Terra Ignota - The Will to Battle
Nov. 2nd, 2023 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunasarielThe Will to Battle, by Ada Palmer.
I really enjoyed TLTL and 7S; I thought they were clever and engaging and well-written in a way I haven't seen in a while. I loved WtB. AP's stunt writing reaches a whole new level here, as she carries an incredible amount of tension throughout the whole book, in a way that, by all rights, should have had me throwing up my hands and going "oh, whatever, this is the seventh 'is it war???' moment and I don't care anymore," but I never, ever did. I noticed a lot more stunt writing (for example, ballsy and also elegantly efficient move to deliver important worldbuilding information via filibuster during a tense Senatorial standoff), and there were a lot of flourishes that I loved (more on these below), but omg, that ending absolutely knocked me flat on my back.
I don't think a (new-to-me) book has made me cry at all this year, but I was crying pretty much from the Utopians frantically trying to reach their suddenly-silent friends (and their names! Kirk and Oz and Fermi and Wukong and Turing and Quark and Avalon and Kili), to the U-beasts flying to the rescue and knowing that they were too late, to "Neverland rushed to Atlantis to save Utopia," all the way up to "Mycroft always said no one should mourn them. Well, shut up, Mycroft, we’re going to make you eat your lunch, and take your pills, and sleep your hours, and rest your rest, and we’re going to mourn you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. And we’re going to make sure your damned seeds fly." Aurgh, now I'm making myself cry again.
Anyway, gorgeous, powerful writing. That apparently makes me break out in run-on sentences. XD
And again, that complexity at allows me to cry for the destruction of Atlantis after the Utopians had just finished kidnapping a bunch of people that they considered dangerous and blowing up a bunch of universities and labs and so on that could plausibly be used to create WMDs, even though they (perhaps untruthfully?) assured everyone that the buildings had been evacuated before they were destroyed. I'm coming to find the Utopians more and more ominous, in that they're absolutely willing to die for their better future, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that many of them are willing go beyond mere self-sacrifice. And yet, and yet! Their boundless hope for the future, their willingness to attempt the impossible, their magitek and alternate worlds - that's more or less what I'm hoping for from the far future. I'd like to stay on Earth, thank you very much, but that sense of optimism and joy in discovery, to me, that is sci-fi.
Of course, that's a very Star Trek-like future, where we've overcome most or all of our social ills and tendency to start hitting each other with rocks at the slightest provocation. It's why so many people seem to fear and hate the Utopians, and why Certain People (Cato, probably Mycroft, maybe Cornel MASON as well) seem to idolize them. They do rather give the impression of having ascended beyond our pettymortal squabbles (even though I'm damn sure they haven't actually) - like Cato said, "They're not dirty like us." The rest of us have to contend with trials and politicking and various sordid scandals.
Oh, and speaking of Cato! I did definitely get a happy little sniff when he was rescued by his old CMSIJSS students and finally got to take the Utopian Oath (which it sounds like he's been living by for a while anyway). Good lord, that poor dude has earned a break. And now he's finally got it! (Well, )
But back to the sordid scandals, etc. I'm now more certain that, were I in the TI-verse, I would be Hiveguard - if I had access to Mycroft's history(/ies). J.E.D.D. has gone from notsureifwant-squint.gif to "NOPE." I mean, I was originally pretty sus when he claimed that he had no interest in assuming any sort of power. Then he claimed that he was willing to assume power if asked, but only long enough to fix the current crisis. Then he said that, okay, he would not only be assuming power of several Hives at once, and clearly things were bad enough that he would be assuming complete, unilateral, and permanent power. And now he's demanding complete submission from all seven Hives (plus the Hiveless, I assume?) and promising to take control by force if they don'tsurrender submit.
And the Hiveguard has style, no doubt. It's style that I can't completely trust, but I admit I cheered internally when the Olympian Humanist whose name I forget (Quarriman?) very handily shut Cookie up by inventing the bulls-eye insignia. Granted, that was far from an unalloyed positive. As Achilles points out, she's just created sides - Us and Them; one more step on the road to war. But still, like I said above, I have much more faith in the Hive system, as flawed and corruption-riddled as it currently is, over the One Enlightened Despot style of government, no matter how divine that despot thinks he is.
Unlike TLTL and 7S, I had fewer definite Favorite Scenes in WtB; it was more just that I was fully immersed in the overall tapestry of the world and all of the people therein. I could stop and marvel at particular bits of narrative artistry (such as Achilles making the rounds of the Hive leaders in the sort of pinwheeling series of conversations that plays with location and interlocutor, where he could have plausibly been speaking to any two of three people, and indeed it was implied that he was) or lol'ing at particular lines (Achilles, again, was particularly good at these, from Where do you live? (Wherever I can hide.) How old are you? (Eleven or three thousand.) Do you speak Ancient Greek? (Yes.) Do you think your existence means the Greek gods are real? (I hope not.) Greek metaphysics? (I sure hope not; that afterlife was terrible, and I’m not looking forward to going back.) to “Someone do something distracting,” I hissed. “Chair Quarriman?” Achilles interrupted in the expansive, thundering voice which had carried his orders across assembled squadrons in the age before the microphone. [...] “I want to compete in the Games, for the Greek Team, in track and field, but I didn’t qualify formally because I was five centimeters tall during the try-outs, and I don’t have a birth certificate because they didn’t use them yet in the millennium when I was born.”), but mostly I just wanted to see what So-and-So would do next, and what That Dude (CA-approved gender neutral) would think about it, and how Those Other Guys would react, and on and on and on.
This is how I described the situation to Bestchat, about halfway through:
Man, WtB is fucking wild. So far we have:
- A secret army of janitors being trained by Patroclus, reincarnated as a two-inch-tall veteran of one or more World Wars by a preteen with an imperfect grasp of history;
- Achilles would do it, but he’s busy hanging out with the astronauts;
- Evil Karen facing off with the Emperor of Rome over, amongst other things, whether murder is still illegal even if the math checks out;
- A serial killer thinks (and actually has pretty solid evidence) that he’s found God in a) the aforementioned tween and b) a guy who was born in the 25th century but raised in the 18th, and is now the world’s most powerful newspaper columnist;
- An evil psychologist decided to try to take over the world via getting world leaders addicted to sexy 18th century philosopher LARPing, and may have semi-inadvertently started World War III or IV
And it is indeed fucking wild! Objectively speaking, there's a lot of big cinematic stuff going on - several trials/courtroom scenes, several kidnappings, one storming of a hospital, and the Olympics, even aside from the ending - but I think it says a lot about Ada Palmer that the tensest and most shocking moments are quiet ones. Thisbe's escape, Achilles choosing a side, and J.E.D.D. revealing his plans to, essentially, destroy the world and remake it but better this time.
Speaking of Achilles! Even though the vast majority of the romantic relationships that Ada Palmer writes are some degree of fucked-up, I still find most of them...weirdly sweet? Yes, most of them involve murder at one point or another, but her couples clearly see each other clearly, and love and respect and care for each other exactly as they are, which is actually quite romantic. Like, OK, Apollo Mojave did stab Cornel MASON that one time, and Mycroft does get all *dreamy sigh* at Saladin threatening to mail a mob boss' kid their ba'sib's fingers and slurping meat off of a bone that he's like 80% sure isn't human. But still, *dreamy sigh* nonetheless. I even like Vivien/Bryar (especially since it does sound like they've patched things up - good for them!) and Cornel/Achilles (especially given the whole "I need you on my side" thing).
I think making Spain an Emperor is a terrible idea, and he certainly agrees - I think he and Aral Vorkosigan would have a lot to talk about on this front. At least Aral had an exit strategy from emperorhood baked in. Poor Spain, though - all he's done is be sensible and kind and rigorously stick to a personal code of honor, and suddenly it seems like he's the last leader in the world who's not a psychopath or Kosala.
I'm (still) real worried about Carlyle, you guys. It's funny how Mycroft's predictions keep coming true, albeit in a sort of sideways fashion - he predicted that meeting J.E.D.D. would destroy Bridger, and that happened; back in TLTL, he predicted that if Carlyle went into Madame's, they would rape him and place bets on who could get him to sign over to Blacklaw first. Which, at the time, seemed ridiculous for the softest-hearted, most rules-abiding, most Cousinly Cousin you ever did see...but now here's Carlyle with a Blacklaw sash, and even though he's explicitly consented to everything Dominic has done to him (and I'm not discounting the possibility that they've had sex, although it would surprise me), it does read very much like a rape. (And yes, I'm still using he/him pronouns for Carlyle - his decision to start using she/her pronouns strikes me as deeply, deeply coerced.)
Concerns aside, the scene at the Vatican was one of my absolute favorites - the Pope's confessor trying to kill Madame with an censer after knowing her for like two hours (and pretty much everybody else going "yeah, no, that's fair"), Felix Faust being genuinely kind to Carlyle (forty-eight pictures of things eating bananas!) and being physically able to shut himself up (oh, and "Codswallop!" - strong words, my dude), Achilles' very "Of course the gods exist, that's no cause to go believin' in 'em" response when asked about the theological implications of his existence, and everybody being "...are you SURE you're sure about this???" to Spain, and his extremely Starkly response of "I said I will marry Madame, and therefore I must. :| " (On a related note, when I went out to dinner withhamsterwoman to shout excitedly at her about TI, I took a chance on some durian gelato. It was, as predicted, awful, and she kept making sensible suggestions that I, like, ask for a cup, or order something else. Long story short, "I must marry Madame" is now my shorthand for "I've made my bed and now I'm going to lie in it" because I am also a Stark :|. And yes, I did finish the durian gelato.)
Oddly enough, Ganymede acts as a notable data point in favor of the Nurturist's argument in this book. One of the few times we see him, he's in jail, where he's emaciated, injured, and sleep-deprived because he refused to sleep on sheets that aren't silk and tore out the IV that was trying to mix impure! common!!! nutrients with his royal blood. These are the actions of a profoundly unwell man, and it's very clear that his unwell-ness is the direct result of the manner in which he was brought up, to the point where he rejects everything from standard accommodations to (potentially) life-saving medical treatment. The Nurturists are still deeply odious people, and overall I very much think their outlook is the wrong one, but it's fascinating that Ada could include such a strong argument in favor of some of her most hateful antagonists. Steelmanning at its finest!
Random bits:
And finally, we now know who 9A is!! This is one of those things that is obvious in hindsight (so much is made of Mycroft becoming the Eighth Anonymous, 9A follows closely on that), but completely blindsided me at the time. This explains so much about the previous books as primary sources/documents in their own right. Like, for example, I thought that the Servicers had been brainwashed in TLTL because Kosala was able to easily distract them from an awkward question with an offer of ice cream. But if 9A/Outis/No-one was there, then they might have had darn good reason to obfuscate the Servicers' true degree of organization/canniness (pun not intended). Oh, and speaking of Outis - I'm intrigued to see how direct an Odysseus reference this will be.
My Seven-Ten List... I mean, list of favorite/least favorite characters:
Favorites:
Concerned About But Still Interesting:
Fuck You In Particular:
I really enjoyed TLTL and 7S; I thought they were clever and engaging and well-written in a way I haven't seen in a while. I loved WtB. AP's stunt writing reaches a whole new level here, as she carries an incredible amount of tension throughout the whole book, in a way that, by all rights, should have had me throwing up my hands and going "oh, whatever, this is the seventh 'is it war???' moment and I don't care anymore," but I never, ever did. I noticed a lot more stunt writing (for example, ballsy and also elegantly efficient move to deliver important worldbuilding information via filibuster during a tense Senatorial standoff), and there were a lot of flourishes that I loved (more on these below), but omg, that ending absolutely knocked me flat on my back.
I don't think a (new-to-me) book has made me cry at all this year, but I was crying pretty much from the Utopians frantically trying to reach their suddenly-silent friends (and their names! Kirk and Oz and Fermi and Wukong and Turing and Quark and Avalon and Kili), to the U-beasts flying to the rescue and knowing that they were too late, to "Neverland rushed to Atlantis to save Utopia," all the way up to "Mycroft always said no one should mourn them. Well, shut up, Mycroft, we’re going to make you eat your lunch, and take your pills, and sleep your hours, and rest your rest, and we’re going to mourn you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. And we’re going to make sure your damned seeds fly." Aurgh, now I'm making myself cry again.
Anyway, gorgeous, powerful writing. That apparently makes me break out in run-on sentences. XD
And again, that complexity at allows me to cry for the destruction of Atlantis after the Utopians had just finished kidnapping a bunch of people that they considered dangerous and blowing up a bunch of universities and labs and so on that could plausibly be used to create WMDs, even though they (perhaps untruthfully?) assured everyone that the buildings had been evacuated before they were destroyed. I'm coming to find the Utopians more and more ominous, in that they're absolutely willing to die for their better future, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that many of them are willing go beyond mere self-sacrifice. And yet, and yet! Their boundless hope for the future, their willingness to attempt the impossible, their magitek and alternate worlds - that's more or less what I'm hoping for from the far future. I'd like to stay on Earth, thank you very much, but that sense of optimism and joy in discovery, to me, that is sci-fi.
Of course, that's a very Star Trek-like future, where we've overcome most or all of our social ills and tendency to start hitting each other with rocks at the slightest provocation. It's why so many people seem to fear and hate the Utopians, and why Certain People (Cato, probably Mycroft, maybe Cornel MASON as well) seem to idolize them. They do rather give the impression of having ascended beyond our petty
Oh, and speaking of Cato! I did definitely get a happy little sniff when he was rescued by his old CMSIJSS students and finally got to take the Utopian Oath (which it sounds like he's been living by for a while anyway). Good lord, that poor dude has earned a break. And now he's finally got it! (Well, )
But back to the sordid scandals, etc. I'm now more certain that, were I in the TI-verse, I would be Hiveguard - if I had access to Mycroft's history(/ies). J.E.D.D. has gone from notsureifwant-squint.gif to "NOPE." I mean, I was originally pretty sus when he claimed that he had no interest in assuming any sort of power. Then he claimed that he was willing to assume power if asked, but only long enough to fix the current crisis. Then he said that, okay, he would not only be assuming power of several Hives at once, and clearly things were bad enough that he would be assuming complete, unilateral, and permanent power. And now he's demanding complete submission from all seven Hives (plus the Hiveless, I assume?) and promising to take control by force if they don't
And the Hiveguard has style, no doubt. It's style that I can't completely trust, but I admit I cheered internally when the Olympian Humanist whose name I forget (Quarriman?) very handily shut Cookie up by inventing the bulls-eye insignia. Granted, that was far from an unalloyed positive. As Achilles points out, she's just created sides - Us and Them; one more step on the road to war. But still, like I said above, I have much more faith in the Hive system, as flawed and corruption-riddled as it currently is, over the One Enlightened Despot style of government, no matter how divine that despot thinks he is.
Unlike TLTL and 7S, I had fewer definite Favorite Scenes in WtB; it was more just that I was fully immersed in the overall tapestry of the world and all of the people therein. I could stop and marvel at particular bits of narrative artistry (such as Achilles making the rounds of the Hive leaders in the sort of pinwheeling series of conversations that plays with location and interlocutor, where he could have plausibly been speaking to any two of three people, and indeed it was implied that he was) or lol'ing at particular lines (Achilles, again, was particularly good at these, from Where do you live? (Wherever I can hide.) How old are you? (Eleven or three thousand.) Do you speak Ancient Greek? (Yes.) Do you think your existence means the Greek gods are real? (I hope not.) Greek metaphysics? (I sure hope not; that afterlife was terrible, and I’m not looking forward to going back.) to “Someone do something distracting,” I hissed. “Chair Quarriman?” Achilles interrupted in the expansive, thundering voice which had carried his orders across assembled squadrons in the age before the microphone. [...] “I want to compete in the Games, for the Greek Team, in track and field, but I didn’t qualify formally because I was five centimeters tall during the try-outs, and I don’t have a birth certificate because they didn’t use them yet in the millennium when I was born.”), but mostly I just wanted to see what So-and-So would do next, and what That Dude (CA-approved gender neutral) would think about it, and how Those Other Guys would react, and on and on and on.
This is how I described the situation to Bestchat, about halfway through:
Man, WtB is fucking wild. So far we have:
- A secret army of janitors being trained by Patroclus, reincarnated as a two-inch-tall veteran of one or more World Wars by a preteen with an imperfect grasp of history;
- Achilles would do it, but he’s busy hanging out with the astronauts;
- Evil Karen facing off with the Emperor of Rome over, amongst other things, whether murder is still illegal even if the math checks out;
- A serial killer thinks (and actually has pretty solid evidence) that he’s found God in a) the aforementioned tween and b) a guy who was born in the 25th century but raised in the 18th, and is now the world’s most powerful newspaper columnist;
- An evil psychologist decided to try to take over the world via getting world leaders addicted to sexy 18th century philosopher LARPing, and may have semi-inadvertently started World War III or IV
And it is indeed fucking wild! Objectively speaking, there's a lot of big cinematic stuff going on - several trials/courtroom scenes, several kidnappings, one storming of a hospital, and the Olympics, even aside from the ending - but I think it says a lot about Ada Palmer that the tensest and most shocking moments are quiet ones. Thisbe's escape, Achilles choosing a side, and J.E.D.D. revealing his plans to, essentially, destroy the world and remake it but better this time.
Speaking of Achilles! Even though the vast majority of the romantic relationships that Ada Palmer writes are some degree of fucked-up, I still find most of them...weirdly sweet? Yes, most of them involve murder at one point or another, but her couples clearly see each other clearly, and love and respect and care for each other exactly as they are, which is actually quite romantic. Like, OK, Apollo Mojave did stab Cornel MASON that one time, and Mycroft does get all *dreamy sigh* at Saladin threatening to mail a mob boss' kid their ba'sib's fingers and slurping meat off of a bone that he's like 80% sure isn't human. But still, *dreamy sigh* nonetheless. I even like Vivien/Bryar (especially since it does sound like they've patched things up - good for them!) and Cornel/Achilles (especially given the whole "I need you on my side" thing).
I think making Spain an Emperor is a terrible idea, and he certainly agrees - I think he and Aral Vorkosigan would have a lot to talk about on this front. At least Aral had an exit strategy from emperorhood baked in. Poor Spain, though - all he's done is be sensible and kind and rigorously stick to a personal code of honor, and suddenly it seems like he's the last leader in the world who's not a psychopath or Kosala.
I'm (still) real worried about Carlyle, you guys. It's funny how Mycroft's predictions keep coming true, albeit in a sort of sideways fashion - he predicted that meeting J.E.D.D. would destroy Bridger, and that happened; back in TLTL, he predicted that if Carlyle went into Madame's, they would rape him and place bets on who could get him to sign over to Blacklaw first. Which, at the time, seemed ridiculous for the softest-hearted, most rules-abiding, most Cousinly Cousin you ever did see...but now here's Carlyle with a Blacklaw sash, and even though he's explicitly consented to everything Dominic has done to him (and I'm not discounting the possibility that they've had sex, although it would surprise me), it does read very much like a rape. (And yes, I'm still using he/him pronouns for Carlyle - his decision to start using she/her pronouns strikes me as deeply, deeply coerced.)
Concerns aside, the scene at the Vatican was one of my absolute favorites - the Pope's confessor trying to kill Madame with an censer after knowing her for like two hours (and pretty much everybody else going "yeah, no, that's fair"), Felix Faust being genuinely kind to Carlyle (forty-eight pictures of things eating bananas!) and being physically able to shut himself up (oh, and "Codswallop!" - strong words, my dude), Achilles' very "Of course the gods exist, that's no cause to go believin' in 'em" response when asked about the theological implications of his existence, and everybody being "...are you SURE you're sure about this???" to Spain, and his extremely Starkly response of "I said I will marry Madame, and therefore I must. :| " (On a related note, when I went out to dinner with
hamsterwoman to shout excitedly at her about TI, I took a chance on some durian gelato. It was, as predicted, awful, and she kept making sensible suggestions that I, like, ask for a cup, or order something else. Long story short, "I must marry Madame" is now my shorthand for "I've made my bed and now I'm going to lie in it" Oddly enough, Ganymede acts as a notable data point in favor of the Nurturist's argument in this book. One of the few times we see him, he's in jail, where he's emaciated, injured, and sleep-deprived because he refused to sleep on sheets that aren't silk and tore out the IV that was trying to mix impure! common!!! nutrients with his royal blood. These are the actions of a profoundly unwell man, and it's very clear that his unwell-ness is the direct result of the manner in which he was brought up, to the point where he rejects everything from standard accommodations to (potentially) life-saving medical treatment. The Nurturists are still deeply odious people, and overall I very much think their outlook is the wrong one, but it's fascinating that Ada could include such a strong argument in favor of some of her most hateful antagonists. Steelmanning at its finest!
Random bits:
- So apparently Perry-Kraye is back? And he was behind the Canner Device theft that kicked everything off in the first place?? *And* he was the one who stabbed Mycroft??? Like, I don't *dis*believe it, but I've just kinda thrown up my hands in general regarding this dude. He's just got some sort of Terry Pratchett-esque narrative field around him that warps everything into a soap opera/penny dreadful.
- Speaking of villains, I got a genuine lol at Thisbe's two appearances. With Mycroft she was very "Ah, so you've finally come to seek out the MISTRESS OF DEATH? The world's greatest assassin is now ready to hear your proposal. B)" And Mycroft, who is *actually* arguably the world's greatest assassin, waits politely for her to finish her Villain Monologue before telling her that actually, no, most people have forgotten about her; he just wanted to let her know that she was going to be in a book that he was writing. XD It's very much what she deserves - to be forgotten as petty and selfish, while the rest of O.S. is lionized, hated, or debated, but they're damn well going to be remembered. Although it does make me wonder how previous O.S.es have dealt with members who, er, get too much of a taste for their job. Not like the current generation's ba'parents, who collectively made a decision to go rogue. But there must have been someone like Thisbe at some point, who just decided that killing was fun and/or convenient.
- I don't know if I can call this stunt writing as much as a nice little series of flourishes, but I was tickled that Mycroft was running through all of Achilles' epithets, choosing the one most appropriate to the situation, throughout the narrative.
- The whole Hugo Sputnik story-within-a-story thing was adorable; it felt very believably like fandom as we know it now, with even Andō and Spain squeeing. <3
- I don't know whether Ada Palmer has read any Terry Pratchett, but she does seem to be engaging with his "evil begins when you start treating people like things" idea, whether that's O.S. seeing people as data points to be deleted, or J.E.D.D.'s idea that people are all just pieces of this Universe’s God’s message to him, or Madame in general.
And finally, we now know who 9A is!! This is one of those things that is obvious in hindsight (so much is made of Mycroft becoming the Eighth Anonymous, 9A follows closely on that), but completely blindsided me at the time. This explains so much about the previous books as primary sources/documents in their own right. Like, for example, I thought that the Servicers had been brainwashed in TLTL because Kosala was able to easily distract them from an awkward question with an offer of ice cream. But if 9A/Outis/No-one was there, then they might have had darn good reason to obfuscate the Servicers' true degree of organization/canniness (pun not intended). Oh, and speaking of Outis - I'm intrigued to see how direct an Odysseus reference this will be.
My Seven-Ten List... I mean, list of favorite/least favorite characters:
Favorites:
- Spain. Yes, still. OK, he was less impressive here than in Spain's Finest Hour in 7S (the aftermath of the Parliament bombing), and mostly kind of facepalm-inducing in his insistence that he *would* marry Madame and make J.E.D.D. his heir, despite the fact that both of them are, to use one of the twins' phrase, flipping insane (albeit in rather different ways). And, to be honest, Spain is a member of the G7 brothel like all the rest of them - he has no stones to throw there. And yet, even when the world teetered on the brink of war so many times, it was Spain who advised calm and patience, and who modeled thoughtfulness and peace for as long as he possibly could. And he doesn't want to be the Emperor of Europe in the very least, which is definitely a point in his favor.
- Martin. His "weakness in the face of cauliflower"! <3 <3 <3 My gosh, talk about your Starks. He's so earnest, and I feel like I really get him - he just wants things to Make Sense! I still loved his and Papa's detective routine, but overall he's so reasonable it's almost scary. Almost, but not quite. Like, his whole catch-and-release idea to try and entrap Mycroft's would-be killer was sensible, reasonable, well-thought-out, and more than a little unhinged. Similarly, he was absolutely willing to taser himself in order to catch said killer during the attempt to reach Cato. And even though I definitely don't agree with him about J.E.D.D. being the right choice, I can't argue with the fact that "no one in the history of the human race has ever erred less." I can say that J.E.D.D.'s goals are likely to significantly contribute to global suffering, and that he is doing harm, but I can't say that he's necessarily in error. And that's clearly the most important thing to Martin.
- Papa. He and Sam Vimes would have so much to talk about, especially of the "cool motive, still murder" variety. You can see the stress he's under as he goes from Chief Mycroft-Wrangler And Also Other Crimes I Guess to chief security officer for the entire world, but he never stops trying to uphold The Law. I admit, the reveal that he's biologically female kinda threw me for a loop - my mental image of him is indelibly stubbled, and knowing that he's female-bodied has done nothing to change that.
- Vivien. I know that joining the Humanists was a decision not entirely of his choosing, but goddamn, he makes a fine one. Extremely Humanist of him to be ordered to revise his Hive's entire system of government, give it a good think, and come back with "no, actually, we're fine the way we are and I have the math to prove it." And he does have a point - even in a system defined by its flexibility, the Humanists are known for their *extreme* flexibility (in more ways than one), and this does seem more like a user error than a hardware error, as it were. Oh, and also, I loved Ockham's almost palpable relief upon meeting Vivien and discovering that he was a sensible person and a good leader.
- Cato. He finally gets to join Utopia after all!! T.T It's kinda ironic that he's the one person Utopia wasn't able to secure before destroying and/or abducting all the Harbingers, because he would have been absolutely delighted to chill with the Utopians indefinitely. But whatever, he now finally gets to be with his heart's people.
Concerned About But Still Interesting:
- Sniper. In a different way than last time! I had a real "oh, shit" moment when Martin and Papa deduced that It would be more like Sniper to parasail into Buenos Aires and proclaim its acceptance from atop the obelisk, with fans supplying fireworks and marching band, and that something was real wrong with Sniper. Which turned out to be the truth, but not the truth that they were expecting, if you know what I mean. He was right that the person training for the Olympics wasn't Sniper, which was bad. But when Sniper actually did get back... that was worse, actually. At first I though that it was the Utopians who had held them for some reason - it's very much their style. But Sniper is clearly traumatized, and traumatized in a way that a) indicates that he was tortured or otherwise not treated well while in captivity, which is very much not the Utopians' style, and b) somehow managed to go beyond even their loss-of-bodily-autonomy kink. So the question is, who would want to hurt them badly enough to abduct them when their presence was necessary for world peace, but dedicated enough to world peace to release them in time to make their appearance at the Olympic Games? Someone whose bash'mate had been killed by O.S.? Julia? Or someone who was concerned that Sniper would do something/say something to kick off hostilities early? I kinda want to say Madame just by reflex, but I honestly don't think she would have let him go.
- Ganymede. Ganymede was also much less prominent in this book, but we still got a much closer look into his psyche. It's a little heartbreaking, how his political ambitions are as much an attempt to get away from Madame as they are bred into him. See above re: exactly how Concerned I am about him, but I did get at least a small lol out of the warden's kind of perplexed, helpless, "look, I'm not trying to be a lecher here, but he keeps taking off his clothes and that is extremely unhelpful." XD
- Mycroft. I don't think "concerned" does him justice, actually. "Deeply, deeply alarmed" is more like. He was getting worse/9A was editing less throughout most of the book, but it seemed to really accelerate during the last third or so, when he was either completely losing his grip on sanity, or dead people actually were talking to him through his tracker; the first is certainly more likely but both are actually quite plausible. Either way, when even Papa has reached the stage of «Mycroft?» Papa called from behind me, soft syllables with a sob’s edge hidden in them. «Go rest, alright? Please? For me? Tell MASON I said you need it.» then you know things are real bad. But even before that, his hallucinations and/or narrative devices that resemble hallucinations were getting more and more vivid, taking up more and more screentime.
Fuck You In Particular:
- Madame. Wow, I hated Madame in this one. Like, I hated her before, but her complete disregard for the rights, opinions, or even lives of others. In particular, that sort of weaponized fragility that she uses to get her way/get out of consequences really got to me. Like, when everyone tried to keep Ganymede's location secret from her because a) fuck Madame and b) he'd been doing his damnedest do undo her programming, but then she finds out anyway and goes weeping and wailing all over him. She very blatantly didn't give a single shit about him, but was using the archetype of the distraught mother who must be forgiven any transgression because it's all just because! she cares about Her Child!! so much!!!! she really can't be held responsible for anything she does or says :3 Wow, lady, that's evil. I believe the note I left in my copy was "Solid brass balls on this one."
- J.E.D.D. Mason. Five words: "In the end I moved." The fact that he's not actively malicious like Madame doesn't mean that he doesn't still intend an enormous amount of harm, or that he's not looking to destroy the freest (arguably) and happiest society in human history because its imperfections Offend him and he thinks he can rebuild it better.
- Cookie. We finally met Cookie, and wow, she's just as bad as everybody has been saying. This might be a bit of IRL rage creeping in, but her "but it's for the children!!!" reeks of every anti-trans law and book ban that I've seen.
