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Oct. 10th, 2019 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI'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!
(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!
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Date: 2019-10-10 09:37 pm (UTC)(For a moment I had Faber John mixed up with Prester John, and I was very confused about your comment.)