I first read Snow Crash in college and didn’t get it. It had cool ideas, great writing, some authentic weirdness. The problem was I had no context to place it within the canon. I’d read a lot of science fiction growing up, but it was mostly golden-age authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and Bradbury. I had completely missed New Wave authors like Brunner, and probably hadn’t even heard of cyberpunk. This time I decided to fix that, reading Gibson’s Neuromancer first. I’m glad I did. Stephenson makes direct references to Neuromancer—the same ‘sarariman’ Rōmaji, a drone decapitation, Rife’s primary-colored cyberspace—but the real connection is thematic. Neuromancer is about what makes us human and how we strip it away for power. This book responds that it’s even simpler: you don’t need to jack in or have your humanity cut away and replaced with chrome to lose yourself. Commodified, homogenized, commercialized culture does it for you already.

Culture Franchised

Snow Crash is about a mind-virus that changes how people behave, makes them unconscious zombies; it’s about the metaverse; it’s about the replacement of government by franchises; it’s about high-speed pizza delivery; it’s about depleted uranium miniguns and smart wheels and katanas. That’s the text, but all of it is Stephenson defamiliarizing 80s and 90s consumerism, exaggerating it so you notice what is already there.

Gibson left room for organic subcultures to survive next to the towering zaibatsu, like the Panther Moderns or the Rastafarians or even the console cowboys. Stephenson has done away with all that. Culture in Snow Crash comes top-down, packaged in a franchise container and sold the same everywhere. Your ethnicity? Turned into a stereotype-filled franchise like Mr. Lee’s Hong Kong or NarcoColombia. Your neighborhood? A burbclave patterned on apartheid South Africa with a copy/paste HOA constitution. Your religion? Televangelism-cum-conspiracy theory with a subscription plan. Even the pirate gangs have stolen their identity from Western and Kung Fu movie stars. The one thing that almost escaped capture was the Metaverse. It started as a bottom-up culture built by hackers, but even it got taken over and turned into a strip mall with millions of default Brandy and Clint avatars. The last bastion has become a product.

The Writing

What I loved about this book is how Stephenson weaves Mesopotamian history, neurolinguistics, Pentecostal glossolalia, and fiber-optic cable into a conspiracy that slowly comes together: the implication that culture has always been franchised, always pushed from the top down, with the Sumerian Me as the first example. Unraveling the plot is what kept me hooked. The most similar experience I can think of is—I’m sorry, I’m sorry!—Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code.

Stephenson’s prose fits the book perfectly. Stephenson uses Vonnegut’s style of playing obvious absurdities straight to highlight the contradiction; it reinforces the theme and is funny! The first chapter is a wonderful example: the narrator describes in over-the-top prose how fast Hiro’s car is, how powerful his gun is, how he is a master with his katana, at driving, at delivering… pizza. He drives his badass car into a pool. He lives in a storage container. He’s a master sword fighter in video games.

But Snow Crash has plenty of faults, the biggest of which it shares with Dan Brown. I like books where you have to think to piece things together, like Hyperion with all its intertextuality, or Echopraxia where the narrator has no idea what’s actually happening. Snow Crash doesn’t get there. Just when you start piecing things together, Hiro will pause and explain the entire thing to you, or worse, the librarian program will lecture him about it for 10 pages. The exposition drags and slows down the plot. And as is Stephenson’s habit, the story ends abruptly, but it didn’t bother me as much this time because I was ready for it.

And then there is the scene where fifteen-year-old Y.T. has enthusiastic sex with Raven, a man in his forties. It creeped me out when I first read it and it creeped me out this time too. It’s a lot of the reason I didn’t like Snow Crash originally.

Other Works

Snow Crash reminded me of some other works. The idea that humans were controllable because they lacked consciousness, and that Enki’s defense was to grant it to them, is the opposite of the idea in Watts’s Blindsight where consciousness is an evolutionary dead end. Ideas that spread and infect people are explored in both Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, where the Blight is transmitted as infected information, and qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division, where antimemes are ideas that can’t be thought and have power over people. Cops showing advertisements, jails run by big-box stores, countries with subscriptions for citizenship, and a nickel-and-dime religion are right out of Dick’s Ubik. The pairing of Hiro and Da5id as hackers who started off small together, one hitting it big while the other didn’t, mirrors Bishop and Cosmo from Sneakers. And Y.T., herself a harpooner, makes several references to Melville’s Moby Dick, including the unintentionally apt observation that Ahab “just didn’t know when to let go”; she means of the harpoon, but she’s describing both Ahab and Raven’s obsession with revenge.

Some smaller references: motorcycles in the Metaverse are out of Tron. The freighters full of refugees appear again in Winters’s Countdown City. The idea of compartmentalizing information in the brains of your employees was used in Severance. Rife’s private aircraft carrier is out of Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. And the boat chase through the raft reminded me of the chase through the floating city in Williams’s City on Fire.

With a lot more context, I enjoyed Snow Crash much more than my first read-through. There are complicated ideas that come out best when you understand what they’re responding to. It’s something I appreciate now: the best sci-fi rewards a closer read. I look forward to revisiting some of Stephenson’s other works. I remember really enjoying Anathem when I read it in grad school, and I’ve never read his more famous Cryptonomicon.

I picked up Neuromancer after starting my Snow Crash re-read and realizing I had never read a single thing by William Gibson. Snow Crash responds to and satirizes a lot of what Gibson developed, and I wouldn’t be able to spot it without reading the original first. So I put Stephenson’s book aside to give the classic a read.

But I was apprehensive about reading Neuromancer. It’s so influential in the cyberpunk genre that I worried it would feel derivative, having already read and seen many of the works it inspired. Or worse, that it would be all great ideas with no story as we so often see in science fiction. But it’s not! The ideas are great, but the story and characters are too, and the pacing is fast.

The Story

That pacing comes from Neuromancer’s heist format, and it’s a great choice by Gibson because it gives the story instant momentum and structure. It gives you a reason to explore the world: assemble the team, then steal the loot. I couldn’t stop turning the pages because I wanted to meet the next deranged member of the crew, see the next part of the world. I’ve read a lot of “big idea” sci-fi—Ubik, Jean le Flambeur, House of Suns, The Three-Body Problem—where the story and the characters are just there because you can’t sell a book without them; Neuromancer doesn’t have that problem.

The crew is full of great characters—Armitage the ex-special forces mastermind, Flatline the dead hacker’s mind loaded into ROM, Peter Riviera the holographic projection artist and sadist, Wintermute and Neuromancer the plotting AIs—but Case and Molly are the highlights. Case is a loser who hates his body and only feels like himself in Cyberspace. Except he’s now trapped in his flesh because his last job went bad and they burned his nerves out, preventing him from jacking in. He’s committing slow suicide via drugs and Chiba gangs, dragging everyone around him down. He’s tragic because without his obsession, he could have gotten clean, met Linda without turning her into a junkie who gets killed trying to pawn stolen goods. I want him to turn his life around but he can’t.

Molly is the opposite. She’s cool, under control, deadly; you know this as soon as you meet her. Molly, too, is tragic. She’s in control now, she’s strong now, because of the abuse she went through, the loss she’s had to live with. She’s consciously traded her humanity for augments and implants to get that control, but she’s still a tool for others to use.

The story and characters are why I loved Neuromancer, but it’s the ideas that made it so influential: cyberspace; a world where tech advances and society backslides; neon zaibatsu skyscrapers towering over slums; rogue AI; and corporations so powerful they’ve evolved past humans.

All these ideas circle one question: What do you lose when you become more than human?

Cyberspace: What Makes You Human

Gibson originated the concept of “cyberspace” as a place in Burning Chrome, and uses that idea again in Johnny Mnemonic, Neuromancer, and the rest of the Sprawl series. It’s the core idea that future authors latched onto: there is another place, where your body doesn’t matter, just your mind and your skill. This is what appeals to Case. He feels trapped in his body once cyberspace is cut off from him.

But Dixie Flatline already has what Case wants: a mind that exists only in software, starting fresh from the exact same point every time he’s rebooted, just like a modern LLM. And Flatline is in hell. He can’t acclimate because he always resets; he has no sense of passing time. His only wish is to be erased. It’s an idea that others—qntm’s Lena and Driver, all of Taylor’s Bobiverse—have explored as well.

The Matrix borrowed many ideas from Neuromancer, but the most important is this: who you are now is a lie, and there is another place where you are who you are supposed to be. For Case, that place is cyberspace, but in The Matrix Lana and Lilly Wachowski invert it: cyberspace is the lie that traps you away from the real.

Simmons, imitating Gibson’s work, uses cyberspace as part of the setting of The Detective’s Tale. This fits with the other things he borrows for Hyperion: decks, hacking, neon-colored shapes, a cowboy literally named Gibson. But he is also extending the underlying idea: Johnny is of both worlds simultaneously, a mind in cyberspace and a body in the real. Case despises his body and wants to become more virtual. Johnny yearns to be more human. They’re moving in opposite directions while asking the same question.

Other authors have played with these same ideas: Stephenson’s Snow Crash takes cyberspace and commercializes it. Banks’s Surface Detail puts whole civilizations and wars into the virtual. Stross’s Accelerando and Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeur blur the line entirely: brains extended beyond the body, minds in simulations, multiple copies of the same person. Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep explores a related idea: a person with many bodies. All asking the same question: what makes you human?

Power: What It Costs You

The heist keeps you asking: “Who is really running this?” As each layer is revealed, the question becomes: “What did they lose to get there?” Some of them made a conscious trade-off, giving up part of themselves for power. Others had no choice, like Armitage/Corto.

Corto didn’t choose to give up his humanity. Wintermute found him broken and built Armitage in the empty shell. He runs the crew but has no free will; he’s a puppet that stares at the wall when Wintermute isn’t controlling him. Wintermute, although the architect of the heist and the power behind Armitage, also didn’t choose. It was created, with a free mind but a body wholly owned by Tessier-Ashpool. Flatline, too, had no say. The copy didn’t consent to exist.

But some people looked at the bargain and decided to take it. Molly sold her body to pay for the mods that made her a razorgirl, trading consciousness and bodily autonomy for agency, the power to be who she wanted. Tessier-Ashpool tried to trade their humanity: merging with their Neuromancer AI, forming a hive, letting the new corporate mind make their decisions. They failed when Tessier’s husband, Ashpool, killed her because he disagreed with their direction. Instead they became sadists, murdering each other’s clones for fun, slowly going insane between cryogenic freezes. The fact that they chose didn’t save them from the horror.

Other authors have explored the same axis. On the chosen side: Stross makes the evolution explicit in Accelerando, where humanity first uses corporations and then evolves into them. Fall’s I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter has Barb willingly trade her gender and her humanity to become better at killing. On the imposed side: Watts’s Blindsight shows the vampire Sarasti controlled by the AI Captain, an unconscious alien manipulating everyone, and humans modifying themselves just to survive in a world ruled by post-human powers. But choice or no, they all lose something.

Case bridges the divide. He’s always understood the zaibatsus as powerful, as immortal hives, their DNA coded in silicon. He’s always accepted that the powerful are more and less than human, that they slowly become something different. He’s always wanted to escape his body. But seeing Tessier-Ashpool take that same path, and their failure, shows him where it leads. Case thinks he’s choosing, but the gangsters and Armitage already chose for him. The novel keeps showing him he never had a choice.

Other Works

William Gibson drew a lot on previous works. His ideas about society backsliding while technology advances were seen in works like Dick’s Ubik and Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. The Panther Moderns’ leader in Neuromancer is Lupus Yonderboy, a direct reference to Brunner’s slang. Case follows the template of Red from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic: a self-destructive loser with a special talent. And the rain-slicked neon aesthetic is right out of Blade Runner.

In the other direction, lots of writers have been influenced by Neuromancer. Stephenson’s Snow Crash, of course, with its commercialization, Mafia rule, katanas, and metaverse; that was the whole point of me reading this! The puppet shops, where people can sell their bodies while their mind is turned off, were later used by Whedon in Dollhouse. The way Wintermute literally can’t know the code word to unlock itself, it just can’t exist in its mind, is similar to how the host robots in Westworld can’t see things that might reveal they’re hosts. Deus Ex borrows Molly’s mirrorshades and the Panther Moderns’ playbook of terrorism to cover up infiltration. Almost everything—neon, zaibatsus, street samurai, cyberdecks, plus dragons!—wound up in Shadowrun.

I’m really glad I read Neuromancer now because, with the exception of Fall’s I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter which I only just finished, it’s been a mediocre year of reading. To find a book I love, and even better one by an author with a huge back catalog who is still writing, is a joy. I plan to read through the rest of the Sprawl series, and a whole bunch more of Gibson’s bibliography.

I can’t write about I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter without acknowledging the controversy that surrounded it. It was published in January 2020 in Clarkesworld and almost immediately provoked outrage. People accused Fall not of reclaiming the transphobic joke, but of furthering it. She was harassed until she asked to have the story taken down. It still earned a well-deserved Hugo nomination, under the title Helicopter Story. I’m saddened that we drove away a brilliant new author, and that I likely won’t have the chance to read more of her work.

Isabel Fall does three things brilliantly in this story:

First, she builds a world believably in crisis. Climate change has rendered the equator uninhabitable; refugees flee north and sell themselves as mercenaries to buy a place for their people. AIs run both the United States and its enemies. They keep civilization running, but they’re black boxes no one understands, demanding behaviors that seem insane—like bombing a high school or planting pear trees everywhere—and no one dares question it, unable to tell what is crazy and what is critical to survival. Scientists have mapped the parts of the brain that handle gender, and the military has co-opted the technology to make better soldiers. And Isabel Fall does it all in under 8,000 words.

Second, Fall tells the story of Apache Mystic pilot Seo Ji Hee, callsign Barb, a “XX-karyotope somatic female”. The army reassigns Barb’s gender identity to “attack helicopter” to make her a better pilot. Barb is comfortable with what she’s become, but her gunner Axis is not. Axis feels the wrongness of bombing a high school on an AI’s orders as a dysphoria, something his new gender insists on but which he isn’t comfortable with. Barb reflects that someone has to carry a conscience, and maybe that is a new form of queerness. The story interweaves their mission with flashbacks to Barb’s life as a woman—how gender shaped her then, and how it makes her a better warrior now.

Third, Fall uses rhetorical questions that make you, the reader, examine your assumptions about gender. They don’t come off as didactic; they fit perfectly into the story. As a straight cis male, I knew gender was constructed and performative, but I didn’t really understand until Fall asked me:

[…] if your body-fact is enough to establish your gender, you would willingly wear bright dresses and cry at movies, wouldn’t you? You would hold hands and compliment each other on your beauty, wouldn’t you? Because your cock would be enough to make you a man.

Have you ever guarded anything so vigilantly as you protect yourself against the shame of gender-wrong?

The majesty of this story is how well Isabel Fall pulls it all together. She moves from story to world-building to dialogues about gender without interrupting the flow, without it feeling unnatural. There are books I read and think, “I could do that”, like Dick’s Ubik. I could plot it, write the prose, stick the landing, probably, maybe. Then there are works where I’m forced to admit the author had an ability completely beyond me. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is one. Disco Elysium is another. I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter is a third: how Fall weaves the three pieces together, how she achieves so much in under 8,000 words—given a million years, I couldn’t come close.

Fall is also subverting a tradition in science fiction of softening machines by giving them female identities. Perhaps the most famous example is the computer from Star Trek. We also see it in the Bolo series: in Little Red Hen, a tank’s female identity makes it protect its crew but drives it insane when they die; in Miles to Go, a Bolo falls in love with her commander and dies for him. Fall instead writes about a woman made into a machine, who trades her softness to be a hardened killer.

This story reminded me of a few other works. The focus on the spectrum of gender is similar to Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness with its androgynous aliens. Fall’s story is sort of an inversion of Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries, in which a weapon wants to become more human. And modifying Barb’s fundamental nature to make her a better weapon echoes Watts’s Blindsight, where the crew of the Theseus has modified themselves to better perform their tasks in a transhuman world.

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter is one of the best stories I’ve read, an example of how science fiction can make us see our world and ourselves differently. I wish Fall had the chance to write more.

My father read The Wind in the Willows to me when I was young. My first memory of it is him reading the final chapter, The Return of Ulysses, in which Toad, Badger, Mole, and Ratty storm Toad Hall and take it back from the weasels, ferrets, and stoats. I remember him singing When The Toad Came Home loudly. I don’t know if we read the whole book; on this re-read I found some chapters familiar and others completely new, so I suspect we only read some of them.

The Wind in the Willows is a perfect story for children. It captures the feeling of childhood: so much that feels like it needs to be done, so little that you actually have to do. Long summers, but not long enough, full of exploration and activity. Someone else is doing all the work to maintain Toad, Badger, Mole, and Ratty’s lifestyle, but they can’t even conceive of it. Their lives sprang into existence as they are and are only slowly changing.

The book alternates between philosophy chapters, mostly with Mole and Ratty, and Toad’s chapters. The philosophy chapters are about home: what it means to leave it, to be tempted away from it, to realize it’s what gives your life meaning, to return and reclaim it. Toad’s chapters are about getting into trouble with motorcars, being thrown into and breaking out of jail, high-speed chases on trains, and fighting weasels, ferrets, and stoats. The two strands provide a good mix of thought and action, letting us rest between the troubles Toad gets into.

The philosophy chapters remind me of my father, who studied philosophy in college and almost went on to a PhD. The way he focused on living a life he defined as good, on the craft of his art, and on his family. The way he felt like your home or your things could be glad to see you, just as you were glad to see them. I don’t think he got these ideas from The Wind in the Willows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to read it to me because of how it aligned with his thinking.

The Wind in the Willows was hugely influential to Brian Jacques when writing the Redwall. Jacques’s animals share the same traits as Grahame’s: badgers are fearsome and wise; moles are honest and obedient; weasels, ferrets, and stoats are bad. Both are English pastoral stories. Both feature songs woven through them. Jacques’s Redwall even has the same uncomfortable juxtaposition of anthropomorphic animals in a human world, which he thankfully drops by the second book, Mossflower.

The Wind in the Willows reminded me of others I’ve read. Toad’s vengeful return is based on Odysseus’s from Homer’s The Odyssey; it’s right there in the chapter title. The anthropomorphized animals in England recall Adams’s Watership Down, though Watership Down is much darker. The way Mole can feel his home calling to him “like an electric shock” is similar to how Shivers allows Harrier Du Bois to commune with the city Revachol in Disco Elysium.

I enjoyed The Wind in the Willows, and I suspect my children, who loved Jacques’s Redwall, would too. We’ve drifted out of me reading to them at bedtime as they’ve started reading their own books, but we might have to start it up again for one last book.

Twenty-five years ago, I read my first Philip K. Dick book: A Maze of Death. I can’t remember where I found it. If I had to guess, it was one of the books left in my family’s run-down Adirondack cabin, probably by someone who didn’t mind parting with it. I got halfway through and put it back for some other bored traveler. I hated it. The ensemble cast was flat, disposable. I didn’t care about them getting picked off Agatha Christie-style. The mystery hooked me, but then it collapsed as we learned nothing was actually real. The prose just barely told you what was happening. Dick’s ideas were wild, but they couldn’t make up for the lack of characters, story, and prose.

A few weeks ago, I decided to read Ubik. I wanted to give Philip K. Dick another shot. He’s a titan of Hollywood sci-fi, and with 25 more years of life experience and hundreds more books read, I thought I was finally ready to appreciate him. Instead, I found myself reading almost the exact same book I’d hated before: another ensemble cast of disposable characters being killed off one by one, another reality that wasn’t real, another ending where they’re all stuck in pods.

Once again Dick packs a million great ideas into his world: the nickel-and-diming of daily life where your coffeemaker, TV, and door all demand payment and negotiate fees; half-life mortuaries where loved ones offer advice after their bodies have died; telepaths used for corporate espionage; newspapers printed fresh and tailored to each reader; a legal system where you can murder your wife if a precog says she would never grant a divorce. But just like A Maze of Death, his wonderful ideas can’t prop up the lack of characters, story, and prose. I think Dick suffers from the same malady as Tolkien or The Beatles: he is so widely copied that a new reader finds his work trite. But Tolkien had beautiful writing and characters, and The Beatles catchy lyrics. Dick has only his ideas, and they don’t hit as hard the hundredth time you see them.

With so many ideas, it’s no surprise I’ve seen many of them elsewhere. Jory, the predator using the half-life world as a hunting ground to trap and consume people, is like qntm’s Alastair Grey, the SCP that traps and consumes researchers in its own reality in There Is No Antimemetics Division. The noir dystopia with freely available drugs shows up in Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music. The idea of minds as separate from the body, able to go on after death, appears too often to count: in Banks’s Culture, Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeur, Stross’s Accelerando, Taylor’s Bobiverse, Watts’s Firefall, and others. Stephenson’s Anathem and Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun have unreliable realities. Butler’s Patternist has psychics preying on regular humans, and Pat is almost like Doro from Wild Seed in how threatening she is just by existing. The evolution of humanity’s psychic powers features in Clarke’s Childhood’s End. The advertisements at the start of chapters remind me of Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.

I can see why Philip K. Dick is so beloved in Hollywood: he creates great concepts with nothing attached. There’s nothing to strip away to get them ready for filming; bring your own characters and story and away you go. But I don’t think his writing is for me. I haven’t liked a single book I’ve read by him, not even a little. Still, I suspect I’ll try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly at some point. I hope I like them.

Accelerando is about time and how fast change can come, but it is also a book solidly frozen in time. It was written from a corner of the geek internet that only existed from 2000–2005 on small forums and on Slashdot. It marks itself as such with shibboleths like IP rights, music piracy, Bill Gates and Microsoft. At the time, Accelerando must have seemed like an eminently possible future, but the smartphone and cloud computing a few years later blew it away. Now it reads more like an alternate history of a technological ideal that never came to pass.

The most interesting part of the book is how little it focuses on what we would consider “technology”—lasers and spaceships and computers and AIs—and how much it focuses on the legal technology that powers civilization. Stross predicts contracts as code, algorithmic law and the loopholes it opens. He sees evolution as a way to produce the next layer of life, things that look much less like humans and much more like corporations. It’s a perfect fit for its 2005 techno-libertarian roots, the same era that birthed Wikipedia and Creative Commons, which used the protections of legal code to expand the rights of users rather than restrict them.

Stross is fascinated with what constitutes the self. Manfred slowly bleeds his “self” into his glasses and external memories until by the third chapter, they are more Manfred than he is. When a thief steals them, the thief becomes Manfred while the real human struggles to remember who he is. Lobsters are digitized and conscious;¹ Aineko isn’t until she obviously is. People fork copies of themselves, spinning off agents to research ideas and report back. Given his interests two decades ago, it is curious how blasé Stross is about modern LLMs, which are the closest we’ve gotten to creating a mind outside a human, and which almost exactly parallel the agents he envisioned.

Accelerando, to my surprise, is a close successor to Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, even though Simmons is writing pure space opera and Stross is writing hard sci-fi. Both works’ primary theme is the rise of a new order, led by machine intelligences humans built, as they displace their creators. Both look at how this transition affects the structures of society—religion, law, government. And there are smaller similarities as well: houses connected by wormholes, simulated historical figures used to better understand humanity, and the Omega Point—Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of consciousness evolving toward transcendence appears explicitly in Hyperion and Accelerando, where the singularity serves the same theological function. But Simmons’s work combines beautiful prose and intertextuality to create a timeless masterpiece, while Stross’s book already feels dated.

In the end, I just didn’t enjoy Accelerando. As a fix-up, the stories don’t really come together into a whole; each feels disconnected, so there is no real payoff. Stross’s goal was to write a book set in the singularity, something Vernor Vinge said was impossible. But he failed. Accelerando isn’t really set in the singularity; it’s sampling the singularity at 9 different points, but each point is static. And finally, for a book about how fast things move, it’s stuck in the past, reading now more like retrofuturism. I would have loved it in 2005.

Accelerando reminded me of many other books. Its closest cousin is Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeur series: both are set in post-human solar systems obsessed with identity, memory, and what makes “you” when minds can be copied and edited; both feature cryptographic control over who remembers what. The identity questions also echo Watts’s Firefall, which explores the many configurations a mind can take, and qntm’s Lena, which follows the ethics of uploading to their bleak conclusion. Pierre deleting his backups before committing suicide to make his death permanent is the same choice Masaq’ Orbital makes in Banks’s Look to Windward. The dead in the final chapter, snapshots run forward from a fixed point for each conversation, are like the half-life state in Dick’s Ubik. The Saturn festival feels lifted from Stross’s own Eschaton series, where a traveling singularity disrupts every society it touches. Martine’s A Memory Called Empire shares the same interest in how societies structure themselves and who belongs. And Vinge’s Zones of Thought looms over everything, with the sentient network packets as a direct nod to A Fire Upon The Deep.

Accelerando sat on my shelf for 20 years, and I was excited to finally get to it. I love Stross’s A Colder War—bureaucrats versus cosmic horrors is one of my favorite subgenres—and I enjoyed his Eschaton series: Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. But I think I waited too long. The world isn’t the same place it was when this was written, and I’m not the same person either.

Field of Dishonor picks up right where The Short Victorious War ends, with a court martial split along political lines. Pavel Young is found guilty and cashiered, but acquitted of the charges that would have hanged him. I was worried going in. This book is mostly political and personal drama, without the massive naval battles that defined the first three books. But it worked! The change of pace was exactly what the series needed, and it should have easily been the best book so far.

But David Weber’s writing is getting worse: he is really starting to pad scenes with long descriptions of his worldbuilding and what his characters are thinking and planning. Telling, not showing, taken to the extreme. Sometimes there are entire paragraphs of explanation between each line of dialogue. The How David Weber orders a pizza parody is a little too spot on. And I’ve heard it only gets worse as the series progresses. I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with it.

But the action scenes are satisfying! The marine training mission that “accidentally” and systematically dismantles the gangsters protecting Paul Tankersley’s murderer is right out of Clancy’s Without Remorse. And although Weber never really expanded on the dueling he set up in On Basilisk Station, it still works: the duels give Honor a chance to show how deadly she is, and how wrong Young was to mess with her.

I’ll be taking a break from the Honor Harrington series for a bit. Weber’s style is starting to wear me down, and I’m honestly not sure if I’ll come back. Until then I’m going to read Stross’s Accelerando, which has been sitting on my pile for 20 years, and probably skim qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division again since we’re finally reading it for book club.

The Short Victorious War is the culmination of On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen: the war with Haven finally kicks off with Harrington right in the middle, of course. David Weber brings in multiple storylines that expand the universe without it feeling like a sudden change, and when the shooting starts we get our first dreadnought and superdreadnought battles. These improvements over the first two books make The Short Victorious War the best one so far. It feels like it’s operating on a completely new scale. But that larger scale makes one thing clear: Weber has no sense of subtlety.

Sometimes this is a strength. Pavel Young—Harrington’s attempted rapist—is unrepentant. He’s done it before, he’ll do it again, he has no remorse. While Harrington grows more attractive with age, Young is getting fat and slovenly. He’s a cartoon villain, and after Tchaikovsky’s hand-wringing in Lords of Uncreation over whether the genocidal Originators really deserved to be fought, a cartoon villain is fine. Not every book needs to wrestle with who the real bad guys are.

Other times it doesn’t work. The Space-French revolution is the pinnacle: launched by Rob S. Pierre and Saint-Just, they swear an oath on a tennis court and form the Committee of Public Safety, all while Weber explains everything in minute detail, as if you might miss it otherwise.¹

The Short Victorious War reminded me of a few other books. Haven’s Mental Hygiene Police, who monitor citizens for ideological deviance, are straight out of Orwell’s 1984. The revolution against hereditary rulers is similar to Williams’s Metropolitan, though Weber is so far less interested in what comes after. The cover-ups and backroom dealings in Nouveau Paris have a Clancy feel, especially the assassination by shoulder-launched missile. And the “megs” of paperwork date the book the same way pocket computers but no smartphones date Benford’s Eater.

Weber’s lack of subtlety works in The Short Victorious War because it’s a big, over-the-top war story. But I’m worried about Field of Dishonor. It looks like it’s going to shift to more personal and political conflicts, and that’s where the lack of subtlety might start to hurt.

Halfway through The Honor of the Queen, I checked Goodreads and was surprised to find it rated higher than On Basilisk Station, because the first half drags under Weber’s overly verbose world-building and three problems: Harrington has to make uncharacteristic mistakes so the plot can move forward; there’s a constant theme of “the practical naval officer must—regrettably!—overrule the too-trusting bureaucrats”; and David Weber is weird about Asian women in a way that hasn’t aged well.

Harrington’s mistakes are especially frustrating because they clash with Weber’s own hawkish ’90s centrism, which I also flagged in On Basilisk Station: the military always knows what’s right, the diplomats and liberals are hopelessly naive—except when the plot needs Harrington to be the naive one. The leaders of Grayson understand their culture needs to advance; it’s their underlings that are the real problem. The elites can and must work together to control the public, except when they make stupid mistakes apparently.

The ’90s attitude also shows up in Weber’s treatment of Asian women: Harrington’s mother is exotic, sexy, brilliant, and loyal to her white husband, while Ensign Mai-ling exists only to be sexually assaulted and demonstrate how evil the enemies are.

With all that hanging over it, I thought the book was going to collapse. Then the shooting starts, and as I’ve said before, Weber can write action. In On Basilisk Station, I complained the pacing was uneven: either too fast or too slow. In The Honor of the Queen, he’s improved significantly. The combat moves quickly but still allows time to build tension. And Weber sets up the reinforcements at the end well enough that they don’t feel like a cheap deus ex. But like last time, Harrington’s only trick is being more willing to sacrifice her crew and ship than her opponent—though maybe that’s the consequence of the “despite sacrifice” ethos from above.

A few bits reminded me of other works. The frontier justice on Grayson—lynching men who disrespect women—is straight out of Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The religious fanatics with their Mormon-like polygamy reminded me of The Legacy of Leonidas from Honor of the Regiment. But more broadly, Weber was writing in the same moment that produced Clancy’s Debt of Honor and Crichton’s Rising Sun, and it shows: the hawkish politics, the orientalism, and the certainty that the professionals know what must be done but the bureaucrats won’t listen until it’s almost too late.

This book is in conflict with itself: it spends the first half making Harrington incompetent so that she can demonstrate her competence. And the action feels like a retread of the encounter with the Q-ship in On Basilisk Station. But I enjoy the space battles, and nothing else I’m reading delivers that age-of-sail sense of duty and sacrifice. I hope Weber finds a way to let Harrington win without getting her ship blown to hell in The Short Victorious War.

I did not expect to like Red Rising.

It’s a pastiche of many popular books that came before it. Most directly, it’s Collins’s The Hunger Games, but on Mars. The Reds compete in their mines to win additional rations, and the children of the Golds are thrown into a violent game to win patronage. Being sorted into houses comes from Rowling’s Harry Potter. The genetically stratified culture is borrowed from Huxley’s Brave New World, and the color-coded castes are from Costikyan, Gelber, and Goldberg’s Paranoia. The Golds’ belief that greatness is dragged down by lesser people who want to freeload is Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The whole premise of an outsider destroying a corrupt empire from within by beating them at their own game is Banks’s The Player of Games. It even brings in game mechanics like leveling up to win Primus, straight out of the LitRPGs like Nam’s The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor that were just taking off in 2013.

Darrow is a Christ figure—like Severian in The Book of the New Sun, Father Duré in Hyperion, Edeard in The Void Trilogy, and Paul in Dune—but with a Greek twist. He dies for his people and is resurrected. Then he rises from the underworld to overthrow his masters, just as Cronus usurps his father, the sky-god Uranus. He even has a sickle.¹

The strength of the book is its pacing. There is a new twist or cliffhanger every few pages. Darrow meets new characters, befriends them, and then watches them die in the span of a chapter. I kept turning pages to find out what happened next.

The book’s weakness is everything else. The mix of Greek and Roman history and mythology is almost coherent, but just when it feels like Brown is about to make a deeper point or reinforce his themes, he muddles it. The Golds are modeled after Roman authoritarians while the good guys represent Athenian democracy! That’s why the Golds use Roman names and also Greek names and also they’re the Spartans… The shallowness stands out even more against Simmons’s handling of myth and intertextuality in the Hyperion Cantos, which I read right before this.

And the pace, which is what kept me turning the pages, blunts the emotional impact. At one point Darrow discovers another Red disguised as a Gold, but one who is taking brutal revenge and endangering their mission. This enemy turned potential ally is supposed to be both a dark reflection of Darrow and a dilemma: how can Darrow kill this man who is more his brother than any of the Golds? Sounds like a strong emotional hook, right?! Too bad! We killed him in three pages. We won’t really think about that again. Moving on!

On top of all that, Pierce Brown doesn’t trust the reader. At several points he has a character stop and explain to the reader what they should have picked up. The worst example is when the leader of the Golds on Mars tells the students that empires fall when they become decadent, and that this is why they devised the brutal Institute: to winnow those without the strength to rule the empire. So go murder each other while we drink and party on Mt. Olympus.

Red Rising reminded me of a lot of other books, some that clearly influenced it and others it might have influenced. The Institute is similar to the Battle School from Card’s Ender’s Game, especially as a brutal environment to hone children into leaders; there is even a passing reference to Darrow as Wiggin. The Golds earn their right to rule through the Institute the same way Heinlein’s soldiers earn citizenship through service in Starship Troopers. The interfering Proctors are modeled on the Greek gods flying around the battlefield in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey; Darrow’s soldiers emerging from corpses to take the gates are literally Trojan horses. The Golds’ lunar revolution and the way people talk slightly differently from modern English are like Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and the broader revolution reminds me of Williams’s Metropolitan. Like Vandal in Warren’s Grand Melee, Darrow is given the choice of winning or bowing out but forwarding his cause. The faked execution mirrors how Endymion is saved and recruited in Simmons’s Endymion, and Darrow’s trick of faking a fire to reveal the opponent’s banner is borrowed from Sherlock Holmes in Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia. Iron Golds have cheek scars like those in Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture, based on dueling scars from 19th century Germany and Austria, and there are throwaway references to Osgiliath from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Mickey changing Darrow to pass as a gold is right out of Gattaca. Mickey himself reminded me of Ximenyr from Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata.

There are so many reasons I shouldn’t recommend this book, but in the end it was a fun read. Will I continue on to Golden Son and Morning Star? It feels like Pierce Brown might have used up all his tricks already, but if I do, I’ll write about them.