(no subject)

[skygiants]

I'm most familiar with Max Gladstone through his Craft sequence books, but his latest solo novel, The Empress of Forever - a gonzo space opera about a rogue tech wunderkind who gets kidnapped by a space dictator from the far-distant future - reminded me less of those and more of China Miéville or Sheri S. Tepper, with maybe a little bit of the Twilight Mirage season of Friends at the Table thrown in. China Miéville, especially his early stuff, because of the incredible density of the weird worldbuilding; Sheri S. Tepper because, for all her flaws, she's the only other author I've ever seen mix time travel and space opera in this way that ends up with something more or less shaped like a portal fantasy.

(None of these associations are things that Max Gladstone mentioned as influences in his afterward, so, you know, take all of this with a grain of salt. Also, it took me like 40% of the book to realize that it was also a retelling of Journey to the West, which really should have been a gimme from the minute a powerful character turned up with a protagonist-controlled punishment crown around her head.)

The plot, more or less: Vivian Liao, a startup mogul from a near-future dystopia, has decided that it's her responsibility to save the world by essentially creating the AI singularity, with a college buddy along for the ride. Unfortunately, right in the middle of Operation: Secretly Revolutionize Machine Intelligence, the Empress of Forever swoops in, stops time, and carries her off, after which Vivian wakes up imprisoned on a spaceship in the middle of a giant battle between evil robots and space monks.

Vivian just wants to escape the Empress and get home to rescue her friend, and soon acquires a collection of quest companions who for one reason or another are willing to help out:

- Hong, cyborg space monk of an Empress-related religion who thinks Vivian is an important religious artifact; sweet but misguided; believes he is the voice of reason, is probably not the voice of reason; has a good and interesting friendship with Vivian and I'm quite fond of him
- Xiara, daughter of the chief of hereditary warrior spaceship pilots who have been grounded for several generations on a technologically devastated planet; very much the Barbarian Princess Love Interest archetype in re: Vivian but gets a bit more interesting as the book goes on, though probably the least compelling character for me personally
- Gray, a sulky teenage shapechanging sentience-devouring pile of goo who spends the book attempting to internalize the concept of 'ethics'; I love him
- Zanj, long-imprisoned rebel and rival of the Empress, who for mysterious reasons has the aforementioned protagonist-controlled punishment crown on her head; think the Monkey King or Loki or any other charming but potentially treacherous chaos avatar pal; mysteriously is not a love interest although she has vastly more compelling tension with Vivian than Xiara, sorry Xiara

I enjoyed a lot of things about this book, including Vivian herself; despite my dubiety about Tech Mogul Heroes (a dubiety which I think Max Gladstone shares, as things play out, but all the same) I could not help but enjoy the moments in which she addresses problems using the tech project management framework with which she is familiar. Let's try to resolve the issues between the cyborg space monk and the chaos avatar goddess during morning standup! A good joke every time.

It definitely also was sometimes kind of a slog to get through - the worldbuilding is of the sort where you're constantly running to catch up, and there is just so much book that sometimes you're just like "please, hang on, I need to catch my breath for a minute here!" This was especially true in the first half as I bided my time waiting for Vivian & co. to finally figure out the inevitable fact that Vivian's AI singularity is what caused the world as it exists in the future and Vivian is a version of the Empress, a hypothesis so obvious that it seems it really should have occurred to Vivian the Genius sometime before page three hundred but once we got that out of the way everything picked up much more for me. The real power to save the universe was the power of friendship all along!

Comments

[oracne]

I bounced off the first Craft book but it sounds like I really need to read this one, damn it.

[skygiants]

The first Craft book is my favorite, but I've bounced off others -- for me the key with his stuff seems to be whether I lock in with a protagonist/theme early and then stick with it all the way, or whether I never quite break far enough into engagement with a character to keep up.

[musesfool]

Yeah it was definitely a lot of book, and a lot of book before Vivian figured out what was obvious to the reader almost immediately.

[ambyr]

a lot of book before Vivian figured out what was obvious to the reader almost immediately.

This has been an ongoing issue for me in Gladstone's Craft books; I eventually stopped reading because it bugged me so much. I suspect it's a reason for me not to read this one at all.

[skygiants]

Admittedly I did not call specifically 'practice version of herself from a replay simulation' but I feel like other than that detail most of the context was pretty much there for the taking ....

[brownbetty]

and also, weirdly earth-specific metaphors and stuff cropping up early. But I felt genuinely pleased by the reveal that it wasn't time-travel, and how much Viv finds that that rocks her solipsism.

[brownbetty]

hah, pretty much from chapter one, you're like: "You seem like you could be a super-villain," and then she mights a lady super-villain with ~~maybe~~ time-travel powers, and you're like "I think I see where this is going."

[kore]

I also kinda bounced off the Craft book, but this sounds neat!

[skygiants]

Personally, I like some of the Craft stuff better, but there were parts of this that really worked for me and this is definitely an interesting turn for him.

[hebethen]

Vivian/Zanj is ripe for ficcage!

I actually found Xiara's solo arc interesting -- the whole living up to her mother, living up to her entire history and heritage, trying to retain humanity, etc. -- and Vivian/Xiara takes on more meaning for me when embedded within that context, as opposed to as a romance-for-its-own-end, if that makes any sense.

[skygiants]

It makes a lot of sense! I liked a lot of the stuff with Xiara towards the end, when she's struggling to retain a sense of self in and around her connection with the spaceships, and I love the concept of a culture that has trained for flight for generations without having the opportunity to put their skills to practice, but for me her role as Vivian's love interest distracted from that arc rather than adding to it.

[snickfic]

As someone who absolutely loves the density of China Mieville's worldbuilding, this all sounds very intriguing. I think I will add this to my to-read list. :D

[skygiants]

It definitely feels a bit like Mieville at his most playful - here's a new stop on the road trip and another piece of dizzyingly high-concept worldbuilding, now let's move along, there's much more to go!

[sovay]

Vivian's AI singularity is what caused the world as it exists in the future and Vivian is a version of the Empress

"Faber John's wife was called Vivian. Everyone knows that."

[conuly]

Crossover headcanon accepted.

[landofnowhere]

Oh, sweet. I'm not sure how Faber John fits into the picture, but those are two great tastes that go well together.

(For a moment I had Faber John mixed up with Prester John, and I was very confused about your comment.)

[skygiants]

A GOOD NAME FOR POWERFUL TIME EMPRESSES APPARENTLY

[larryhammer]

... okay, I need to read this.

charming but potentially treacherous chaos avatar pal

An excellent description of Monkey King, and one I am not going to share with Eaglet until AFTER Halloween season, as that is their costume and they already have their own interpretation of his character.

(I need a Monkey King icon, don't I.)

[skygiants]

It's funny because I'd watched the kdrama based on Journey to the West not that long ago, so that was the main comparison point in my mind -- and honestly I was quite impressed with Vivian's ethics in managing a companion trapped by a Punishment Crown by comparison!

[larryhammer]

Heh.

Library I pass on the way home from work had Empress of Forever, and so now I do too. Read the first two chapters before going to bed, and so far so good.

[qian]

Interesting! So is Vivian Tripitaka, if she controls the Monkey King equivalent's torture tiara?

[hebethen]

Ooh, I know the answer to this one because I literally just skimmed the AMA:

As for the character correspondences—Zanj is the closest to her Xiyouji springboard, intentionally—I thought it was important to be honest about the inspiration I was drawing with her character design. Viv and Hong both started with riffs on Tang Xuanzang—Tang Xuanzang in Xiyouji has a sense of a "contemporary" character, or near-contemporary, questing through a fantastical landscape, which informed Viv's story, but his monastic leanings couldn't hang on Viv's character, and Hong grew out of that, while assuming some of Wujing's quiet determination. Gray started with Zhu Bajie's appetite and shapeshifting and his character really launched off in a different direction. And yes, Xiara started with me always having a fondness for those sequences where the rest of the team has been incapacitated by a demon and the Dragon Horse turns back into a dragon to save the day. He's such a nice and helpful dragon! And everyone forgets he's there 85% of the time. Please, won't someone think of the dragons

[qian]

Ah cool, thanks for that!

[skygiants]

I did not know any of that, but I would have guessed that Tripitaka was split between Vivian and Hong!

I can't believe it turns out this book is Max Gladstone's Tripitaka/Dragon Horse fanfic.

[qian]

Right? Also it confirms my belief that any adaptation of JTTW that doesn't ship Tripitaka and Monkey King is misguided.

[hebethen]

Have you seen the recentish NZ/Aus TV adaptation that was aimed at children and if so what did you think of it?

[qian]

I haven't!

[dimestore_romeo]

I spent most of the novel absolutely BAFFLED that Zanj was not the love interest. It makes so much sense! The chemistry is there! Cranky space pirate queen!

It wasn't that Xiara was unbearably bland, exactly, but the romance just had...no spark compared the fun tension and trust-building and drama of Vivien's relationship with Zanj.

BAFFLED.

[skygiants]

Yeah, Vivian's relationship with Zanj is vastly more compelling -- though, honestly, Vivian's dynamics with everybody else are more compelling than the romance with Xiara! The friendship through betrayal with Hong is really good! Gray's loyalty is adorable! Xiara's affection ... feels mandated by narrative fiat. But romance has never been Gladstone's strong point, tbh, he's much better at writing interestingly tense friendships, so perhaps the fact that Vivian and Zanj's romance is not narratively mandated is for the best and then fanfic can take it away....

[shadaras]

That dynamic thing might also be why the only romance of his I've liked is in Ruin of Angels, where the romances are "Are we fighting or fucking and why can't we just actually stay together?" and "ENDLESS PINING until forced into confession, at which point it's revealed that it's reciprocated", and the romances are incredibly Not The Point of the book, but are still nice to see. The relationships are built on a lot more friendship stuff (or friendship/betrayal stuff), so... more robust.

[shadaras]

Zanj just matches the sheer amount of personality and drive Viv has so much more than Xiara did. Xiara was fine, but I loved the idea of her and her culture more than I liked anything else? Like, the romance was alright, but mostly I was sad about it not being Viv/Zanj.

[skygiants]

Yeah, Xiara and her culture were very conceptually cool but didn't quite come together for me on execution -- and I think also it feels off-balance because Zanj is so very much a co-protagonist, in a lot of ways, and Xiara is very much not, so her story feels much less her own story and more an accessory to Viv's. Which is never a problem with Zanj!

[shadaras]

Yes, definitely. I'd love a story that focused on Xiara and her people! But they're painted in such broad strokes, as opposed to the specificity of Zanj that it's a little harder to get invested.

It's also interesting because Xiara is introduced as a member of a culture before we're introduced to her as a party member, as opposed to Hong. With Hong, when we meet his culture, it's interesting seeing how it's the same/different as he's presented it.

With Gray, it's through him that we learn that his people even have a culture and aren't just advanced programs, so seeing that instead of just hearing about it is really cool.

With but Xiara, we're introduced to her alongside her culture, so there's no compare/contrast "How is Xiara's presentation of these people the same/different from how they are when in focus?", which also makes it a little harder to care -- she's just An Exemplar. (Not that Hong and Gray aren't, but... there's more depth there, since they/their culture is presented antagonistically for a while.)

[whimsyful]

Like you, I was also surprised that 1) it wasn't immediately obvious that the Empress is another version of Vivian and 2) Xiara is Vivian's love interest instead of Zanj. Not only because there were much more character parallels between the two and interesting tension, but because I clocked that this was Gladstone's Journey to the West IN SPACE as soon as the punishment crown showed up and I pretty much expect Tripitaka/Monkey King to be the main pairing in any JTTW retelling if there is shipping at this point. To the point where I kept expecting Xiara to be the decoy love interest and Zanj to be the endgame one - I mean, Xiara pretty rightfully calls Vivian out on her selfishness and breaks things off and then Viv and Zanj have a heart to heart after the not-really big twist, can you blame me?
The biggest surprise for me was how much I ended up loving Gray? Zhu Bajie is my least favorite JTTW character but by the end I was like "I'm having Feelings about a sentient pile of hungry goo".

[skygiants]

Your expectation was also my expectation! I can't decide if I think Max Gladstone went in knowing that Tripitaka/Monkey King is the default pairing and was pleased with himself for subverting the expectation or not, but either way I still think it would have been better the other way around. >.>

I LOVED GRAY SO MUCH. He was such a terrible teenager and tried so hard and went through such genuine character development! The moment when he decided not to eat his farmer friend even though he was on the verge of starving to death was really extremely touching.