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Mar. 27th, 2024 08:07 pmSpeaking of books that throw you into the deep end and expect you to keep up, I've been meaning to write up Emma Mieko Candon's The Archive Undying since I read it last year.
I was thinking about this book as I was reading Menewood because in many ways -- intentionally, I think -- The Archive Undying feels a bit like reading a sequel to a book that doesn't exist, although I didn't think that while I was reading it. While I was reading it I mostly thought it felt like Friends at the Table, although that's really very much cheating because I knew already that Candon was an FatT fan and also the link of influence in the big divine mecha is not difficult to spot.
It's definitely one of the most ambitious books I've read recently, in in plot, themes, conception. The protagonist, Sunai, is one of the last relics of the dead machine god Iterate Fractal; the book is narrated in large part by the fragmentary AI hiding out in his brain. Sunai has been On the Run, but is about to get sucked back into hometown politics as the remnants of his city-state are threatened by various powers who all have different feelings about the concept of machine gods in general and Iterate Fractal in specific.
The world is big, messy, complicated, and interesting. So, more broadly, is the book. It's deeply and thematically interested in free will, carceral states, individual and collective trauma, individual and collective consciousness, and of course, Big Machines Being Very Cool.
Sunai is also messy and interesting, even aside from also toting around several AI fragments in a trenchcoat, but I found him as a character harder to invest in because so many of his motivations for making choices and doing things rest on the weight of relationships that are more in the implied backstory than present on the page. Honestly, this is part of the reason I kept thinking about FatT, also; it reminded me specifically a bit of that kind of actual play storytelling, in which the gears of the story are Action and Set Pieces and Exploring the Lore of the World -- the kinds of things that in most RPG systems you roll to do -- while the interpersonal conversations between characters slide in through the interstitials. You've got to extrapolate a lot of emotional context from a relatively small amount of content, and then do the backfilling of the connective tissue yourself.
I expect this in a collaborative story being constructed somewhat on the fly. I do think a book perhaps needs a little bit more of that emotional connective tissue to hold itself together. Still, there's a lot of meat here, the concepts in the mix are all stuff I care about a lot, and I have a lot of respect for the scope of the ambition in the storytelling; I'm glad to have read it, and will pick up what Candon writes next.
And all that said: I am contractually obligated to report that, despite the title, nobody in this book does anything that even begins to resemble the day-to-day work of an archivist.
I was thinking about this book as I was reading Menewood because in many ways -- intentionally, I think -- The Archive Undying feels a bit like reading a sequel to a book that doesn't exist, although I didn't think that while I was reading it. While I was reading it I mostly thought it felt like Friends at the Table, although that's really very much cheating because I knew already that Candon was an FatT fan and also the link of influence in the big divine mecha is not difficult to spot.
It's definitely one of the most ambitious books I've read recently, in in plot, themes, conception. The protagonist, Sunai, is one of the last relics of the dead machine god Iterate Fractal; the book is narrated in large part by the fragmentary AI hiding out in his brain. Sunai has been On the Run, but is about to get sucked back into hometown politics as the remnants of his city-state are threatened by various powers who all have different feelings about the concept of machine gods in general and Iterate Fractal in specific.
The world is big, messy, complicated, and interesting. So, more broadly, is the book. It's deeply and thematically interested in free will, carceral states, individual and collective trauma, individual and collective consciousness, and of course, Big Machines Being Very Cool.
Sunai is also messy and interesting, even aside from also toting around several AI fragments in a trenchcoat, but I found him as a character harder to invest in because so many of his motivations for making choices and doing things rest on the weight of relationships that are more in the implied backstory than present on the page. Honestly, this is part of the reason I kept thinking about FatT, also; it reminded me specifically a bit of that kind of actual play storytelling, in which the gears of the story are Action and Set Pieces and Exploring the Lore of the World -- the kinds of things that in most RPG systems you roll to do -- while the interpersonal conversations between characters slide in through the interstitials. You've got to extrapolate a lot of emotional context from a relatively small amount of content, and then do the backfilling of the connective tissue yourself.
I expect this in a collaborative story being constructed somewhat on the fly. I do think a book perhaps needs a little bit more of that emotional connective tissue to hold itself together. Still, there's a lot of meat here, the concepts in the mix are all stuff I care about a lot, and I have a lot of respect for the scope of the ambition in the storytelling; I'm glad to have read it, and will pick up what Candon writes next.
And all that said: I am contractually obligated to report that, despite the title, nobody in this book does anything that even begins to resemble the day-to-day work of an archivist.
