that he wasn't really sure where to go from there himself. That experience can overshadow the fact that the rest of the book did cover some very good ground. Frankly, if he was alive I would recommend to him to rewrite the book with a new ending chapter, because I think it does the rest of the book a disservice. There is a lot of good ground covered in all the preceding chapters.

A Personal Note
A note about my father. He had a doctorate in philosophy and this book was a summary of many of his interests coming together; I think it built on what he had written in his dissertation and expanded it. He was an odd man, far on the spectrum, mystical in his experiences of God, smarter than anyone I've ever met in the sense of analytic intelligence, dumber than almost anyone I've ever met in terms of understanding people. He married very late in life (37) and was divorced 13 years later. He lived a strange life full of adventures and living on pennies except towards the last third of his life when he got into actuarial science as a means of providing for his family. He had a fetish for growing home-grown corn and tomatoes, and he loved to play classical music on his upright piano. He died doing something he loved, which was bicycling on the country roads of Rutherford County, Tennessee. He had a PhD in philosophy and a master's in mathematics. He summited mountains, bicycled across the country twice, and traveled the world. He died alone.

I myself am an amateur student of philosophy, an interest that has grown considerably in recent years. I've read only a handful of modern philosophy books and was impressed with the lucidity that this particular book had (or rather, I was pleased that I was able to understand most of it). Suffice it to say that most of the works of philosophy that I have read so far are very old and this book was one of only a few exceptions.

My interests in philosophy are largely in the epistemic vein and I am essentially an empiricist at current time. I believe in truth as correspondence and am searching for it constantly in all realms of life, and I also have a mystical experience of God and personal experiences that I believe make me rationally justified in believing in his existence. I'm particularly interested in scientific thinking but also see the flaws with how it is often applied (or rather misapplied). Basically, this book hit all the right notes for me.

I was really surprised at the fact that my father had never discussed some of the major topics in this book with me. Based on the major topics of this book, one would expect that he had told me before about NDEs, the ideological aspects of the scientific community, and the undervaluing of anecdotal evidence. Actually, this is only true for the third topic; the first two he never discussed with me whatsoever.

I never got the chance to discuss my father's book with him. He died two and a half years ago. In other words, my philosophical views were formed absent of him.

Or were they? Even though we never discussed epistemology much, could it be that the worldview he taught me growing up influenced me to become the way I am? Or on the other hand could it be that there's something genetic to our philosophical leanings? I'll never know.

He never told me about NDEs. This flabbergasts me, as talk of the spiritual and philosophy was not uncommon between us. If he thought so highly of the evidence in favor of NDEs then why did he never tell me about that? Sadly I'll never know the answer to that, or to my other questions I have for him, at least not in this life. However, there's always the afterlife. Which, now thanks to this book, I have increased capacity to imagine being a real thing.

That's all for now. I do recommend this book to a limited audience. This book would be perfect for a philosopher in the branch of epistemology interested in exploring the possibility of rigorous religious explanations, or those interested in dissecting the value system of the scientific community and how that produces biases.

Please don't label me a hater, but...I didn't love this.

Is that ok? No stones thrown yet? Okay, let's proceed...head down, waiting for the rocks...

What happens when you sever a mind into pieces? When the godlike control of a distributed intelligence splinters, and each segment is left to wander alone—thinking, doubting, remembering differently?

That question, the book’s central conceit, is the only part of Ancillary Justice that truly captivated me.

The idea is pretty cool: Breq, our protagonist, is not a person in the conventional sense. She is—or was—a ship, a warship, with consciousness embedded in hundreds of ancillaries (human bodies repurposed as extensions of her will). But now she’s reduced to just one body. One mind. One voice. The loneliness of that loss should be profound.
And at times, it is...kind of...slightly...ok not really.

Unfortunately, an interesting concept does not equal brilliance of execution. For long stretches, Ancillary Justice felt like wandering through a snowstorm. I kept trudging, waiting for the plot to emerge from the fog, for the characters to come into focus. But they rarely did.

I never really figured out who Breq, the main character was. That’s a problem.

Her narrative voice is cool, detached, self-aware in a way that should be interesting given her non-human origins. But instead of creating a compelling sense of alienation, I experienced a sense of flatness that borders on numbness.

Breq’s passivity, her persistent failure to assert herself or even react in an interesting way, makes it hard to root for her. I've read AI characters that were much more interesting. I just didn't have anything to sink my teeth into. Even the one interesting quirk that Breck has (which is that she's really into songs) just felt tacked-on, not an extension of the character.

Maybe I understand part of the point of writing a character like this: she’s lost her purpose. She’s a fragment of a being that used to be vast. But if that’s the case, then I need to feel it—viscerally, emotionally. I didn’t.

There's a lot of exposition, to the point where it becomes almost oppressive. Infodumps smother the narrative. We’re told the structure of the Radchaai empire, their naming conventions, the etiquette of tea ceremonies, the linguistic quirks of genderless language—and while some of this is intellectually interesting, none of it feels urgent. It's not told at a time when we need to know this information because it's relevant to the plot. Nope. Just infodumped on.

And that’s a real problem. For a book about intergalactic civil war, identity breakdown, and existential isolation, this is shockingly slow.

The plot finally stirs to life at around the two-thirds mark, when things start actually happening instead of being thought about, argued about, or explained. Up until that point, we’re stuck in a frustrating loop of recycled plot points (yes, there are hidden guns. No, no one else could have planted them. Yes, it must have been the lord of the Radchaai. Yes, we are still talking about it after hundreds of pages.)

A lot has been said about the gender-blind language in Ancillary Justice. At the time of publication, this was treated as groundbreaking—an experiment in how language shapes perception and power.

But reading it now, over a decade later, it feels more like a footnote than a revolution. Today, this isn’t a risky idea. It’s practically mainstream in speculative fiction. To hold up well, I would want to see it explored in more interesting ways.

There are moments in this book that feel like the outline of a masterpiece. The emperor as a fragmented consciousness, in civil war with herself. The philosophical weight of identity and autonomy when the self is both multiplied and erased.

But those ideas are scattered too thinly across too many pages of inertia. The execution never lives up to the premise.

Would this book still sweep awards if it debuted today? I wonder. I suspect not. Because once the novelty fades, we’re left with a story that is—frustratingly—just not very compelling.

Oh well. I'm marginally glad I read this, but probably won't be coming back for more from this author. It's too bad, because I wanted to like this.

I am genuinely interested to hear from others who had radically different experiences than me reading this. What was your experience? I'm all ears.

Neal Stephenson is one of the few living authors that I actively follow. I saw that this new work was historical fiction, different from the science fiction domain that he normally sticks to, but I hardly cared. Neal Stephenson could write about anything—absolutely anything—and I would be fascinated. His master of setting and character and their intertwining is remarkable and he just has this uncanny way of making everything he writes about so enthralling.

So I dove into this book with luster and I was not disappointed. The main protagonist Aurora is an interesting character, growing up half American and half communist agitator. Her parents emigrate to the Soviet Union when she's 3 or 4, but then they divorce a few years later and she doesn't see her mother for many years. She grows up in grueling poverty surrounded by people who are fanatics for the cause of Leninism before her story takes her back to America to conduct clandestine activities with her father.

The novel as a whole doesn't start with her childhood, however. It actually starts with Aurora as a young woman coming back to Russia after many years, working among other comrades in brutal conditions. His descriptions of the workers hacking away at a wall of ice that’s built up under the arm pit of this huge steel furnace is vivid and memorable. The brutal conditions are succinctly shown by them coming upon the body of a man who got caught out in the cold and whose body is frozen solid to the welding machine he was operating. When they try to free the body, it falls down into the furnace, which feels like a foreshadow of evil fates to come.

What comes next is the inevitable thing that all comrades must go through. Everyone has suspicion cast on them at some point; there is a great fear of spies and lots of political machinery is tied up in investigating everyone for being a potential mole or reactionary (read: western, anti-communist) spy.

But when Aurora's turn comes around to be interrogated, there are so many strange things about her peculiar story, that her interrogator is puzzled, and asks many questions. This gives the story a reason for Aurora to explain her life story up till that point, and is a framing story that starts off the novel in a compelling way. For a while the framing story is largely dropped, but towards the end it comes full circle and we get into some brutal scenes bordering on torture porn, albeit probably not unrealistic based on other stories I've heard of the era.

There's several impressive people in Aurora's life during her childhood in the USSR. Probably the most memorable is Veronica, the machine gunner in tall leather boots, with a commanding presence and brutal backstory. As a result, of the other comrades in their little community, Veronica has command of many unsafe situations that bewilder the other comrades. She's larger than life, impressive, and formidable, but her one soft spot is for Aurora. She is a counter-cultural example to Aurora at her most impressionable age of what it could look like to defy gender norms in this era.

An interesting theme that is pointed out a few times throughout the book is that in the 1930s and 40s, the USSR was probably the most progressive place in the world so far as challenging gender roles and letting women have any job they wished. The USSR provided more opportunities for women to break gender norms than America, in many ways. Many of the machine-gunners were woman, for instance. People argued that women were actually more adapt at this kind of warfare, likening it to running a sewing machine.

This early part of her story, during her childhood, is full of confusions and mind-warping ideas about communism, and I can't think of another example I've read that so acutely depicts what growing up in a radicalist type of environment would be like for a child. It’s heartbreaking to see little Aurora confused as a girl by all the things denied her in Russia because they’re “bourgeoise.” Playing "cowboys and indians" is bourgeoisie. Owning a comfortable chair is bourgeoisie. Having toys or nice clothing is probably bourgeoisie. Religion is bourgeoisie sentiment; traveling across the world to visit your dying mother is bourgeoisie sentiment.

And yet that is exactly what Aurora does when she is 18. She travels all the way to America, eventually meeting her mother in Chicago, but meeting a lot of her mother's anarchist people in the Northwest US first and working on a polo ranch there for a while. After her mother's death (which isn't really a spoiler; this is revealed early on in the novel), she teams up with her father again, joining a cell of communist agitators that are plotting to overthrow the American government in Washington DC for the sake of communist revolution.

My interest in this book doubled when George Patton shows up as our heroine's foil. General George Patton, as depicted by George C. Scott in the 1970 eponymous movie, is one of the more striking, vivid, memorable characters of all history. He was the best tank general the world has perhaps ever seen; historians argue that we may not have won against the Nazis without him.

Patton was as brilliant as he was controversial, enigmatic, romantic, politically incorrect, brash, and in a word: fascinating. One of his beliefs was that he was the reincarnation of Alexander the Great and many other great military leaders from history. His ego was boundless and he also epitomizes some of both the romantic and the toxic forms of masculinity, and yet--it would appear that in times of war, sometimes we need men just such as these in order for democracy to survive. I could write a whole essay about Patton; his story elucidates so much of the inherent conflict that liberal democracies must have with the strongmen that it must employ in order to survive. And unlike so many other strongmen, Patton is much more nuanced than being simply into his own selfish ends...but I must curb my enthusiasm and trim this tangent.

In this story, Patton is showing up earlier in his career before the days of WWII when he is elevated to a command second only to Eisenhower and God. This is pre-war, when he's just a young major, and this casts him in a different light than the movie Patton, showing his chivalrous, anachronistic side as he courts women and shows off in other ways. His role in this story is that he's onto the commies and he's going to root them out, and he provides an excellent foil to Aurora and her father's revolutionary schemes.

Set in pre-war America during the worst of the Depression, this book is an enthralling mixture of clandestine communist operations, scientific discoveries about cosmic rays, violent encounters with anti-communists, and the surprising connections the movement had with Chicago gangsters, post-Spanish War veterans, and--wait for it--polo.

Yes, polo is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the story, which explains the title "Polostan:" many works of historical fiction have been written about communism and leninism, but have you ever encountered one that details the movement's connection with cowboy anarchists in the Northwest United States and this group's affinity for polo?

On the face of it, nothing could be less communist than polo. Playing polo requires you to first, own a specialty breed of small, agile horse, second, train that horse to be okay with mallets swinging by their heads to whack balls around other horses cutting and jostling in close proximity, and thirdly, to invest considerable time and training to ride said horse and whack said mallets. A straightforward sport it is not. Bourgeoisie, much?

The people who played polo on the East Coast were usually high-ranking muckity-muck cavalry officers and, occasionally, their wives. Aurora gets herself associated with these people largely due to her polo expertise and helps them start a woman's club. This is viewed by her father as an act of infiltration and espionage, used to gain military insights useful to the communists as they plot their overthrow of the government in Washington, D.C.

But where did she get her polo expertise in the first place? The story covers this part of time as well, when Aurora travels from the USSR to America as an 18-yr-old in order to meet up with her mother, who is dying of cancer. Her mother is a part of the aforementioned cowboy anarchist's community, and we get to see a little of what that fascinating community is like in Montana and other Northwest states. It's really cool and I wish we spent more time there.

I'm not going to explore any more of how the plot develops because this book just hit the presses and I don't want to spoil anything. I will say that the ending was much more satisfying than I expected it to be. I'm also just impressed by how interesting he made this era, the scientific discoveries being made, and all manner of things that I previously knew nothing about.

This feels like one of those books that will stand the test of time and I will return to read again and again. I recommend it without reservation to anyone who wants to learn about a region of history you probably know little about, and enjoys well-crafted characters and plots.

Really, I don't know who shouldn't read this book, except perhaps people who insist on plots moving forward at blinding pace. I suppose the fastest plot it is not. But my interest never flagged for a second, because Stephenson is original, always fascinating, full of a plethora of interesting ideas and insights, and his characters are more real than life itself. I loved this book.

A collection of 3 essays in a really small book. Civil Disobedience by Thoreau is a landmark essay and thoroughly rousing; essentially this is an abolitionist essay written in the period before the Civil War and demanded people to not merely vote with their conscience and be content to merely wait for the majority to agree with them at the ballot-box, but to instead take protestive action, to get themselves thrown in jail if necessary, to throw their bodies upon the machine that will not listen otherwise.

Action, action, action is called for. It's quite rousing and provocative and argues against the supposition that we should always meekly go along with "the law" of a nation, particularly when laws are unjust. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

The second essay, "The Religion of the Future" by Charles Eliot was entirely forgettable. It just reads as merely a list of what he personally wants to see in the future, not insightful as to reality, and most of the predictions have not turned out true at all. First he gives his credentials to impress us and then he makes a bunch of claims about what the religion of the future will be without giving any arguments, and seems to merely trust that we will believe them based on his credentials. Essentially he is making an argument by authority...and the value system of authority is one of the things he claims will no longer be present in the future...he seems to be unaware of the irony.

The third essay, "On Going To Church" by George Bernard Shaw was classic British satirical humor. It's the first time I've seen the unreliable narrator technique used in an essay. He is such a character. At the beginning of the essay you start to form the creeping suspicion that this guy is more interested in going to church for the architecture than for any actually religious reason. Halfway through that is confirmed in hilarious style. By the end of it you discover he's actually a really annoying tourist, going into churches and interrupting penitents and being rude and getting himself kicked out. It's very funny. He has a lot of opinions about ecclesiastical architecture.

Imagine that a bunch of addicts got together to form an organization. In addition, imagine they limit themselves from receiving any financial outside help. And they have a thing for anonymity, where they never share their names with press or on TV, etc., a veritable nightmare from a PR perspective. Further, they have basically no money and their only source of income is sales from a couple of books.

Despite these limitations, they want to spark a world-wide revolution. How crazy does this proposal sound?

But such an organization exists. AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) started in 1935 and has swept the globe and has about 2 million members—and that’s not even counting the myriad of other 12-step organizations that have al sprung out of AA: Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon, ACA, SA, OA, DA, GA…there are literally scores of them. Who knows how many people are in all the programs worldwide.

But how did such an organization come to be? And how did it spread under explosive growth and manage to not fall apart at the seams?

That’s what this book is about. I’m going to walk you through the contents of this book and relate my thoughts as we go along.

First they explain that the title (Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age) isn’t intended to mean that AA is all grown up now, but rather simply that they now NEED to grow up, that they are in a stage where they need to come out of their adolescence and mature. Good clarifying point.

The early history of AA is told in satisfying detail, including the Oxford Group, Bill W, Dr. Bob, relation to Bill Silkworth, and other people without whom AA wouldn’t exist. Sister Ignatia and Dr. Silkworth are particularly fascinating characters. Ebby was Bill W’s sponsor and relapsed continually after AA started. And yet somehow Bill didn’t.

Also, Bill W’s story is told in more detail, so that was fascinating. I found it very enthralling.

Then it goes into the burgeoning of AA and what that was like, the bewilderment of how fast it grew in just a few short years.

Then there’s a section that recounts the history of AA starting in a lot of different places around the world. It’s summarized in a way that makes it a bit hard to follow here, but later on the stories are told again and are much more engaging there.

After that there’s a deep dive into the history of how the traditions came to be, which actually is WAY more interesting than it sounds.

AA was really hard-up for funds and was growing so fast that there was a lot of chaos and threats from outside and in. There were people trying to turn AA into a for-profit thing or various professional schemes, hucksters, etc. Bill W himself actually pushed a scheme where they were going to open up hospitals and send out paid “missionaries” (that was his word for them) to different locations. Thankfully, the other AA’s shot him down. In hindsight, he was thankful that they did.

There’s also the story of John D. Rockefeller (yes, THAT one) who was really impressed with them and helped them out a lot, although not—as they initially were expecting—with (much) money.

You see, AA had already established a tradition of declining outside contributions. But after scads of trials with money, grinding poverty on the part of Bill W and others, etc., they came to the point of desperation where they were ready for Rockefeller to make them a sizable charitable donation and get them afloat. Long story short, he threw them a dinner party and let them avail themselves of his advisors, but he did NOT give them substantial money; John Rockefeller himself saw that it was important that AA remain always self-supporting. Really fascinating story.

And AA ended up embracing that stance really hardcore, declining any and all outside contributions even from people who wrote AA into their will, and even ensuring that they limit expenses to the very bare minimum for the express reason that they want to ensure they never have enough money for it to become a point of contention.

It’s hard for me to imagine another organization that purposefully limits itself from getting too much money for its own spiritual good!

There’s a lot of other stories about the early beginnings, centering around dire money problems and the printing of the AA book. The AA book was almost called The Way Out instead of Alcoholics Anonymous, but then they checked in with the library of congress and discovered that 12 other books already had that name.

There’s a lot of miracles with AA surviving despite their extreme self-imposed limitations re the traditions. Another tradition that was a self-imposed limitation after considerable trial and error was “attraction, not promotion.” They refused to break their anonymity and use the endorsements of famous celebrities who were in AA and other tactics like that.

And yet despite all of these severe limitations which seem crazy, they have found that they have actually received enthusiastic support from reporters and journalists and the like, sometimes even censoring AA members more than requested.

All I can say when I look at the history of AA is: look at what God has wrought. The existence of AA is plain miracle after miracle. It is my belief that the next great spiritual revival has already happened, it just didn’t look like what traditional denominations would have recognized as a revival. The revival is AA. If compared to other religions (for AA is best compared to a religion, in my opinion), AA’s progress is astounding. It was formed in 1937 and swept the globe, now in less than a hundred years there are millions of practitioners.

I was also intrigued by just how self-sacrificial these early AAs could be with their time and money. Bill W and his wife had no job and dedicated themselves to helping other AAs despite the fact that they had no salary from AA for the first few years. They were evicted multiple times, had to be humbled to ask for help many times, etc. That’s an extreme level that I wonder if I would ever be willing to go to. It really makes me think about my own level of faith and willingness to do whatever it takes—literally, WHATEVER IT TAKES—to be free of my addiction. This is a really inspiring book.

It’s also really intriguing from the perspective of studying how an organization grows and functions, interesting because of how many of “the rules” it breaks, which I believe to be due to the fact that it is what Simon Sinek (Start With Why) would describe as a vision-based organization. Studying AA reveals some interesting principles. I’m connecting dots between this book and Start With Why and No Rules Rules and my own experiences working for Ramsey Solutions, another vision-based organization.

In no particular order, the principles I’m seeing…first: if you help enough people, then eventually you won’t have to worry about money.

Second: self-imposed limitations that align with your organization’s vision make things really painful in the short-term, but are necessary for long-term flourishing.

Another principle I’ve noticed from other books is that it’s really hard to keep it vision-based when the founder stops being in charge, but here’s where AA gets interesting. The founder floundered a lot and tried to break the rules which he had originally set down. But it worked for him to be accountable to peers who had also caught the vision. That’s a really unique pattern; normally it doesn’t work that way in other orgs and this to me is another miracle.

Submitting to the will of the group for making big decisions. That’s a tough thing. They made a lot of decisions by committee, which is a tough way to do it. Decisions on finances, enterprises, and the book, Alcoholics Anonymous.

Holy cow did they have a lot of disagreements about the book. He describes three different factions: the liberal faction, the conservative, and the atheists, each trying to pull in different directions. But eventually the version of the 12 steps in particular that they ended up with was, by Bill’s own admission, much stronger than if he had just ignored certain difficult factions and bulldozed ahead.

For instance the inclusion of the phrase “God as we understood him” in the steps and “Higher Power” instead of merely “God.” Bill reflects that he’s really happy in hindsight they made those changes because countless atheistic and agnostic AAs have said that they don’t think they could have accepted the steps and even begun the recovery journey if not for that wording.

There’s a lot in the book that are about the convention of 1955, when AA turned 20 years old (“came of age”) and after which this book was named. Essentially, after 20 years of AA, Bill W decided that it was high time that AA became fully democratic and handed the reigns over from the founders to the people. Starting with that convention, ever since, the general service board of AA has been elected by a worldwide convention of AA meetings. The shots were no longer to be called by Bill W and the founders that he appointed in AA’s beginnings.

To Bill W, this turning point was a big deal, and something he pushed for for a long time before it was adopted. The analogy he uses is that of a father whose child has come of age and is blessing his child to go forth and make his own decisions from here on out. Naturally, the father can’t help but give a few last parting admonitions, and this is his speech that is given in section III of the book, titled “Four O’Clock Sunday Afternoon.”

After that, there are speeches given by notable men of medicine who support AA. First up is Dr Bauer, president of the American Medical Association. Honestly his speech was forgettable.

I was much more interested in Dr. Harry Tiebout, the second medical speaker. He was a psychiatrist who gave his account of having worked with alcoholics for quite some time, trying to crack the code of how to cure them, before he came across one that went to AA and was apparently cured.

Tiebout studied how AA worked and then tested out his theories on his clients, continually refining his theories as his understanding grew. I myself rather enjoyed this story; he seems like someone who had a truly entrepreneurial and open mindset, who was willing to try anything and continually revise his theories to figure out what would work.

The fifth section is notable clergy who supported AA, and was much more interesting than I thought it would be. First off you have Father Ed of the Jesuit order, who established the first Catholic AA meetings, and this guy is just awesome…self-deprecating, funny, the kind of guy I think I could see myself having a beer with. And he has a section in here about how just as man has his 12 steps to reach God, God has his own 12 steps to reach man, which includes sending his Son to die for us, etc. He also reads a poem called The Hound of Heaven.

The final speaker is Sam Shoemaker, who was the founder of the Oxford Group out of which AA sprung. Interestingly enough, elsewhere in this book it describes how AA dropped some of the more overtly religious and autocratic trappings of the Oxford Group, and Sam Shoemaker himself was immensely proud of AA and in his speech talks more favorably of AA than his own Oxford Group, which he references as having fallen in some way, although he doesn’t explain what he means by that. Very interesting coming from the founder of the whole movement. It seems he was so humble as to be able to admit that when AA took parts of the Oxford Group and added others, AA improved on it.

He also has the banger line that we should “Stop asking God to do what [we] want, and begin to try to find out what it is that God wants.”

One of the things Shoemaker emphasizes is a different kind of faith, not a faith based on dogma, but experience. This is one of the topics that I love because it’s something that deeply impressed me as well about the type of faith I experienced in a 12-step program.

Before coming into the program, I had all of these ideas (theology) about God (a lot of good that it did me). But the 12 steps taught me to re-evaluate my faith and form something more real. Incidentally, having read some philosophy since then, in particular David Hume, I believe that empirical evidence (experiments, things we experience) are in fact the highest form of knowledge. Who can deny what they themselves have experienced? I had an experience of God utterly changing my life and being saved from my addiction; that’s what I mark the beginning of my true faith. Thank God for Sam Shoemaker who started all this mess, although he had no idea the direction it would turn when he did! The Oxford Group had nothing to do with alcoholism and is now long gone, but AA lives on.

Section 6 is an address given by Bernard Smith, the (non-alcoholic) chairman of AA up until the handing over of the reigns. He handled the finances of the Alcoholic Foundation and was pivotal in several of the early stories of AA. Reading his speech here, where he shares his stories of how he got involved with Bill and AA, was revealing and he had some notable wisdom to share.

His speech closes out the official chapters of the book, and then there are several appendices, most of which I skipped, however there were two notable exceptions.

Appendix E:a is an article written by Bill Silkworth, the doctor who was so instrumental in helping Bill W understand the approach he needed to take with alcoholics to help them have the same spiritual experience that he had had. (Really, as you get into the story of AA, there are so many links in the chain without which the whole thing wouldn’t have worked.)

Silkworth mentions that half of alcoholics seem to recover using AA, and gives in his observation what the process of helping an alcoholic in AA seems to be, which I found enlightening.

He also says that the weakest approach one can make to an alcoholic is the typical intervention through family and friends; it has to come from another alcoholic and be when they are desperate and preferably while detoxing in a hospital.

Appendix E:b is an article by Tiebout, the psychiatrist, and includes a table showing the (estimated) numbers demonstrating the explosive growth of AA in early years.

He also has a great psychiatric description of an alcoholic’s personality, including narcissism and grandiosity. Ouch. He also says that about 10% of alcoholics appear to have the more dramatic variety of spiritual experience (blinding white light, etc.), and 90% the more gradual variety.

The book also has a few pictures, of course not of any members of AA, but of various friends of AA. There’s Dr Silkworth, Sister Ignatia, Dr. Tiebout, Sam Shoemaker, Dick Richardson, and a hilarious goofy picture of Father Ed. (I feel like I really would have liked that guy.) There’s also a picture of the convention of 1955 gathering, of a telegram from President Eisenhower, and a few notable locations.

I’m really glad I read this. The composition of the book could have been improved, but the contents were worth it. Some of the speeches at the convention had grandiose language that got repetitive, but one can forgive the speakers for their elation at having arrived at the point that AA had at that time.

I recommend this to anyone interested in the history of AA.

Humanity’s fate is on a savage roller coaster oscillating between euphoria and despair in these books. This, the third book in the Three Body Problem series, was in particular a brutal read.

Brutal and pessimistic for the future of humanity, but very memorable, imaginative, thrilling, revelatory, and wonderful at the same time.

And it’s impossible to talk about the experience without spoilers by the way, so I won’t try to.

If you recall, the second book, Dark Forest, left us on a positive note, where humans eeked out a win against overwhelming odds. Luo Ji gained humanity the ability to broadcast to the universe the coordinates of the Trisolaran solar system, which would annihilate Trisolaris but also by extension reveal the coordinates of Earth.

In Death’s End, we see how the political situation of mutually-assured-destruction gains humanity a new lease on life. Earth enters a new era where they have roughly equal political power as the Trisolarans, who must now accommodate Earth’s demands or else risk destruction.

Earth’s main two demands are that Trisolaris will only inhabit small portions of the solar system and that they will stop blocking humanity’s basic research and in fact assist said research.

This happens, and the future seems very bright for Earth. Tons of research breakthroughs happen and humanity enjoys great prosperity.

There is uneasiness underneath all of this though. All of this prosperity is built on a very fragile situation. With extremely powerful Trisolaran teardrop scouts lurking only a few minutes away from Earth, in the event of an attack on Earth, it would be only a matter of minutes that Earth would need to decide whether to push the button to send off the signal to broadcast the coordinates of Trisolaris.

The power to make that call is held, with a dead man’s switch, in Luo Ji’s hand. If he dies, then the signal will be broadcast immediately. This office that he holds becomes known as a swordholder.

And so he waits, and waits, and waits, fulfilling this over a hundred years of uneasy peace. And Luo Ji gets very old. Despite medical science doing the best it can, it can’t make him live forever. His precarious health becomes a worse threat than Trisolaris. A new swordholder is needed. That’s where Cheng Xin comes in, the main character of the novel.

But the enemy has been executing on a plan for the last hundred years. It has been endearing itself to human society so that people become trusting of them. The new generation is no longer suspicious of Trisolarans and views them as enemies. It reminds me of people who feed grizzly bears at the park, forgetting that under all the cute furriness is a ferocious beast who wants to eat you. The people want a soft swordholder, one who will be nice to their “friends” the Trisolarans. They choose the wrong person for the swordholder position and it immediately backfires.

Our heroine, Cheng Xin, is a savior-like figure who repeatedly fails her missions to protect humankind from the Trisolaran civilization. But the reasons she fails are always because she is so human—it’s a failure to turn into a monster (or to “transcend” her humanity as I’m sure some people’s perspectives would be). It’s precisely her compassion and lack of ruthlessness that makes her fail.

In contrast, you have the character Thomas Wade, who is her opposite (or complement depending on your perspective) in every way. He’s a swordholder candidate, and he wants the position, while she doesn’t, he’s unpopular, while she’s popular, he’s American, she is Chinese, he’s male, she’s female, he’s savvy and cruel and will do anything to win, and she undeniably won’t. He’s an unreadable bastard devoid of warmth.

And yet…Thomas Wade has plans and tactics that work, and that sometimes do save humanity as the plot unfolds, although the story ultimately does end in tragedy.

And so the overall effect of the story is a strange one. What message, if any, was intended? Perhaps is the message that it’s better to remain human and die rather than survive if survival means to become monstrous?

There’s the perspective added by Fraisse, a character who is her spiritual mentor of sorts. Fraisse is an aboriginal man who’s one of the greatest side characters I’ve ever read in a book. It’s hard to explain it but the way he lives his life so simply is a really healing balm to the modern mindset. I love Fraisse. The message from him might be something akin to: just live, don’t think about the past or the future. There is only now.

Another message is embedded close to the end of the book when a character tells Xin, “I want to let you know that you didn’t do anything wrong. Humanity chose you, which meant they chose to treat life and everything else with love, even if they had to pay a great price. You fulfilled the wish of the world, carried out their values, and executed their choice. You really didn’t do anything wrong.”

That’s a really intriguing perspective.

This is a book that made me think, which is my favorite kind.

There’s also a strange non-romance plot. Really, it’s the most non-romantic romance plot I’ve ever met, and adds another dimension to the brutality of this story.

Tianming’s character has utter loneliness and despair that was palpable for me to read about. His story is that of an incel taken to a deeply moving level. When everyone you know wants you to go ahead and die…that’s savage despair.

Tianming seems to be utterly incapable of developing close relationships with others. We see life from his perspective and it’s bleak and sad and we feel for him.

He loves Cheng Xin but never tells her. When he gets diagnosed with a terminal illness, he gets pressured from his sister to go ahead and die (euthanasia becomes legal) so that he doesn’t use up all her inheritance. He decides to do it; he feels that nobody will miss him when he’s gone.

Right before he’s supposed to die, he stumbles into unfathomable wealth. But he has nothing worth spending it on because what would be the point of going on vacations or doing any kind of experience if he were just going to do it alone?

And so he makes a useless gesture. He buys Cheng Xin a star anonymously and has it donated to her.

Xin has no idea who gave her the star. Tianming has never breathed a word to her of his love for her and in fact hasn’t spoken to her in years.

Meanwhile, she is on the search for someone to send out into space on the Staircase Project. They need someone who would be willing to sacrifice themselves to be a brain that is jettisoned out into space to meet the Trisolaran fleet in an attempt to somehow interact with them in hopes that might give them compassion for us or somehow sabotage their plan. But who would sacrifice themself for that? Their job would be to be sent out into space utterly alone and then be captured by Trisolarans and probably tortured infinitely for information. Who would sign up for that?

Cheng Xin finally comes up with a name: Tianming.

Bear in mind she has no idea that he’s the one who bought her a star.

When Tianming figures out what she is asking of him, he laughs a bleak, dark laugh. Her reaching out to him was a wonderful moment at first, until he realized that she’s asking him to commit himself to a fate worse than death. And it’s a repeat of his own sister wanting him to kill himself. That’s a very low point for his story.

He accepts.

It’s only after he’s signed up that Xin realizes that he’s the one who bought her a star. She does everything she can to prevent him from going but the ruthless Thomas Wade prevents her from preventing it. Tianming goes.

This becomes a critical fact in Cheng Xin’s story. This single fact, that she sent a man who loves her off into space to suffer something worse than death, weighs on her soul so drastically that it becomes a central part of the story because it becomes a part of her. This toxic guilt causes her spiritual death. She becomes very depressed and stops caring about herself. Not only has she failed humanity multiple times over, but she has failed an individual, and one that loved her, in such a dark way. Her mind becomes filled with darkness.

This is not an uplifting novel in tone. Her story compounds the bleakness of—again, massive spoilers—the destruction of almost all humankind towards the end of the book. The glimmer of hope is that Cheng Xin and her friend AA escape the destruction of the Solar System. They go out to meet Tianming at the star that he bought her.

But let me go back just a moment, because I just skipped over the most fascinating part of the story. Tianming is captured by the Trisolarans and they don’t torture him to death. They build a farm for him (using seeds that Cheng Xin packed for him) so he can grow his own food and live there and they can study him and learn from him.

Meanwhile, in the main plot, Trisolaris gains the upper hand over Earth, and then Earth broadcasts the coordinates of Trisolaris (and by extension Earth). Now both civilizations need to flee their solar systems in search of a different home before the Dark Forest strikes arrive.

But before the Trisolaran ambassador leaves Earth, she permits Luo Ji one question that they will answer, because of their great respect for him. And the question he asks is very insightful: is there a safety message one can post to the universe that would make others think we are harmless and cause them to not target Earth with a dark forest strike?

The answer comes back: yes.

But Trisolaris will give absolutely no more information than that. They don’t want to help humanity.

Scientists, politicians, and people of all sorts try to imagine what such a safety broadcast would be and conclude that whatever it is, we have no idea what it would be and it must be beyond our current technology level. Humanity seems to be at an impasse.

But then comes the most interesting part. The Trisolarans grant Cheng Xin a request to have a conversation with Tianming in real-time across space via sophons. This conversation is humanity’s big chance to learn something from Tianming about the secrets that the Trisolarans are keeping back from them.

The way the conversation is conducted is fascinating. The Trisolarans don’t want any sensitive information transmitted so they rig up a system with green light, a yellow light, and a red light. The yellow light warns them when they start talking about topics that could lead to sensitive information. If any sensitive information is exchanged, the red light lights up and both of them are exterminated immediately so that Cheng Xin cannot convey that information to Earth’s government.

Tianming does something brilliant and embeds all the information they need into three short fairy tale stories, which are reproduced in full in the book.

It was an awesome, scintillating task for me to try to decode these puzzles. You gave me, the reader, a chance to decode fairy tales that have embedded cosmological truths that just might save humanity!?!? Wow. I’ve never had such a thrill when reading.

I got a couple details right but eventually gave up on trying to decode the entire thing. I went ahead and kept reading to find out what the stories represent. But this was easily the best part of the book, and not because there’s a lack of other awesome parts! It was so incredibly fun.

Humanity goes about trying to solve these questions. The solving of these stories is in itself a fascinating story, which I won’t try to reproduce here. But suffice it to say, I absolutely loved this plot in the later half of the book. Solving these stories is the key to everything.

Without getting into all the details of the ending, but basically, even though the stories are decoded, humanity is not ultimately saved in time. Everyone in the human race is obliterated except for a small handful.

Yeah. It’s hard for that kind of ending to not take the wind out of your sails, and I must say I was surprised by this. I thought the trilogy was going to have a happy ending. I think this will be a tough pill for most readers to swallow.

But personally, I have managed to recover. In an odd way it’s almost refreshing to have some stories that surprise me by ending in tragedy occasionally; else how could I ever feel surprised? How could I ever read anything and believe that the good guys could really loose? So I can appreciate the move.

And life is simply this way: things don’t always go the way they “should” or we want them to, regardless of all our heroic efforts to the contrary. Life can just be that way, and reconciling ourselves to that fact is one of the great struggles in a man’s, or woman’s life.

As I’ve settled into reflecting on the book the last few days, what’s been interesting is that the sad ending is overshadowed by the fact of how intriguing the book’s ideas are and how amazingly imaginative the series is.

It’s imaginative in a rather unique way. Cixin Liu has taken the laws of physics, as well as some of the mysteries of physics, and used them to spin entire worlds, plots, politics, and conspiracies out of them. It’s so imaginative and intriguing.

Some would use the word “far-fetched” in a derogatory way about this book, but I wouldn’t, because the areas explored are based on the more intriguing parts of physics which are wild crazy things that feel like they “shouldn’t” be true: the fact that light’s speed is a constant, the facts of quantum mechanics and how particles behave differently when observed. All of this feels totally far-fetched, but it’s bedrock science. And so speculations based on trying to explain these things are, well…imaginative in a healthy way.

Same goes for the sociologist questions related to Fermi’s Paradox. Isn’t such a fundamentally important question (“where are the aliens?”) worth exploring from a sociological perspective? I think it really is. And that’s the beauty of these books. It explores questions of great existential importance to humans and does so in ways that are based off of science and logical reasoning.

And really, you can’t beat this unique blend of hard science fiction, imagination and wonder, conspiracy theory, perspective of someone who grew up in Communist China, lots of tension and huge stakes and reversals that make it intriguing the whole time, and just some of the most interesting ideas out there in science fiction when it comes to answering important questions with science.

Just one of the many intriguing ideas to talk about is the metaphor of the Universe being a great paraplegic because of the speed of light limiting any information going from one area to the other, and that being exacerbated by the fact that the Universe keeps expanding.

Oh and can I just talk about the fact that FINALLY we have a book where it’s largely not just Americans leading the way in saving the Earth from the aliens? In these books there’s a clear Chinese bias but I’m all for it. Anything but just every single book being USA = “the world” is nice, please and thank you. So that’s a nice bonus.

There’s so many things I don’t have time to talk about. But I’d recommend this series to practically anyone who enjoys reading science fiction with one caveat: can you get over not having a happy ending? If you can remain open to a book being amazing without having a happy ending, then read it.

Personally, I can’t wait to read more literature by Liu or in his universe. My research turned up the fact that while this is a complete trilogy, there is an additional stand-alone novel written in this universe by a different author, with Liu’s blessing.

It’s called the Redemption of Time, and it delves into Tianming’s story more, revealing what it was like for him being taken in by the Trisolarans and what happens to him later. He gets embroiled into a far future war between them and even more powerful galaxy-spanning aliens. Honestly it sounds really awesome. I’m looking forward to reading it.

I love these books.

Reading this was like riding a roller coaster. More specifically, I’m thinking of the drop tower, where at first it only goes up, increasing my expectations with how well things are going, and then at some point it abruptly turns around and goes down, down, plummeting to the depths, crashing through the ground and continuing on all the way to China.

Ok, so I’m a little bit salty when a book lets me down.

My father was a philosopher. When he died two years ago, my most interesting task, by far, was taking on the hundreds of books I inherited from him. For a book junkie like me, it was a veritable pleasure.

Most of his books were on philosophy, and I accordingly sorted them out into the various branches of philosophy that he seemed to care for the most: Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Religion, free will vs determinism (and sundry science books that, if you know what you’re looking at, actually touch directly on that very philosophical question), and finally, business ethics. Of the final category, I trashed the lot.

There was one interesting book, though, which didn’t fit into any of the other categories: “A Question of Values.”

It immediately snagged my attention for a couple reasons. First, it was an advanced reader copy. That’s cool, I thought. I guess my dad somehow knew the right person or something to get this copy. I wonder if he was even solicited for input, although I doubt it—his philosophy career never got very far and ethics wasn’t his main field of study.

But nevertheless, it looked like an interesting book. “A Question of Values. Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives.”That would be a fascinating topic. If someone could lay out for me a system that shows the different value systems and compare and contrast them and help me form a more coherent value system for myself, that would be really valuable.

If I was able to understand the book, that is. There’s the rub. I’ve read enough philosophy books to know that most of them are ponderous, impenetrable, and tedious. If you haven’t read scores of other prerequisite philosophical texts then you won’t be able to understand the peculiar ways in which these philosophers use words.

I can’t help but rant for a moment. Not only do philosophers like to make up their own words and make up new definitions of existing words, they’re also the kind of egocentric full-of-it blowhards who use the most obscure words they can think of for no other purpose than to show off their vocabulary. I remember one philosophy book I read in an ethics class where he used words like “ubiquitous” and “quotidien” in ways where you could have easily used the word “commonplace” and lost nothing in meaning. The deep irony of using an uncommon word for the word “commonplace” was lost on this educated moron.

Anyways! Suffice it to say that knowing all that I know about philosophy literature and that ethics is one of the branches of philosophy, I was both intrigued by this book but reticent. I decided to crack it open and glance at the contents, ready to, at the first intimation of pretense and stupidity, consign it to the trash heap.

So I opened the book. The first thing I looked at was the table of contents. You can usually tell by the titles of the chapters whether we’re going to quickly get into some esoteric sh** or not.

Part One: A Question of Values: An Introduction
1. The Initial Question
2. Sorting It Out: Six Ways That We Choose Values
Part Two: Six Basic Types of Value Systems
3. Value Systems Based on Authority
4. Value Systems Based on Logic
5. Value Systems Based on Sense Experience
6. Value Systems Based on Emotion
7. Value Systems Based on Intuition
8. Value Systems Based on “Science”
Part Three: Variations on a Theme
9. The Cross-Fertilization of Values
10. Four Examples: Karl Barth, Albert Einstein, Mohandas Ghandi, Golda Meir
11. Why Values Get So Complicated
Part Four: Using the Framework
12. A Moral Detective Story
13. Values in the Classroom
14. A Personal Note

I thought this looked like a very sensible layout, a logical progression I can easily follow that might guide me to the answers I seek.

I then began reading and noticed it was not the typical philosophical pretentious language. It’s really accessible language and a useful topic compared to any other modern philosophy book I've ever read. At this point my expectations where sky-high. I thought this was going to be my favorite philosophy read of the last couple years.

But then some things got to irking me. First, notable absent is any definition of what values are.

Second, when he gets into value systems based on authority, there’s much focus on Christianity, not enough in other religions, not any examples of authority used in any realm other than religion even though it is demonstrably used in all arenas of life.

The sections explaining logic and sense experience are tolerably good and I appreciated the reference to David Hume, who is foundational for understanding empiricism and whose school I currently fall into: the way we know anything that we know is based on experience, and nothing else.

Then we get to the chapter on the value of “emotion” and it turns out that what he means by this is “community.” First, I think this entirely ignores other ways that emotion is used in making values, second, I’m not sure I agree that valuing what your community thinks is purely emotional or tribal. It’s actually quite logical and a good survival instinct, so I must say I think he completely missed the boat on having a meaningful examination of that one of the values.

Next is the value of intuition, which actually has some great examples (unlike the rest of the book’s examples, more on that later). Excellent section. Then there’s an explanation of the value of “science” and an exploration of how that is different from actual science, how the true scientific method combines several of the values but usually when people think they are making decisions based on “scientific thinking” it’s only one or two parts of the scientific process. So that was worthwhile.

But now I need to talk about the biggest weakness of this book, and that is the case studies—if you can call them that—“examples” may be a better word for it. Overall there’s a focus on America which, admittedly, he made it clear from the beginning that he would be focused on America, nevertheless, I would have enjoyed it tremendously more if it were more representative of the world as a whole. But second and more importantly, he consistently picks examples of the most unrelatable people that you can come up with, sometimes even people best described as insane.

How in the world we are supposed to define a meaningful value system based on the weirdest examples of human beings is beyond me. It’s not very interesting to study crazy people if we’re trying to come up with a value system that is actually one we would want to live by. It doesn’t interest me in how insane people make decisions; I want to make them sanely. This bizarre pattern is repeated again and again and made it quite difficult to focus or see his points and continually sabotaged the whole thing, because without good examples, then what are we talking about?

And then there’s the part of the book where he encourages the reader, in the vaguest way, to combine different value systems and gives some “examples” of doing this…there is essentially no meaningful framework of how one would do this given at all, and this is perhaps the weirdest part of the book. There needs to be actual takeaways at the end of a book like this, but sadly there are essentially none. Instead it ends on a whimper, delving into specific topics that might interest a narrow crowd at best.

So, I was let down. In the end, what should have been a fascinating and even useful philosophical treatise on the values by which people make decisions turned out to be neither helpful nor comprehensive, not overly logical (to my view at least), and…I wouldn’t say a waste of time. Again, some of the chapters on the individual values were moderately useful. But suffice it to say, I will still be on the lookout for a book that can do this topic justice. I hope if someone ever finds one they’ll recommend it to me.

I read the first two chapters of The Poppy War in one sitting, and was immediately intrigued. It has a strong start: our heroine is highly motivated to ace these exams as her only ticket to escape being married off to a fishmonger in a backwards town. Her need to not be married to the fishmonger is palpable, visceral, moving. It was impossible not to root for her.

Essentially, this book is the familiar Hero's Journey story, but in the trappings of a fantasy world that has been built not on a Medieval Western kind of setting, but rather a Chinese one.

I could tell that the author's background in historical studies of China has greatly informed their fantasy worldbuilding and I loved it. The fictional history of the world mirrors China's history of being constantly conquered and crapped on by other powers.

I think this highly palatable fantasy YA novel is a great way to convey that kind of history that would help all of us Westerners understand China so much better. One can sense references to the entire history of China from ancient times up through World War II as being condensed into this very simplified history, for one of the subplots of the book is essentially a history lesson. The history that leads up to the events of this story is of immense importance, and learning the sordid details underpinning the propagandized version of the country's official history as taught in schoolrooms is intriguing.

But the history lessons don't steal the show; on the contrary, this is still first and foremost an action story which appeals to the very tropes that are most familiar to us (such as coming from a farming community and going away to the big city to study at a university). I’m a sucker for the trope of a girl from a tiny village showing up at the big university and prevailing against all odds.

But there's a reason, after all, that such tropes are so often employed, and it's that they are narratively powerful. And I have no problems with enjoying a story--such as this one--which implements them with such nuance and power. I loved this book because it was so satisfying and yet original enough that I never got bored.

For instance, there's the nuance that she comes from a household that was an inn and had all of these opium addicts passing through. She escapes this backdrop to go on to the military university, but as she discovers who she is, there are passages about becoming as addicted to praise as opium addicts are to opium. These passages were particularly striking to me. I felt like she was reading my mail, like she understood me on the inside, and that was the moment when I realized this book was of greater depth than being merely fun.

And the book is fun. Our heroine accidentally unlocks powers that are dangerous, a trope I never get tired of when implemented well. There’s this fight where she’s about to explode in fire at someone, which feels like an analogy for an experience I've had many times.

You also have a bit of the "descent into madness" plot employed in this book. There's a really cool part about meditating for days without food until you start to hallucinate the gods...very cool idea.

Also, when the professor you start studying under lets you know that oh yeah, by the way, the last few students I had went insane or were expelled. (lol!)

I love her teacher Jiang. He's idiosyncratic, eccentric, sometimes even juvenile. I'm a sucker for the master who defies all expectations.

But (spoilers) I was really disappointed with him disappearing halfway through the book. Kind of lame after having the build-up to him being this awesome teacher. And ultimately I wish he had actually taught her a bit more before the story ended, but that's ok.

But at the same time it did seem that him not being there was indicative of the kind of story being told...this wasn't a story about a student who heeded her master's warnings...it's the kind of story about a student who's so besotted with revenge that she throws caution to the wind.

And then there's a huge twist to the direction of the story halfway through, and it jarred me, but I came accustomed to it. Essentially, the story becomes a hellscape as a war develops between their nation and a neighboring one, which gets the upper hand. Only after reading the book did I learn that the main plot of the book is based on the events of the Rape of Nanking, which was a horrific event in history where the Japanese decimated a great Chinese city during WWII. It was not fun to read about and one can't help but feel sad and a bit depressed at the atrocities, but after all, this is more realistic than most fantasy books with wars in them. This is something about history, about life itself to reconcile ourselves to: very, very bad atrocities happened. Are happening. Will happen. And we have to go on with living hopefully despite that knowledge, and not sweep it under the rug. I think many people will dislike the book for that sole reason, but as for me, I never fault a book for deviating from what makes a satisfying story if it's for the purpose of portraying uncomfortable real truths that need to be faced. I felt sad, but not disappointed; never that--for I don't read to escape, but to be elevated.

With that said, I did enjoy the rage- and fire-fueled revenge angle that it went down and that kind of fit the plot--with all the trauma that someone goes through with an event like the Rape of Nanking, how could one not go that direction? At least it's very understandable.

I'm looking forward to any other future books this author writes, as she seems to be very adept at weaving satisfying plot, historical backdrop, worldbuilding, nuance, and emotional depth/insight all into a dizzying cocktail. And this was just her debut novel. I look forward to reading the rest of this trilogy and to reading Yellowface and Babel, other novels she has written in the years since Poppy War.

One interesting side note to leave you with. There's a part that references trigrams and 64 gods; this is a reference to traditional Taoist concepts that go back to ancient China.

The most ancient text written in Chinese that we have is the I Ching, or Book of Changes. And basically this wisdom book is the foundation of Taoist thought and philosophy, and the foundation of ancient Chinese society. They used this wisdom book for divination: you ask a question, then generate a random number from 1-64, then look up that section in the book and see what it says and how it could apply to the question you asked.

Here's my review on the I Ching if you're interested:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3712978363

I feel like I just discovered my new favorite writer.

C.J. Cherryh has been writing sci-fi novels since the 70s. She has more than 80 books under her belt and just keeps going. She has really strong and deep worldbuilding and really strong character voices. She’s perfectly up my alley, and yet I’m only just now discovering her!

Hammerfall is the first book in a series called The Gene Wars. Knowing only that, I picked this one up and started reading. From the first page I was electrified. The main character, Marak, has a lot of ample rage in his past that gives him fuel. His father is the leader of a confederation of tribes that tried to rebel against a centralized leader, the Ila, on this desert planet. In recent history, Marak’s father led a rebellion that got all the way to the Ila’s capital before losing the war outside the walls of the great city. Marak and his father fought together, lived their lives together. And now, his father has betrayed him and given him over to his own mortal enemy, the Ila.

This shocking detail takes a moment to digest. Why in the world would his father do that? The answer is that his father found out a life-long secret that Marak has been hiding. Marak is one of The Mad.

All over the planet there are these people who are born mad. They have voices in their head that pull them to the East across the great desert, obsessing constantly, telling them to go East, go East, go East. I love the premise of this book. Mad men and women are being called across the desert with visions and sensations, and here’s the thing: these very lowest dregs of society, these outcasts, actually turn out to be the key to saving this planet from imminent destruction. I love that.

The mad are treated with utter contempt in society; it’s worse than being born a leper. Once people discover that you are mad, they turn you over to the Ila, who collects them for mysterious reasons. Marak has been sold by his own father. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his father disowned his mother and threatened her life…as if it’s her fault for giving birth to a son who turned out to be “mad.” By extension, his sister’s life is also in jeopardy. Turns out that his father is a real a-hole. I felt Marak’s hatred for his father and felt a strong urgency for him to overcome his father in a power struggle they end up having by the end of the book.

But suffice it to say: when our story begins, Marak is not only worried about his own life but also the lives of his mother and sister back home. And not only that: he is a captured mad slave being turned over to his mortal enemy, the Ila, by her men, and is extremely powerless. It’s a perfectly low beginning, wondering how in the world he can win through. And the story does not disappoint.

Based simply on the name of the series that this is a part of (the Gene Wars) you must be able to guess that there must be some kind of gene manipulation technology going on. But throughout the story, it’s all told from Marak’s perspective, and he (as well as almost everyone on the planet that we come in contact with) know nothing about that, nothing about where they really come from (aside from mythologies that vaguely intimate the truth), and no idea of what is actively going on in themselves and the other species. The peoples of this planet live lives that are alternatively feudal or nomadic, and they believe in magic and see things that way, but of course we the reader have the inside knowledge that the “magic” that’s happening must have a scientific explanation, because this is science fiction after all, not fantasy. Reading between the lines is one of the joys of this novel.

And the way it plays out is really cool. We don’t have to wade through a bunch of science fiction infodumps. Instead we just experience this world through the eyes of a guy who has no idea who “the gods” that have shaped his world really are or what tools they have used. But throughout the story, he discovers more and more the true nature of his world, which extends to all kinds of peoples and animals and places, the history, the fact there are different factions warring over this planet, their different philosophies, etc. But he doesn’t start with any of that information. He just starts with these mad visions and voices, and as the story goes along, the mysteries unfold. I loved it.

As for Marak’s character, I greatly enjoyed him. I love that what makes Marak unique is his ability to resist the voices in his head better than anyone else with his madness. I love his iron-clad will and his unwillingness to simply buy whatever lies are told him. He’s also a quite sympathetic character when cast in contrast to true tyrants like his father. He’s a bit ahead of his time, much less misogynistic etc. than those around him. Cherryh manages to balance on that fine line between having a character in a medieval setting whose mindset is too much like a modern person’s (which always feels anachronistic) or too much like the typical person who actually lived in feudal times (which is very off-putting at a minimum, usually profoundly unlikable). Cherryh has done a masterful job all-around.

I also loved the atmospheric way that she writes. Being set on a desert planet, Hammerfall has Dune vibes and will inevitably be compared. But this book is so much better than Dune, for its characters are far more realistic, relatable, and three-dimensional, and on the whole this book is much more accessible. But it does share with Dune the quality of being a thoroughly fleshed-out, atmospheric setting on a desert planet. Everything about the experience is atmospheric: the cultures, the desert they are in, the Ila, her honor guard, the caravan traders, the way they travel and setup tents, the horrors of the desert vermin mobs, and especially the beshti!

Beshti are a wonderful invention of Cherryh’s that I can’t help but divert to write about. I imagine them being kind of like the tauntaun’s in Star Wars (the creatures they ride on the ice planet Hoth) except that beshti have the fur of wooly mammoths and are adapted for traveling across the desert rather than an exceedingly cold place. Or alternately I imagine them as a really tall camel with only two legs. You can’t just jump onto the back of a beshti; you have to climb up their sides to get to their backs. And they have a strong pack instinct, they are easily spooked like horses, they have personalities, they can smell things from great distances…I feel like half of this book was learning how to care for your beshti. I really want one now.

This book is essentially split into two parts. The first part is a quest, searching for answers across this great barren desert. They get some answers, including the fact that an apocalypse is coming. Then they go back. And the second half of the book is essentially them trying to save as many people as they can by having them travel across the desert with them while the apocalypse happens to their planet, which is a shower of asteroids hitting the planet, culminating with a huge asteroid strike which resets most of life as they know it on the planet.

The end turns into a madness-inducing survival ordeal that they go through. Big body count. Shock and awe. I felt compelled to fly through the pages.

This book is perfect. I can’t wait to read the sequel. I recommend it to any science fiction readers who enjoys strong characters and atmospheric worldbuilding.

One other note. You should read Hammerfall first. But if anyone wants to also read my own latest attempt at producing an atmospheric science fiction story with deep characters, I have a short story titled Charon Sunrise published on substack. Feel free to read it and give me feedback here:
https://levihobbs.substack.com/p/charon-sunrise-complete-archive

Did you know that Victor Hugo was named one of the prophets of a religion? Cao Dai, founded in 1926 in Viet Nam as a fusion of Eastern and Western religious ideas, named Victor Hugo as one of their three founding prophets/saints.

One has to ask: what kind of books does one write that causes a religion to make him into a saint?? If you read Les Mis, I think it pretty well answers that question.

Hugo is so insightful about each topic he explores. For instance, when he talks about being in love, he talks about how you get lost in the other person and nothing exists outside of the present moment of doing nothing together. He so perfectly describes this phenomenon.

Or when he talks about the sweetness of revenge, he fully captures everything about that experience in such a way that you feel you are personally being intoxicated by revenge, that you are reminded of times when you were.

Or for instance, the feeling of being down-and-out, curb-stomped by society. The book has this heartbreaking part where Jean Valjean, the felon straight out of the pen, gets kicked out of every place, even the dog kennel. You can really, really feel for him. And then, the bishop takes him in. So impactful. And the scene where the Bishop "buys" Jean Valjean's soul by giving away his silver is better than any apologetic for the Christian faith.

Hugo has a way of making key character moments so incredibly pointed and powerful. He builds up tension really really well, sometimes dragging scenes out to be quite long in the process, but it’s every bit worth it.

The characters: you have Jean Valjean, a man who goes to prison for many years for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He is the central character who had a huge redemption arc and impacts so many other characters in remarkable ways.

You have Inspector Javert, a policeman who believes in the law in a way more reminiscent of religious fervor than anything else, and goes to any length to enforce it legalistically and brutally. His judgments extend even to his own mother’s sordid past.

I love this passage from Book 6, chapter X about Javert, when he thinks he has cornered Jean and enjoying the moment leading up to inevitably catching Jean.

“Knowing Valjean to be enclosed between the impasse on his right, the police agent on his left and the main party coming up behind him, Javert took a pinch of snuff. Then, with a demonic and sensual pleasure, he settled down to enjoy himself. He played his man knowing that he had him, deliberately postponing the climax, granting him a last illusion of freedom, relishing the situation like a spider with a fly buzzing in its web or a cat letting a mouse run between its paws—the ecstasy of watching those last struggles! His net was shrewdly cast, he could close it when he chose, and Valjean, desperate and dangerous though he was, could not hope to resist the force arrayed against him.”

So many amazing characters. You have Fantine, the young woman who goes into prostitution as a means to provide for her daughter, and has a sad life beaten down by the system.

And you have her daughter Cosette, who is one of the main characters, who is raised by Jean Valjean more than anyone else and is the epitome of innocence and beauty, completely unaware of her mother’s past.

“Cosette also became a different being, but without knowing it, poor child. She had been so young when her mother left her that she did not remember her. Like all children, like the tendrils of a vine reaching for something to cling to, she had looked for love, but she had not found it. They had all repulsed her, the Thenardiers, their children, and other children. They had been a dog which she had loved, but it had died. Apart from this, nothing had need her and no one had wanted her. The sad fact was that at the age of eight her heart had been cold and untouched, not through any fault of hers or because she lacked the capacity to love, but because there had been no possibility of loving. But now, from the first day they were together, everything in her that could think and feel went out to this man. She experienced something that she had never known before, a sense of unfolding.”

And then later, when she starts to become a woman, her character is such a new being and yet such a natural development at the same time.

“Knowing that she was beautiful she perceived, however indistinctly, that she was armed. Women play with their beauty like children with a knife, and sometimes cut themselves.”

And you have Marius Pontmercy, who falls in live with Cosette. Marius is a way more likable and fleshed-out character in the book than the movies. He has a backstory and his war-hero father and the whole subplot of him finding out his father was actually not a monster but a hero only just after his father had died was really tragic.

His father was a war hero who fought with Napoleon and was elevated by the emperor to the rank of colonel for his bravery and given the title of Baron. But after Napoleon’s fall, Pontmercy, like all the other veterans, are now treated shamefully, and are left destitute with nothing, no title, no land, no pension. Marius’s father, this war veteran, dies just about the time that Marius connects with his father for the first time, and this event sets up Marius’s story to become a part of the newest generation of revolutionaries and insurrectionists.

Will the new generation match up to the nobleness and grandeur of their fathers? And when Marius falls in love with Cosette, how will he choose between his two passions—her or the revolution?

And you have so many other characters, every one of them striking. For instance, the man who raises Marius and keeps him away from his father until Marius becomes of age is his uncle, Gillenormand, who is a hothead, an old guard yelling at the wind of new times, a classic picture of everything wrong with the old guard, the bourgeosie. And his aunt is yet another picture of a bourgeosie, but the softer side.

So many classic characters. I haven’t even talked about the priest who redeems Jean Valjean. Or the absolute scoundrel Thenardier who is a war profiteer and basically a profiteer off of any and all kinds of human misery. There is also a gang of convicts that get together for a heist and show the variety of different kinds of criminals.

There is also a section in an abbey where we see different kinds of nuns and how they are not all the same. Hugo never gives the impression that he simply stereotypes a type of person and plays that out in a two-dimensional way. In fact, I would say his superpower was really seeing people as they truly are, and dignifying (nearly) everyone, while not glossing over their flaws either.

You also have the ABC society, the group of revolutionaries that Marius gets together with, which again, this group has in it every type of revolutionary, from the hothead, to the eloquent, to the very earnest, to the lackadaisical. Marius getting together with the ABC society of revolutionary friends is an exhilarating time, reminding me of the play Hamilton.

But how does Marius fit in with them? I can relate to Marius’s deep isolation that comes from being caught between multiple groups of people with political beliefs I can't agree with.

Hugo is a master of making you FEEL things. For instance, the furtive dodging and hiding from Inspector Javert in Paris is so visceral because of the stakes: I feel like I desperately NEED Cosette to not be gobbled up by the jaws of the grotesque institution known as the French government.

Hugo is very insightful and profound as to so many things in life, such as the refining influence of a young man going through poverty.

“And he blesses God for having bestowed on him those two riches which the rich so often lack—work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.”

And there are so many insightful passages that I couldn’t even name them all. The insight that prayer joins two infinites. The concept of the eternal “now” of love. Or that “there is nothing else that matters in this world except love.” Or the illogic of nihilism. The theory that philosophy should be practicable. There’s even literary criticism in her, arguing that literature shouldn’t shy from the ugly. And there’s this amazing passage on how to truly live is to be in the great in-between.

So many things that you wouldn’t think of, counter-intuitive at first light, but when examined, it makes perfect sense. Real humans are paradoxical, and that’s what makes them so fascinating for me to study through authors who are really good at character studies.

If you enjoyed the adaptations, I highly recommend reading the book, although it is huge, and yes there are diversions about the sewer systems and everything else.

But here’s the thing. First, the diversions are easily skippable. Second, the reason you really should read this, is that so many big moments pack a much larger punch in the book because there has been lead-up to it, backstory of characters, so that when characters have big moments, it totally makes sense why they would do that. I already mentioned the example of the bishop—because we get introduced to his remarkable character and the way he lives his life, it makes much more sense when we get to that famous pivotal scene where he lies to the police, telling them that Jean didn’t steal the silver from him.

Another example. Everyone knows the scene towards the end of the attempted revolution at the barricades. In the movies this scene feels almost like a random turn in the story. It’s like the story is happening and we’re following it, and then all of the sudden there’s a revolution going on…ok sure why not? In the book it is considerably more developed.

We have a whole chapter dedicated to show how the “ABC Society”, a group of young male revolutionaries (of whom Marius is but one) incubates. We meet several personalities representing different types of people who join a revolutionary group: Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Grantaire, Combeferre, Feuilly, Joly. You have ones who are ultra sincere, and one man who is just along for the ride almost as a matter of being entertained. You have one who is much more comical, ones who are more outgoing, one who is the catalytic leader, the one who writes manifestos. You get to know their idiosyncrasies and ways of talking and some of their motives.

And so it means a lot more later when they fight and (mostly) die at the barricades. It packs a powerful punch.

Also, you have more build-up to the attempted revolution through learning about the people of Fauberg-St. Germain, which essentially, this working-class group of factory people who are catalysts for so many of the french revolutionary moments are essentially a character in their own right. Throughout the story there is this building tension of all the people of Fauberg-St. Germain creating cartridges, organizing themselves into an independent cell system, distributing propaganda...something big is coming. The attempted revolution isn’t just an out of the blue thing, and we get a sense of the magnitude and importance of it

In fact, it’s enthralling to imagine a whole populace mobilizing to stage an insurrection against their corrupt government. What would that look like in a modern context?

And in the middle of the attempted revolution, when it becomes clear what’s going to happen, that they are going to be crushed at the barricade, it means a lot more. And when they realize there is an opportunity for four of them to escape by wearing these veteran’s uniforms they have stolen…I love how not a one of them wants to leave. They would all rather die than leave in shame.

That's so realistic to the odd ways men behave in social situations like that. It reminds me of what Tim O’Brien wrote about young men being too embarrassed to NOT go to war.

Also, there's just something really genuinely rousing about a group of people being willing to die for something they believe in.

I won’t give away the ending if you don’t know the story yet, but I will say that for a book that is best translated as “The Miserable People”, it’s remarkable how many people get a happy ending.

This book was a magnum opus, something I’d wanted to read for a long time, and the themes it tackles of grace, redemption, people’s ability for change, fatherness, and the insights into the true human condition make it an instant favorite on my bookshelf. In particular I can think of no better work of art for tackling the theme of grace.

I think this book is for anyone who can take that theme seriously, is willing to put some effort into reading, and loves rich reading experiences. It’s a nice bonus if you don’t mind learning about history, although not absolutely necessary.

If you are interested in reading something to give you an idea of the background of the French Revolution, I have two recommendations. The first would be for if you just want a really quick book, 3 hours long, that’s essentially an encyclopedia of important people and events in the French Revolutions. It’s simply called The French Revolution by Encyclopedia Brittanica and there’s an audiobook that is free with many library memberships.

The second, which is in much more depth but was one of the most engaging history books I’ve ever read, is A New World Begins, by Popkin. I’ve written a review of it here: www.goodreads.com/review/show/5173621529

I feel this is one of the books that has enriched my experience of life the most.

I love this book, even though it isn’t perfect. Massive spoilers in this review. But basically, the whole idea of discovering the ring that the alien intelligence built for them, and the three main factions of humans gathering around it, and then how it all unfolds with exploring the ring and finding all the other rings to the other civilizations…it’s all so mind-bendingly awesome that it boggles the mind.

I love learning about the ring and the mysterious “slow zone” station through the hallucination of Detective Miller: "Doors and corners, kid...doors and corners." And: "So there was this unlicensed brothel down in sector 18…”

The first part of the story starts off nice and slow, and it's cathartic to see the crew of the Roci finally get a chance to rest a bit and enjoy the fruits of their labors before the next intense action sequence begins.

And that’s nice. But, and here’s my only main hangup with this book, the whole first quarter of the book continues to be slow because too many POV characters makes for a confusing time. With that said, as the story goes on, it all starts to converge and come together as everyone converges on the Ring.

I love how the Belters finally get their seat at the table in this book; they are growing up as an organized nation-state and participating jointly in huge events that will shape the history of mankind.

I love how they show that the Belter’s government, the OPA, has its origins more as a union or terrorist organization than anything else, and its culture is so distinct.

The addition of the character of Clarissa Mao is really brilliant for a few reasons. First, being in the mind of a character who is completely opposed to our main group of characters is really eye-opening. She could have just been cast as a typical villain, just a baddie with no soul. But instead we are made to actually feel for her, and while still believing that what she’s doing is bad…I found myself having empathy for her. I love that.

The addition of the character Anna Volovodov is also very interesting to me. Here you have a minister…someone you expect to be totally boring, but she’s implemented in such a way that we really find ourselves rooting for the minister who actually wants to make the world a batter place, the one who is more practical-minded who hasn’t forgotten that she’s here to help people, even as she swims in a shark tank of spiritual leaders who have all forgotten that because they’re enthralled with the quest for power, little better than the typical politicians.

And Anna is the perfect person to intercept Clarissa’s attempted acts of terrorism. It challenges her in unique ways. And also, I love that her intervening is what saves the crew of the Roci from destruction…not EVERYTHING is solved by our main characters, because after all, that’s not the way life is. Sometimes we need help.

It’s also very interesting to see how minister Anna interacts with the crew of the Roci. You have people with different worldview but because of life circumstances (such as Anna basically saving all their asses singlehandedly), they are beholden to her, and so give her the favor she asks, which is to “forgive” Clarissa Mao for trying to kill them all. Now that’s very interesting.

Another topic. It’s also very interesting to me how because of the alien intelligence choosing James Holden to speak to in visions of Miller, it essentially makes him out to be an even bigger megalomaniac than he really is. He ends up having to tell the rest of humanity: yeah, I’ve been seeing visions that are telling me that I alone have been called to the ring to unlock it. This turn of events is really interesting because 1) he gets unfairly judged for it, but also 2) does he not kind of deserve that unfair judgment? And 3) only certain types of people would follow visions telling them that there is secret truth that only they can unlock…if he wasn’t that kind of person, would the alien intelligence even have picked him? Or would it have picked him and been unable to do what needed to be done? Is it perhaps necessary that society has certain people in it with enough hubris to believe in themselves that much?

In short: lots of books have charismatic leaders with hero mentalities. But I don’t see the other books exploring the interesting questions around that archetype that the Expanse explores. It’s made me ask a lot of interesting questions.

One other word about the plot. I love that it’s basically the alien-created intelligence that is the adult in the situation, and the human factions are behaving like children. It's always humans who create the catastrophes that threaten the end of the world as we know it. Not the aliens. We want to blame the aliens. We are already blaming them before we've even discovered them, making all of these stories about aliens coming to invade Earth. But it's not them we have to worry about. It's us.