skygiants | (no subject)

Speaking 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jiggit

I got about 30% or 50% in, and it's really compelling reading but I wasn't in the right mood to do that mental piecing together. I did largely really enjoy what I did read, though.

From:

skygiants

I remember you tweeting about it, it's one of the things that got me interested! I'll be very curious to hear what you think if you ever go back to it.

From:

jiggit

Hopefully the stars will align soon.

From:

brownbetty

I found it really engaging, although it didn't quite cohere in the way I was hoping it would. I didn't know about the FatT connection, though.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I think it's taking a lot of fun big swings, and I don't know that all of them hit but it's still enjoyable to see the swings happen!

From:

brownbetty

The first chapter in, I called it "Witch King pulls Neuromancer's baby out of the reeds and raises it as it's own.” Later I decided that wasn't what it was going to be, but.

From:

sovay

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.

I read a pair of historical mysteries once that had something of this problem, in the sense that in order for the progression of the central relationship to be meaningful as it worked itself out in the first book, the reader needed to be in possession of information contained only in the second book, which although technically a prequel was written like a flashback and therefore really didn't work to start with, with the result that the novels feel like jigsaw pieces of one another and since it is not possible for both to be downloaded simultaneously into the reader's brain, I'm not sure what effect the author expected them to have. I've never seen anything quite like it. It would make the most sense if the author had written all of the material at the same time and then had to carve out separate novels from the morass of emotional complication, but I sincerely don't know. It has bugged me for nearly a decade now.

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.

What do they do?

From:

kore

Which books?

From:

sovay

Which books?

Barbara Cleverly's The Tomb of Zeus (2007) and Bright Hair About the Bone (2008). I'm actually quite fond of the cumulative effect of having read them, the linear experience is just very weird.

Edited (HTML) Date: 2024-03-28 11:55 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

oh that is structurally fascinating, but I deeply see the dilemma!

(They get large chunks of machine data downloaded into their brains ... [jazz hands] an archive! this is the conversation we are always having with our IT department about the difference between 'archiving' and 'backup' asjdlkf;dsjk;l)

From:

sovay

(They get large chunks of machine data downloaded into their brains ... [jazz hands] an archive! this is the conversation we are always having with our IT department about the difference between 'archiving' and 'backup' asjdlkf;dsjk;l)

People getting stuck with weird backup copies of ancient data is a classic sfnal premise! I associate it with one of the things that can happen to a protagonist in Andre Norton. If you poke the alien ruins, it's not their fault if your prefrontal cortex is suddenly full of star charts!

From:

imbir

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 on tenterhooks the entire time.

From:

skygiants

I know what my responsibilities are!

From:

sgac

I would like to read this, but the Kindle price is TWENTY! ONE! AUSTRALIAN! DOLLARS! That's nearly twice what I would usually pay! Why, publishers, why?

(Yes, I know, I should not be in the Amazon ecosystem. But the epub price is no better.)

From:

skygiants

TWENTY ONE AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS 😭

li...brary?

From:

mrissa

Combine it with The Archivist Wasp to start to make a sub-genre of non-archivist archive titles.

From:

teenybuffalo

Throw in "The Magnus Archives" if you don't mind a podcast (none of the protagonists have the least idea what archival is)

From:

skygiants

at least they are OCCASIONALLY trying to follow collections procedures

From:

skygiants

Let us not forget The Stormlight Archive, The Archived, and at least three different genre books just titled The Archivist!

From:

kate_nepveu

alas re: archivists!

apropos of Friends at the Table, do let me know when you're up to date on Palisade?

From:

skygiants

I WILL (we are currently two episodes behind and hoping to catch up or mostly catch up this weekend but did just hit DRE DOING THE THING AGAIN)

From:

kate_nepveu

DRE!!!!

From:

kadharonon

I think that part of the problem was that I'm pretty sure it wasn't just one, but two different archives inside Sunai's head, both Iterate Fractal AND the archive-killer archive, and they used the exact same PoV with nothing to distinguish them other than the types of thing they were saying.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I'm trying to remember because it's been a minute how long it took for me to figure out that there were two of them -- and it was fun to puzzlebox it out! but definitely occasionally one wished for a little more distinction

From:

kore

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

Oh dear.

From:

skygiants

at this point I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I encountered a genre book in which things were otherwise

From:

genarti

alkdj;ls a big machine god named ITERATE FRACTAL?? Yeah, uh, okay, the FatT influence here is written in neon letters, I see.

From:

skygiants

IT SURE IS

From:

chestnut_pod

despite the title, nobody in this book does anything that even begins to resemble the day-to-day work of an archivist. -- the eternal curse of the "library" book :(

From:

skygiants

THE ETERNAL CURSE!!!

(not you A Canticle for Liebowitz you did nothing wrong A Canticle for Liebowitz)

From:

shadaras

I had a great time with it because I was enjoying filling in all the gaps and implications about character relationships, but yeah I can see how that doesn't always work. :)

Definitely a fun book, wildly FatT-influenced, very curious what else Candon is gonna write.

From:

skygiants

Mostly I just wanted to Feel Something More when big interpersonal betrayals hit, and I think I needed to see a little bit more of what had happened in more normal times first!

ME TOO, and I'm also definitely planning on checking out Candon's Star Wars book >.>