Review: Exordia, by Seth Dickinson

 Rich, chewy philosophy, with snake-headed aliens and lots of dead bodies. Plus body horror.

We all know The Trolley Problem, right? In this post-The Good Place world, it’s hard to imagine anyone has not run across it in some form or another. It permeates the zeitgeist. It structures The Discourse. But just in case you are one of today’s lucky 10,000, it goes like this: You are standing at a junction in some trolley tracks, with a trolley racing approaching. You can’t stop it, because [insert Reasons here], but you can switch it to a different track. Five people are working on the rails ahead of the trolley’s current path, doomed if you do nothing. One person is working on the alternative track. Do you pull the lever? Do you make the decision to doom that one person in order to save the five?

This is a popular set-up for ethical thought experiments, with many variations that probe people’s human life accounting principles. Suppose the only way to stop the trolley was not to pull a lever, but to physically throw another person onto the track in front of it? Suppose the one person was your brother and the five were strangers? Suppose the one person was your own ethnicity and the five were another ethnicity? Suppose the one person was human and the five were aliens?

Suppose the one person was Earth and the five were the rest of the galaxy?

Seth Dickinson’s Exordia is, at its heart, an in-depth exploration of The Trolley Problem and its variants, as lived through the three primary characters. Because, despite the infinity of forms that the moral thought experiment can take, there are, in essence, only three ways to engage with it. You can play the game; you can refuse to play the game; or you can be the person who sets the trolley rolling in the first place.

Anna came to America as a Kurdish refugee, and her whole life shaped by the horrifying version of the trolly problem she was faced with as a child. An Iraqi soldier gave her a gun and told her that he would spare her village if she shot her brother and father in the head. She played the game straight. She saved her village.

Erik, our second primary character, is a military man, who has spent a significant portion of his career working under the auspices of an operation called Paladin. The role of Paladin was to dispense justice to (assassinate) military contractors who committed atrocities outside the scope of American military or civil law. Unlike Anna, who was forced into the Trolley Problem, Erik engaged in the moral calculus willingly. But it is the same reasoning, at heart: if you murder this man, now, you will save more people later by stopping him. Yet because Erik had the luxury of engaging willingly with the game, he also had the luxury of refusing to engage. Eventually Paladin’s scope of action ballooned beyond the boundaries that Erik is willing to condone, and he not only withdrew from Paladin, he also used his personal connections to put a stop to it entirely.

These personal connections take the form of Erik's childhood best friend, Clayton, who masterminded Paladin in the first place. Clayton's philosophy on Trolley Problems encompasses the third perspective: he creates them, and imposes them on others. He makes other people actually pull the lever. He did not assassinate anyone through Paladin. He recruited others, and gave them the order. Erik, refusing to play the game any longer, noped out of Paladin, and in the process destroyed his relationship with Clayton.

All this is a substantial amount of backstory backstory, revealed in the first pages of Exordia, but it is vitally important backstory to set up Clayton, Erik, and Anna in their three philosophical trolley camps.

Because then aliens invade! Two opposing multi-snake-head aliens, representing two factions of a galaxy-spanning conflict. One of them, Ssrin, forms an alliance with Anna. Ssrin is the rebel, fighting the good fight (as she sees it) against the governing overlords, Exordia. She is alone, unsupported, the little guy against the empire. She is to Exordia what Anna’s Kurdish village was to Iraq. The other, Iruvage, aligns himself with Clayton. Iruvage represents the interests of Exordia, and is backed by the power of an immense spaceship that has no qualms about nuking multiple major cities to get Earth governments to do what he wants. He is to Ssrin’s rebels what the United States is to every country in the Middle East.

Do you get it? Do you see the parallels? It’s not, I grant, subtle, but it’s not wrong either.

Both Ssrin and Iruvage are desperate to get their hands on the book’s Macguffin, an artifact code-named Blackbird, which has appeared in Kurdistan and can upend the galactic power structure if only Ssrin—or Iruvage—can figure out how it works. Naturally, Earth’s governments are also interested to figure out what is up with Blackbird. So all the players in this game converge on Kurdistan: scientific teams, military teams, Ssrin and her agents, Iruvage and his agents—and, alas, the innocent civilians in the local town, just trying to live their damn lives. Not accidentally, this is the same town that Anna saved through her solution to the Trolley Problem imposed on her as a child.

Many arcane discussions of entropy and souls and prime numbers and damnation and information theory and the nature of existence surround the scientific teams’ attempts to unravel Blackbird’s secrets. This is made all the more pressing by two external pressures. First, exposure to Blackbird results in appallingly body-horror-filled death; and second, Iruvage has informed world governments that they have 14 hours to figure out how Blackbird works, or Earth will be destroyed in a rain of nuclear fire.¹ Actually, quite a large amount of this book follows the scientific investigations of Blackbird, and I feel like I’m doing Dickinson a bit of a disservice in skimping over it. He’s done his research. It’s great science fiction. If you want brilliant scientists being brilliant, there’s tons of that in this book. But it’s not what makes this book so striking. So, let’s return to urban mass transport infrastructure.

Against this backdrop of galactic conflict and scientific activity, Clayton recruits Erik and Anna, and they join the other masses of Earth’s Last Best Hope in Kurdistan, where the mother of all Trolley Problems await them. Do they nuke a small group of Kurdish refugees if such an action will allow them to satisfy Iruvage and save Earth? Do they allow Earth to be destroyed if such an action will allow Ssrin to achieve her objective of defying Exordia and save the rest of the galaxy?

This is where each character’s historical Trolley stance comes into play, and I have never read anything as satisfyingly clear-sighted as Dickinson’s articulation of these perspectives.

In Erik’s opinion, only weasels play trolley games. Heroes jump down there and start pulling people off the tracks. Heroes pass laws regulating better trolley brakes. That’s how you make a society (Loc 9106).

This view is the crux of Erik’s fundamental rift with Clayton. In Erik’s eyes, Clayton is worse than a weasel, because, recall, he’s not just agreeing to play the trolley game; he is creating it. He sets up Trolley Problems in the first place and imposes them on others, because this manipulation serves, as Clayton sees it, the greater good. Indeed, Clayton might well see his behaviour as another sacrifice of sorts, because he is benefitting the world at the price of his moral rectitude.² But such a code is not only evil on itself, it spreads evil to everyone who accepts it. Erik refuses to accept it.

If other people or outside circumstances create evil, well, the evil is theirs. To condition your own morality on their evil would itself be evil. You cannot say, well, they’ve set things up so I can kill ten people to save a hundred, so now it’s okay for me to kill ten people. What you do instead is kill no one and try to save a hundred and ten. And if you fail, and they all die, that fucking sucks, but at least you denied yourself the cheap out of “the greater good” (Loc 9092).

Anna, on the other hand, has no use for this idealism, and counters Erik’s philosophy with a blisteringly apt commentary on American exceptionalism. Only someone who is confident that their actions will not be the sole barrier between life and annihilation can have the luxury of virtuous self-sacrifice, of uncompromising morality.  ‘You’re quite sure America is going to stick around to judge you,’ she tells him. ‘And you want to be judged well. But the only people around to judge me were God and the people I saved. And God didn’t do anything for them. So I had to step up’ (Loc 6057).

The little guys don’t have the luxury of noping out of the game. And now, with the entire planet facing annihilation, Earth is the little guy. No one will be left to judge Erik’s actions, and so the fundamental assumption of Erik’s uncompromising morality falls apart.

And Clayton? Well, on the one hand you’d think that Clayton would be the first to pull the lever, the first to knuckle under Iruvage’s demands. Utilitarianism, baby, save the greatest number. That’s how trolley philosophy works. That’s how Clayton works. Except it’s not, because Clayton does not play trolley games, remember. He creates them. He controls other people’s moral decisions; he does not like allowing others to force them upon him.

These character dynamics on their own would make for a rich, chewy read, but they are far from the only thing going in this book. Secondary characters have their own arcs and philosophies, which make the eventual body count all the more poignant.³  Political and racial tensions are described with sophistication and nuance. Characters from China, Russia, Nigeria, the Phillippines, Iran, and Kurdistan are given their own viewpoints that felt fully realized, with each allowed their own personalities and desires that shaped them as individuals, rather than representatives of token diversity, while still being informed by their national and ethnic identities. And I should mention again how good the science bit of the science fiction is.⁴  

Now, I must acknowledge here that the reader will not be walking away fully satisfied, because Exordia does not end with a completed story. It seems to be leaving room open for a sequel. That’s fine, honestly. Given the size of the conflict and the stakes invoked in this galactic Trolley Problem, it would almost trivialize the scope of the vision if it could be finished off in one book. And future books might well serve to elaborate on the bits of history and politics that were left unexplored—namely, those of Exordia. While Dickinson’s understanding of Earthly sociopoliticoeconomic pressures is razor-sharp, he leaves an awful lot of vagueness in his descriptions of how the aliens work. It tends towards rather woo-woo quasi-religious hand-waving vibes, rather than a fully fleshed out social and political governance structure. But that’s fine. Exordia, the novel, takes place on Earth. I will be perfectly happy to wait for future books to explore the celestial politics of Exordia, the galactic power.

——

1 Indeed, several cities are destroyed quite early in the book, which is a quite effective plot device to skip over the tedious disbelief that aliens are real which would otherwise be a necessary part of the narrative. Dickinson wants Earth’s governments to get their tails in gear right quick, and so he drops nukes to speed that process along. ^↩
2 There is a brilliant Borges story about this perspective, called ‘The Three Versions of Judas’. ^↩
3 I really must emphasize that there is a shockingly high body count and a distressingly large number of nuclear explosions in this book. Really, truly. No, more than that. Dickinson is not here to play games (except trolley games). ^↩
4 I suppose I should also mention that I am not an expert in entropy and cosmology; and I am not Kurdish, Russian, Chinese, Filipina, Mexican, or queer. It is entirely possible that I’m missing some glaring errors in Dickinson’s approach to all of this that would hurt like a broken tooth someone who has actually lived the lives of Dickinson’s characters or researched entropy and pink noise. But from where I sit, it feels good. It feels real. It feels respectful, and sensitive, as if Dickinson has done his research and talked to the right people about it. I might be wrong. But I don’t think so. ^↩

——

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention

Highlights:

• On point philosophical point-counterpart discussion of Trolly philosophy
  
• Rich, well-realized characters with diverse lives and roles
  
• Snake-headed aliens
• Body horror
  
• Enormous body count

References 

Dickinson, Seth. Exordia. [Tor Publishing Group, 2023]. 

Borges, Jorge Luis. 'The Three Versions of Judas.' In: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. [Penguin Books, 1998].

——

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

Nanoreviews: The Orphans of Raspay, The Monster Baru Cormorant, A Killing Frost

Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Orphans of Raspay [Subterranean Press]

After seven novellas, Lois McMaster Bujold is treading on familiar ground - Penric finds himself in something of a pickle and with a combination of smart thinking, luck, and Desdemona's help manages to make his way out of said pickle. This is all told with wit, warmth, and heart.

So it was and so it is with The Orphans of Raspay, where Bujold adds orphans and pirates (and not the fun pirates, at that - these pirates are fairly gross). It's not a romp, but on the other hand we never quite feel that Penric is in real danger. The question is how will he get out of it this time and can he protect the orphans at the same time? It's a Penric novella and it's written by Bujold, The Orphans of Raspay is a delight.
Score: 7/10

Dickinson, Seth. The Monster Baru Cormorant [Tor]

Adri already wrote about The Monster Baru Cormorant two years ago in a much longer form review. Her review is worth a read, I agree with much of what she had to say. The novel is one political maneuver after another, and for as much as Baru was able to play the political game with adeptness in The Traitor Baru Cormorant, she comes across as a bit out of her depth here in Monster as she is brought in closer to the power of Falcrest / The Masquerade and everyone around her has been playing politics as a game for perhaps more years than Baru has been alive.

Dickinson's writing is as sharp as it was in Traitor, but Monster is a much slower paced novel - not quite plodding, but let's call it deliberate since my opinion of Monster is generally favorable. Baru is willing to do almost anything to reach her goal of achieving enough power to both destroy Falcrest from within as well as save her home island. There are two significant moments of Baru demonstrating that, one so early in the novel it would almost not be a spoiler to reveal and one quite a bit later in the story. It is Baru willing to sacrifice her humanity, sacrifice almost anything and anyone. But, there are almost a few scattered moments of Baru questioning those choices - that maybe her scorched earth ambition might be better served with actual forward thinking and planning compared to taking each moment as a discrete entity. 

The Monster Baru Cormorant does not stand alone. So much of the context depends on Traitor, but it serves to whet the appetite to see how Baru might possibly achieve her goals and at what cost (as if the cost has not been high enough already. Dickinson tells a brutal story, but it's not quite one you want to look away from (even if sometimes you're reading with one eye open)
Score: 7/10

McGuire, Seanan. A Killing Frost [DAW]

Oh, my heart. It's somewhat odd to think that a significant event in the world of Faerie can feel somewhat minor key, but to be completely vague - it did, but not in a way that felt minimized. It felt deliberate and thoughtful, The heart of the novel is Toby's quest (it's always a quest with Toby) to find and restore Simon Torquill, her tormentor who has lost his memory of almost any good act and intention he had for decades.

McGuire's storytelling is as on point as ever. A Killing Frost is the fourteenth novel in the October Daye series and it feels as fresh as it did with the first couple of novels and as familiar as readers might hope. Seanan McGuire isn't afraid to break her readers hearts and then toy with them, but it is always in service to ever building and expanding and revealing the world of faerie, evolving what we know and what is possible.
Score: 8/10


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Microreview [Book]: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

After a grim start, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant finally restores some confidence to its troubled hero and her Empire-destroying schemes

Content Note: This review contains major spoilers for the end of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, the first book in the series, and anyone picking that book up should be aware that it contains heavy themes of homophobia and queer misery. The Tyrant Baru Cormorant contains a plague as a major plot point, and also contains other elements of torture, body horror and gore that are discussed below.

Baru Cormorant is back for round three! In The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (which, in-keeping with the rest of this series' inexplicable name shortenings, is being published as "The Tyrant" in the UK) everyone's favourite provincial savant returns for another round of high-stakes political drama against the empire of Falcrest: the empire which colonised her island, killed one of her fathers and tried to cut her off from her own culture as a child, and also the empire which now counts her as among its most elite operatives. The first book in the series captured my heart and then broke it into a million pieces, and while I don't think I'm the same reader as I was five years ago, I still consider new releases in this series to be a significant event, and I'm especially glad we haven't had to wait too long between the previous book and this one.

When we left Baru at the end of The Monster Baru Cormorant, she had been captured by the Cancrioth, the secretive cancer-worshipping society which had been secretly influencing the Oriati Mbo confederacy and which could provide a political opening for Falcrest to conquer that society. It's safe to say that Baru wasn't in a great place for any of that book, as she steps up into her new position in the Empire while coming to terms with the death of her lover Tain Hu and the blame she carries for it, having watched the execution and refused to stop it and allow the Empire to use Hu as a hostage against her. The fight that led to Hu's capture and the end of the rebellion she led also gave Baru a major head injury which has led to lasting hemineglect. These consequences reverberate throughout Monster, and the while the ending of the book offers some interesting context as to how the hemineglect, in particular, has influenced her actions, it leaves any emotional healing from these events largely unrealised. Thus, it's a still rather static Baru who returns for Tyrant's first act: Falcrest's political situation has changed around her, but not much has changed from the opening of the previous book for her.

The first third of Tyrant deals directly with the fallout of her capture by the Cancrioth, and the introduction of their different leaders (all of whom carry a different hereditary cancer which apparently bestows ancestral memory as well as... y'know, cancer) is combined with a ton of body horror and outright torture. Baru survives their tender loving ministrations, only to become caught back up in the different factions of Falcrest and Aurdwynn (the country from which Tain Hu hails, and where Baru started her illustrious career) who have been hunting her down. The switch from the Cancrioth's visceral biological horrors to Falcrests ultra-sterile unpleasantness is effective at underscoring their respective awfulness and how tenuous Baru's position is between them, but it's a lot to get through, especially as there's no clear escape route or game plan for what might happen once Baru is out of immediate danger.

What a relief, then, that Dickinson has this all in hand. Once Tyrant gets off the Cancrioth ship, Baru's story gets a lot zippier, with certain spoilery but very precious events helping her regain faith in her abilities, enabling her plans and her scheming to return in force. For me, this was an enormously refreshing change:  while the grief and stress of Baru's recent past never leaves her, her breakthrough lets her reconnect with some of the more engaging aspects of her personality (including the youthful arrogance!) and start rebuilding relationships with those around her, establishing trust with some rather unexpected players to start moving things along. In renewing this confidence, Dickinson makes it a lot easier to get behind the twisty and mysterious schemes that drive Tyrant forward - and that's trust we very much need, as the plot navigates the complex political situation which the first two books have set up. On that front, it also helps that Aurdwynn and Taranoke are now firmly back into the picture alongside the Oriati Mbo, though unfortunately, the sections involving the Mbo still feel like the weakest parts of this story. It's just hard to invest in the characters here, particularly when the main action of this thread takes place in the form of flashbacks to the characters' past, compared to other, more immediately pressing, plot strands. There are other diversions too, notably to the small island nation of Kypranaoke, a former Falcrest colony now left to its own devices with a deeply dysfunctional post-colonisation political system and an experimental infection of a new deadly disease called the Kettling. A lot of the time, though, Tyrant is a homecoming for many of its characters, particularly Baru herself, and it feels the stronger for it.

The other sea change here, which began in Monster but is even more notable now, is Baru's increasing acceptance of her own queerness and her ability to be open with a wider range of characters without fear of retribution from the enforced "hygiene" of Falcrest itself. Although Baru does pursue sexual relationships in Monster after the death of Tain Hu, the discussion of these relationships and her categorisation of them starts to change significantly here, as she starts to recognise which connections are offering her positive connection, which are not, and which might but come with emotional and moral baggage that's higher than she's willing to pay. The introduction of certain characters with some loud, teasing but supportive opinions on Baru's entanglements is also a refreshing change (and I wish I could tell you who they are, but suffice it to say you will probably be delighted). While Tyrant recognises that Baru is still the product of conditioning, and her tendency to self-sabotage is far from gone, there's still welcome undertones of hope and levity piercing through the misery. There's still plenty of setbacks and horror, and some of those hopeful moments exist in the narrative only to make subsequent punches land a bit harder, but having ups with the downs nevertheless makes a huge difference in the reading experience, allowing us to hope alongside Baru that a victory against this all-powerful, overwhelming foe just might be possible.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant was a brutal gem of a book, one which pulled out all the stops (particularly the one labelled "queer misery") to tell its story of a young woman trying to go up against the empire which has destroyed her homeland, outlawed her sexuality and culture, and is now destroying the land of the woman she loves. Monster, its sequel, picks up where the first book leaves off, but in widening the scope of Traitor's story it becomes a rather different experience, one without much space to advance Baru's emotional state on the path towards healing. Tyrant begins as more of the same, but once it comes around to making good on its young hero's growth, it won back any trust I might have lost over the previous volume-and-a-bit. I understand there is one more volume to go before Baru's journey is done, and although Tyrant ends on a positive enough note for the characters that it doesn't strictly feel like it needs one, if it comes to it then I am ready to take down the empire with this terrible young woman, once and for all.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 A long awaited payoff in terms of character healing and growth; +1 New and returning settings and characters provide a strong, hopeful focus

Penalties: -1 The Oriati Mbo storyline still doesn't spark along with the rest; -1 The first third of the book is exhaustingly bleak and brutal

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Dickinson, Seth. The Tyrant Baru Cormorant [Tor, 2020]

Microreview [Book]: The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

The long-awaited sequel to Dickinson's brutal tale of economic intrigue is a difficult but worthy instalment.

It's been three long, interesting years between the release of Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its fair to say this long-awaited sequel, in which the Traitor becomes the Monster, has been one of my most anticipated releases of the year. The Traitor Baru Cormorant blew me away when I read it in 2015: I was still relatively new to modern adult SFF, and at the time I didn't realise that it was possible to capture this type of political and economic intrigue in fantasy. Baru's journey from island prodigy to rebel leader was immensely satisfying, as was the fact she was doing it all as a civil servant. Then, like all books, it ended, and as anyone who has read it will sympathise, it ended like that. I lost hours of sleep. If you haven't read the book and don't know what I'm referring to, let me warn you not to look for queer happy endings in this otherwise magnificent book and send you away to do what you will.

The Monster Baru Cormorant starts with a new perspective on that very scene: (really, this is your final spoiler warning) the death of Tain Hu, Baru's Aurdwynni lover, as part of her induction into the inner circle of the Empire of Falcrest (also known as the Masquerade), aka the imperial power that conquered her childhood home and ruined her life. This outwardly heartless act turns out to be the key to putting Baru beyond the empire's plans for her: the empire's elite "cryptarchs" are selected not just for their value, but for having a particular person or secret that the empire can blackmail them with and keep them in line. By refusing to beg for Tain Hu's life as she is executed (a decision which Tain Hu herself made and insisted Baru agree to), Baru becomes one of Falcrest's very few "unbound" cryptarchs, a position which unsettles and impresses the other cryptarchs around her. Her promotion also throws her into a world where, perversely, everyone is now aware of secrets she had previously guarded on pain of death, just as her peers are now open about their own secrets. In Falcresti terms, Baru is a "tribadist" -- that's "lesbian" to you and me -- a sexuality subject to severe punishment in a society that values its version of heteronormativity above all else. To make matters even more interesting, a head injury at the very end of Traitor has left Baru with dextral hemineglect, a neural condition where she is effectively "blind" and cannot pick up signals or exercise full control over the right side of her brain.

I wish I could say I had time for a reread of Book 1 before diving in to The Monster Baru Cormorant, but life is what it is and I ended up returning to Falcrest without the opportunity to refresh my memory on what had come before. Luckily, there's a slow start as Baru is inducted as a cryptarch and adjusts to her new normal in the relative comfort of the Elided Keep, which means there are enough reminders about her two-faced plan to bring Aurdwynn to the brink of victory to jump in without previous events fresh in one's mind (this recap will also help). That said, the first section of this book was far from my favourite. Perhaps it's the weird nicknames, which makes everyone sound like they should be bit players in a Warhammer 40,000 Imperium fic, and which seems out of place in Falcrest's otherwise deliberately sterile culture.

Or maybe it's the sterility itself that's the problem here. The Masquerade is a compelling villain, representing a creeping totalitarianism clothed in civilising influence, but up close it's by far the least interesting culture in Dickinson's otherwise vibrant world. Most of the time this is a feature, not a bug: by making the empire clinical and soulless when it isn't actively employing sexual violence and lobotomies to control its populations, we can't help but root more desperately for the generally more benevolent, or at least more human, cultures that risk being wiped off the map. However, it means that the scenes where Baru -- now, in a move which I really can't take seriously, calling herself "Agonist" (luckily Dickinson doesn't push this too hard) -- is getting to grips with her new role feel a little devoid of anything except relentless, unpleasant political scheming.

Luckily, it doesn't take long before Baru and some of her fellow cryptarchs, including a new-ish "friend" called Apparitor (snort) and Baru's old enemy Xate Yawa (who also now has a silly nickname that I've deliberately forgotten and refuse to look up), are sent off to the known world's remaining superpower, a federation of states called Oriati Mbo. Having subdued Aurdwynn's civil war, conquering the Mbo is next on Falcrest's to-do list, and rogue navy captains and awkward Mbo involvement in Aurdwynn notwithstanding, they'd like to do it without descending into all-out war. Unfortunately, hot in pursuit of Baru and co is Tain Shir, Tain Hu's cousin and former prodigy of Cairdine Farrier, the same older cryptarch who trained up Baru. Tain Shir, having heard of the execution of her cousin, has taken it upon herself to hunt her down and show her the "error" of treating people as disposable elements of her plans. Baru herself responds to this with a combination of intense grief and a sense of sunk cost fallacy: she has to succeed, because the woman she loves has died to make it happen. Interspersed with Baru's adventure on the high seas, Dickinson also weaves in the past and the present of a prince of the Mbo, a non-binary "laman" called Tau-indi. Tau provides a window into the culture of their people (which is much more interesting than Falcrest, because everything in this world is), and on meeting with Baru becomes the token cinnamon roll in a story that's otherwise teeming with vipers.

Once again, it's interesting to see Baru's status as an "economic savant" played out in Dickinson's well-realised world, where her toybox is the economics of empire and conquest. Now that we're past all the twisty betrayal stuff, Baru's motivations and actions are generally more straightforward and limited in scope: she spends most of the book in situations where she doesn't have the power to for kind of machinations that brought down Aurdwynn. I spent a lot of time musing on the way that Dickinson portrays political change and the impact that the cryptarchs have: Baru herself, and her mentors in this book, seem to conceptualise politics as a "great game", to the point where the cryptarchs literally have a strategy game designed to model their own world that they use to consider scenarios to bring down Oriati Mbo. In the real world, of course, the causes of political change are complex and can be modelled only in statistical probabilities, if at all - there is no way to trace causes of political change in the way that a strategy game allows. Ultimately, the narrative recognises this as well , and it becomes even more clear in this volume that Baru's ability to manipulate political situations is actually more a talent at coming up with a plausible move in any given circumstance, rather than having power over long-term outcomes. Where The Traitor Baru Cormorant was about the shock of seeing a character turn their extensive powers towards unforgivable goals in the name of protecting something even more valuable, The Monster Baru Cormorant is about watching that character come up against the limits of their own power, and what it means for someone whose reason for existence is so singularly focused towards overcoming that limit.

Whether this book will work for you, of course, very much depends on how much time you have for this particular character study, especially given the grimdark fantasy backdrop Dickinson sets it in. If you read The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin and maintained sympathy for Essun and the awful choices she makes in response to a world that wants to destroy her, Baru's journey may well appeal along the same lines. Interestingly, what I think sets Baru apart from Essun is her ambition, a trait which female characters (and real human people) are disproportionately punished for having. Baru is setting out to secure the survival of her people and their culture, where Essun simply wants to exist freely; does the fact that Baru's atrocities are in pursuit of that wider goal, rather than pure self-preservation, contribute to her "monstrousness"? It's a compelling question, if you buy in to what Dickinson is doing here: but this is definitely not a book for everyone. It also ends on a cliffhanger, which is honestly an enormous disappointment in a book that was so long in coming! The acknowledgements assure me that the end of Baru's journey is already written, but I am somewhat nervous about the lack of publishing date.

If The Monster Baru Cormorant lacks the "wow" factor I found in The Traitor Baru Cormorant, that's probably a reflection of where I am as a reader rather than the quality of this book. Readers who enjoyed the first will find a worthy continuation of Baru's awful adventures, with more of the same political scheming and cultural clashes that made the first book so outstanding. At the end, I feel like this review could ramble for another 5,000 words about different elements of this book (gender! hemineglect! Tau! The Lloysdanes! Xate Yawa's schemes! The Cancrioth!), and perhaps that's the best stamp of approval I can give a book like this: I'm not sure I agree with every choice it makes, but it makes me want to sit and reread and unpick it more. I'll be scheduling a full series reread before the final instalment for sure, and I can't wait to see how Baru's mission ends.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +0 no, you don't ACTUALLY get a bonus for avoiding more tragic queer deaths. +1 dense political worldbuilding which left me with a lot to think about.

Penalties: -0 I'm not penalising Baru for being an "unlikeable" female character with ambition either, no matter how reprehensible her means of achieving it are; -1 the slow start and cliffhanger ending make this a frustrating volume from a storytelling point of view.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Dickinson, Seth The Monster Baru Cormorant [Tor, 2018]

6 Books with Seth Dickinson

Seth Dickinson's short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov's, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. He is an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, winner of the 2011 Dell Magazines Award, and a lapsed student of social neuroscience. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was his debut novel. You can find him on Twitter as @SethJDickinson. 

Today he shares his 6 books with us...

1. What book are you currently reading? 

Before bed I'm verrrrrrry slowly working my way through The Power Broker, which is the story of Robert Moses, the man who built modern New York. He began as an idealistic reformer, but constant obstructions drove him to seek power by any means, until that desire consumed him! It's extremely on brand. (He was a really bad person).

I'm also reading Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw, which is about a doctor whose practice treats the supernatural population of London, and Eternity by Greg Bear, which is the sequel to a childhood favorite book about the discovery of an asteroid whose interior goes on forever.

I just finished Jade City by Fonda Lee, Ship of Fools/Unto Leviathan by Richard Paul Russo, and The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts.

2. What upcoming book you are really excited about? 

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel, the last in the Wolf Hall trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. All that's left is his downfall and execution! If you enjoy epic fantasy you should read these books; they are beautiful, intricate thrillers about a common man tasked by the King to find a way out of his (the King's) marriage.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read? 

I do a lot of re-reading, so the itch usually gets scratched pretty fast. I recently went on a World War III kick — Red Storm Rising, Fire Lance, Team Yankee, Red Army, Eon, and Ghost Fleet.

I think I would like to reread Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, a YA novel about a young British spy imprisoned in Nazi-occupied France. After four years or so I'm probably ready to endure the pain.

Oh! And I want to do a reread of the viral 9mother9horse9eyes...thing, the 'flesh interfaces' meta-fuckery story that some genius improvised on the Internet in 2016.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about over time--either positively or negatively? 

Guns, Germs, and Steel. When I read it in high school I thought it was the smartest thing ever written. Now it's pretty obviously reductionist. (I'm not, like, clever for figuring this out, there's a bot on the history reddit whose only job is to post disclaimers about GG&S.)

I used to think Pale Fire was a clever postmodern novel with a 'true' story hidden behind the one we're given. Now I know that Zembla is real and John Shade failed its people.

God, I can never remember enough books.

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The novelization of Star Wars Episode III by Matthew Stover, no, hang on, I'm serious here. The movie is...at best kind of a clunker, with long dull walk-and-talks and some really anodyne action scenes breaking up the genuinely good stuff. But the book is a pulp-art masterpiece; it hits all the same beats, uses all the same characters, and yet it really sings. It's got this vitality to it. It's brutal, it's funny, it's mythic. How'd he do that? I want to figure that out. I haven't, but I want to.

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome? 

The Monster Baru Cormorant is the story of Agonist — Baru Cormorant as one of the secret rulers behind the Imperial Throne. She has the power to overthrow the empire that colonized her home. But what did getting that power cost her? She betrayed so many people — knowing that's possible, that level of deceit, can she ever bring herself to trust anyone again? Can she think of herself as worthy of love, or happiness? Is she going to be alone forever? Can you be alone forever?

Fiction is full of these characters who scheme and manipulate. If you're not a sociopath (Baru's not) I think that would be really depressing, really lonely...I wanted to write a character who ran face-first into that wall. You can't just go on being cruel to yourself, being alone, utterly devoted to your purpose. You've got to have something for yourself.

Anyway: Baru is one of the secret rulers of the world, war is looming, she's been given a quest to find the secret of immortality, her brain damage is making her hallucinate, and she's afraid her whole life has been manipulated by the man who made her. And, as ever, she's deep within an empire she secretly wants to overthrow and destroy. She has a lot on her plate. And she can't even see the whole plate! Because she has hemineglect. Poor woman.



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. 

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Dickinson, Seth. The Monster Baru Cormorant [Tor]
Publisher's Description

A breathtaking geopolitical epic fantasy, The Monster Baru Cormorant is the sequel to Seth Dickinson's "fascinating tale" (The Washington Post), The Traitor Baru Cormorant.

Her world was shattered by the Empire of Masks.
For the power to shatter the Masquerade,
She betrayed everyone she loved.

The traitor Baru Cormorant is now the cryptarch Agonist—a secret lord of the empire she's vowed to destroy.

Hunted by a mutinous admiral, haunted by the wound which has split her mind in two, Baru leads her dearest foes on an expedition for the secret of immortality. It's her chance to trigger a war that will consume the Masquerade.

But Baru's heart is broken, and she fears she can no longer tell justice from revenge...or her own desires from the will of the man who remade her.

Why We Want It: The Traitor Baru Cormorant was a bad ass novel of a woman trying to get her revenge on an empire from the inside, and the moral compromises she has to make to rise high enough to effect that change. Monster Baru is the sequel and I need this in my life.

Rivera, K. Arsenault. The Phoenix Empress [Tor]
Publisher's Description

Once they were the heirs to a prophecy that predicted two women would save an empire.

Now Shefali is dying—and her wife is unaware of the coming tragedy. Shizuka is too busy trying to reunite a fractured empire and right the wrongs of her ancestors.

As the Imperial Army gathers against a demonic invasion, Shizuka must do all she can with an empire on the brink of civil war.

Why We Want It:  I have not read The Tiger's Daughter but I've been inundated with the praise that novel has received. It has been enough to push that novel much farther up my reading queue and to get my attention firmly planted on its follow up, The Phoenix Empress.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Red Moon [Orbit]
Publisher's Description

Red Moon is a magnificent novel of space exploration and political revolution from New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson.

It is thirty years from now, and we have colonized the moon.

American Fred Fredericks is making his first trip, his purpose to install a communications system for China’s Lunar Science Foundation. But hours after his arrival he witnesses a murder and is forced into hiding.

It is also the first visit for celebrity travel reporter Ta Shu. He has contacts and influence, but he too will find that the moon can be a perilous place for any traveler.

Finally, there is Chan Qi. She is the daughter of the Minister of Finance, andwithout doubt a person of interest to those in power. She is on the moon for reasons of her own, but when she attempts to return to China, in secret, the events that unfold will change everything – on the moon, and on Earth.

Why We Want It: Would you believe the only Kim Stanley Robinson I've read is last year's Hugo finalist novel New York 2140? I've meant to read more, I've got at least two of his novels that I can think of on my bookshelf downstairs, but I'm overdue to read more. The title has obvious echoes of Robinson's classic Red Mars and the novel itself deals with the colonization of the Moon by China, which is a solid and plausible future. I mostly enjoyed New York 2140 and this should be another major novel from Kim Stanley Robinson.

Scalzi, John. The Consuming Fire [Tor]
Publisher's Description

The Consuming Fire—the sequel to the 2018 Hugo Award Best Novel finalist and 2018 Locus Award-winning The Collapsing Empire—an epic space-opera novel in the bestselling Interdependency series, from the Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi

The Interdependency, humanity’s interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse. The Flow, the extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel between the stars possible, is disappearing, leaving entire star systems stranded. When it goes, human civilization may go with it—unless desperate measures can be taken.

Emperox Grayland II, the leader of the Interdependency, is ready to take those measures to help ensure the survival of billions. But nothing is ever that easy. Arrayed before her are those who believe the collapse of the Flow is a myth—or at the very least, an opportunity that can allow them to ascend to power.

While Grayland prepares for disaster, others are preparing for a civil war, a war that will take place in the halls of power, the markets of business and the altars of worship as much as it will take place between spaceships and battlefields. The Emperox and her allies are smart and resourceful, but then so are her enemies. Nothing about this power struggle will be simple or easy... and all of humanity will be caught in its widening gyre.

Why We Want It: I delighted in The Collapsing Empire, to the point that I was reading in the car on the way to the airport so I could finish it before we left for a week's vacation (side note, I generally don't take hardcover books with me on trips, more often I'll bring a paperback to leave someplace for some random stranger to find a book and be delighted by it - the Scalzi is a keeper). The Collapsing Empire was fantastic, but it was also so very clearly the first part in a longer story. The Consuming Fire is that second part and I am so excited to read it.

Stearns, R.E. Mutiny at Vesta [Saga]
Publisher's Description

Adda and Iridian have survived the murderous AI that tried to kill them in Barbary Station...but now they'll need all of their ingenuity to escape the evil megacorporation that wants to own them, in this second space adventure in the Shieldrunner Pirates trilogy.

Adda Karpe and Iridian Nassir have escaped the murderous AI that was trapping them on Barbary Station, and earned themselves a place on Captain Sloane’s fabled pirate crew. And now that they’ve arrived at Vesta, Sloane’s home base, they can finally start making a living stealing from well-off megacorporations.

Unfortunately, the political situation has deteriorated in Captain Sloane’s absence. Adda and Iridian find themselves trapped in a contract with Oxia Corp., one of the very megacorporations they'd hoped to prey on, forced to rob and intimidate targets they'd never have chosen on their own. If they're ever going to have the independent life together that they've always wanted, they'll have to free themselves from Oxia Corp. first. Meanwhile, the inhuman allies who followed Adda and Iridian from Barbary Station have plans of their own, which may be more dangerous than the humans involved could imagine. It will take not one but five heists, and every bit of ingenuity Adda and Iridian have to escape from Oxia and find the life they’ve always dreamed of…if they can survive.

Why We Want It: I'm a bit behind and haven't read Barbary Station yet, but I'm still sold on Navah Wolfe's description of that first book as "lesbian women of color space pirates versus a murderous AI". This is my reminder that I need to get on that because Mutiny at Vesta is coming up!

Wells, Martha. Exit Strategy [Tor.com Publishing]
Publisher's Description

Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries, a wildfire science fiction phenomenon about an antisocial AI learning to care, comes to a thrilling conclusion with Exit Strategy. 

Murderbot wasn’t programmed to care. So, its decision to help the only human who ever showed it respect must be a system glitch, right?

Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah—its former owner (protector? friend?)—submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit.

But who’s going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue? 

And what will become of it when it’s caught?

Why We Want It: What? You don't know about Murderbot? The first novella, All Systems Red, only won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award for Best Novella. The next two are just as delightful as the first. Exit Strategy is the fourth and final Murderbot novella, though a full length novel was recently announced.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.