Like the old saw about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, in Dust, the technology has become indistinguishable from gods, and the humans who let themselves be remade by it are only demi-gods. The effect, then, is of a strange [book: Pilgrim's Progress].

The world building reminds me a bit of Verner Vinge. I want to call it imaginative, but that's not strong enough. Certain medieval trappings gave what nearly always turned out to be a misleading impression of familiarity: it's not utterly foreign, it's only that there's no certain ground to stand on, so just when I thought I was getting an idea of how the world worked, something mundane would turn out to be fantastic.

The story mostly follows Rien, a serving girl whose life is abruptly and irrevocably changed when the knight Percival is taken prisoner, and claims to be Rien's sister. Rien is ideally suited to take the reader through the world, since she has never left the keep, everything outside of it is mysterious to her, although not as mysterious as it is to the reader.

Rien is mean, common, mundane, and her sister is exalt-- a distinction more real and yet more fluid than merely commoner and noble. The mean live a human span, the exalt are nearly immortal; the mean are shaped by their genetics and environment, the exalt shape themselves by their whim.

Of note: in this new world, gender and sexuality are different enough that even the familiar terms don't mean what they do in our society: what's the meaning of 'female' if you can remake yourself with a thought, and what's the meaning of heterosexual if your lover can too?

There are actually two different persons in this book who do not identify as male or female in different ways, and I found it quite odd that one was given a pronoun, and the other was the occasion for complete avoidance of pronouns, and I think it were anyone less skilled than Bear dancing around use of pronouns, it would be somewhat ridiculous, but Bear managed it. I think it probably helped that the scenes requiring it were not too long.

Bear is obviously doing things with names, most blatantly with Percival, the Knight who keeps herself pure, the better to follow her quest. I wonder, then, what I am missing with the title of the novel? The dust into which life is breathed, perhaps?

The book ends neatly enough, but apparently there is a sequel.