I’ve received so many strong specific and utterly conflicting recommendations to read Ra. People have described this story so many different ways to me, and most of them are right because this narrative is all over the place.

I love that we start out with “Imagine magic, but like in a society.”. Great premise; you love to see it, definitely go run with that. I could navel-gaze all day about the rules of magic and how civilization can build on it the same way we use other technologies.

But the right turn into space war just feels bland, and a let down. It’s like someone trying to teach you how a magic trick is performed by explaining an unnecessarily difficult method which they can’t quite get right, when a simpler approach is right there, and you’d rather just watch the rest of the magic show anyway.

The meta-narrative is so deep in the genre of rationalist fiction that it rapidly gives up what’s fun about the novel for some pretty boring upload conflict deep future stuff. A lot of that feels like an excuse to bust out more neato whizz bang sci-fi vibes, but the stakes are just too far from any of the character beats, and the whole thing blunders off into Accelerando without anything to add.

Disappointing. There are the bones of a novel here and there, but the writing deliberately avoids those elements at every turn.