graculus

There Is No Antimemetics Division

4/5. A short novel about what it would be like to be an organization fighting anti-memes (powerful eldritch somethings that can effectively erase information from the universe, including from human memory). How do you fight a war for humanity when you keep forgetting a war is happening at all?

A very interesting mechanism of a book. I enjoyed watching its strangely-shaped gears catch one to the next, partly because this is the sort of story that my brain would not have come up with given several centuries of work. Not just the story itself, but the entire odd structure that makes it go. I do think I fundamentally disagree with one of this books premises about how human beings work, but sure, okay, I’m willing to go with the idea that the people who work at this particular organization are odd ducks who will, for example, have an entire decade of life scooped out of their head by a cosmic horror and who will just kinda shrug and go about calmly reconstructing their life from the evidence left behind.

I will say as a point of flavor more than a warning: this book has that particular approach to character where people are extremely unembodied. Indeed, you could be forgiven for picturing the entire cast as brains in a jar that go about acting on the world and on each other without much affect at all. People do have internal lives, but we glimpse them at odd angles and through narrow pinholes, like when we only get to know about a marriage when one of the spouses has forgotten the other and reads the surveillance reports on them. It’s all definitely a vibe, and not my style, but here it works.

Content notes: Cosmic horror, other kinds of creeping horror of knowing you’ve forgotten something terrifying, violence.

Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines

4/5. A pair of related scifi novels largely narrated by sentient ships in a plausible corporatist space future. The first book is a sort of survival horror first contact situation, and the second is philosophical space exploration and consideration of mortality on the personal and galactic scale.

I like these. They manage that trick of feeling old-fashioned in the best way. Particularly the big ideas exploration book – it’s giving Niven or Vinge or Baxter or similar, except, you know, not variously phobic and -ist. Actually, several of the characters are Buddhist, which offers a really interesting lens on some more classic science fictional topics.

I’m a little suspicious about why these books didn’t take off, TBH. He got buzz early on, then seemed to fall off the map. I’m pretty plugged into new and interesting SFF, and I’ve only heard about him from one person. I have a suspicion this is because he openly talks about how he uses AI. E.g., in the first book here, he had AI generate hundreds of short poems on various themes, and he picked several for his AI ship to “write.” He is transparent about how he prompted and why he did it that way. I suspect this got some sort of AI stink on him, professionally, which is a real shame.

I will also add, they got Nathan Fillion to read the first audiobook. Normally I do not like these celebrity narrators, but actually, it’s kind of brilliant? He has this bro-y cynical depressive emotionalism that hit just right for the ship narrator of that book.

Content notes: Corporate hellscape stuff, body horror.