Review: The Last Human by P. S. Hoffman

A far-future adventure where the legacy of humankind falls into the unlikeliest hands

Untold millennia after human extinction, new intelligent species populate the universe. Civilizations have risen and fallen and risen again, and developed their own forms of industry, but the relics of the final stages of human technology are still regarded as the ultimate standard of quality. In most worlds, human artifacts are even preserved with sacred reverence. And although humanity is long gone, the memory of our glorious deeds has persisted and morphed and grown to such legendary heights that we are worshiped as gods.

On the planet Gaiam, the native birdlike population is divided in castes, in the same way their capital city, called the Cauldron because of its concave shape, is segregated in horizontal layers of ascending prestige. The nobility lives in the Highcity, the regular folk have the Midcity, and those who have been abandoned by society do their best to get by in the Lowtown. For nineteen years now, Gaiam has been under the cruel occupation of the Cyran Empire, a civilization of reptilians that have conquered dozens more worlds. A short-lived rebellion ended disastrously, and its survivors have joined the unfortunate inhabitants of the Lowtown.

But one day, corvid-shaped Eolh, a jaded spy-for-hire with no personal attachments and no hopes for the future, stumbles upon the greatest discovery in the universe: a gang boss has gotten his hands on a cryonic tank that contains an actual, intact, living human. And there's no telling what the imperial regime will do to seize possession of him. From that point on, Eolh's life becomes a whirlwind of back alley chases, deadly knife fights, underground tunnel forays, clandestine medicine, and personally difficult choices as he crosses paths with a devout robot who has been patiently working to bring about the return of the gods, an imperial magistrate who will happily burn down the city to advance his career ambitions, and a disgraced queen who willingly surrendered the planet to the invaders.

Each of these characters is a complete story in itself, with generous space dedicated to exploring the web of their desires and their hidden depths, but Poire, the rescued human, is on a whole other level of fascinating: his survivor guilt drives a hard journey towards maturity as he slowly gains the strength to resolve the incongruousness between his rather inconsequential position in the vanished human society and the cosmic-scale role that the new society wants to drop onto his shoulders.

One can perceive a similar tension at the core of Eolh's character: each of his choices is a heart-rending balancing act between his post-traumatic urge for self-preservation and his newfound and not entirely welcome sense of responsibility. This is one of the high achievements of this novel: the level of effort that the author invested in portraying the inner struggle behind choices that the reader might not approve of, but will definitely empathize with. These characters are carefully built of emotions that feel authentic, an artistic feat all the more remarkable by the fact that all but one of them behave by alien rules of psychology that in this kind of story often risk coming off as incomprehensible. Here, the alien traditions and assumptions about proper conduct and social norms are organically integrated into the plot so that they don't fall as an infodump, and the reader can easily follow the reasons why this society works the way it does. Poire the human is utterly lost in this world, but the reader never is.

The world itself, lovingly put together, is worthy of more extensive praise. Although the action is mostly limited to one city, the author has taken obvious delight in the creation of each setting, from the shiny towers of the occupation government to the grimy passages between neglected and barely lit neighborhoods. The quarrel between factions to see who will gain control of the last human takes the reader through all the levels of the Cauldron, giving the author a nice excuse to display a vigorous worldbuilding arsenal. It's hard enough to design an entire collective habitat for a species of flight-capable aliens; it's even harder to refine the precise sense of setting that allows the author to carry the action naturally through the places where it needs to happen while ensuring that the physical components of each space reinforce the mood of each scene. This novel invites the reader to feel the vertigo of polished stone balconies and the dread of foul-smelling sewers and the eeriness of sentient climbing vines and the disorientation of abandoned high-tech ruins. Each space is strange and unexpected, but not simply for the sake of wowing the reader (though it more than does). I'm repeating myself, but it's important to highlight the synergy this novel reaches, by which the space supports the action and the action colors the space.

There are unmistakable parallels between the emergence of a long-awaited god in Cyran-occupied Gaiam and the emergence of Christianity in Roman-occupied Judea, but this novel does something far more interesting than a straight retelling of the Gospels. Poire is well aware that he's no savior, he's no divine superman, and he's the least-equipped hero to face the full might of an empire. But it's intensely satisfying to witness his growth from an unskilled, mediocre youth into a reliable, confident man who may not like the circumstances he's been thrown into, but serenely accepts the duty those circumstances put in his hands.

For a debut novel, and a self-published one at that, The Last Human is a consistent work of writing excellence that deserves a place next to any professionally produced book. You can immediately tell how much fun the author had in coming up with the complexities of these characters and in assembling every weird detail of the difficult world they inhabit. Fortunately, it's only the first entry in a planned series, which means we'll get to savor the mysteries of Gaiam for several years to come.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the construction of richly detailed spaces throughout the city, +2 for gut-punching feats of psychological depth.

Penalties: −2 for the way the sequel hook makes the ending feel truncated, −2 because the language used to describe the ethnic varieties of avians comes too close to validating monarchism and bioessentialism—there's no justification for saying there's anything inherently "regal" about birds of prey that would make them worthier rulers than crows, for instance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Hoffman, P. S. The Last Human [self-published, 2022].

Microreview [book]: Inhuman, by David Simpson

A solid sequel to the speculative sci fi Post-Human series!

Simpson, David. Inhuman. Post-Human Media, 2014.

Buy it here.

By the end of the first books in the series, things had gotten super intense. James Keats and the AI had assumed godlike powers, and driven off an army of trillions. It seemed to me that the series was dangerously close to the ‘no threat can possibly top that!’ moment, a moment, needless to say, that affects quite a number of series of this sort (as well as fantasy series, in fact). Once the world/universe has been saved from the likes of a demigod/ginormous army/etc., how can any plausible greater threat still be lurking, ready to jump out from behind a bush or whatnot in book five?

I was surprised to find Simpson manages to postpone that moment, and delivers quite a worthy opponent/crisis in this, the fifth book. Best of all, Inhuman combines the most interesting elements of the outlying fourth book (the one about the AI’s ethical test) with the ongoing implications of Craig et al’s actions earlier in the series. In this installment, we learn more about the nature of the ‘multiverse’, an idea that everyone seemed to have forgotten about after Craig’s little venture into alternate universes in book one, and begin to suspect the true archenemy is someone even worse than One. That’s about all I can say about the content without spoiling stuff; suffice it to say, this is an entertaining tale that will keep you turning pages.

But how will you react to the end, I wonder? Because this is the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ effect times a trillion: going from a high point (the endings of books three and four) to a dark valley until, presumably, the sixth book delivers a happy resolution of some kind. Here’s the problem, though: at the end of Empire Strikes Back, a happy ending to the overall series seemed a bit unlikely, but certainly not implausible, since the rebels were mostly still alive and the main characters had even learned some valuable lessons, arguably, in how to face the superior power of the Empire. At the end of Inhuman? Not to spoil it, but a whole lotta farms have been bought! How can one realistically hope and expect a happy resolution when things have reached such a bleak point?

“But maybe Keats et al will pull off another wildly improbable ‘do-over’ and save everyone!” you might say, and based on the series so far, I’d be inclined to agree this sort of deus ex machina is quite likely to occur. But hasn’t that dead horse been beaten enough? Seems like every few hundred pages in the series all hope (and everyone alive) is lost, only for a miraculous reset to erase all that suffering and death and make it as though it had never been. ‘O Death, where is thy sting’ indeed! I am not a huge fan of this sort of deus ex machina in the best of circumstances, and seeing it used repeatedly in the series hasn’t made me any sweeter on the idea. For one thing, characters that had been mercifully dead keep popping up…

And while I’m venting about the false notes in an otherwise entertaining and even thought-provoking series, let me just say: why do most people seem convinced that, barring extraordinary circumstances, an artificial intelligence will “inevitably” be a mustache-twirling supervillain? Oh, I admit that sort of thing is surely a possibility, but not a very well thought-out one: why would a being with the knowledge of the (multiple) universe(s) at its incorporeal fingertips decide to wipe out all life 99.99% of the time?

In any case, things are looking bleak for our intrepid band, and despite the ranting above, I’m quite curious as to how Simpson will manage to top the ‘darkest hour’ feel of book five and sustain tension and interest in book six!

The Math:

Objective assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for expertly weaving together elements of the very different storylines of books 1-3 and book 4 into a newly integrated structure

Penalties: -1 for taking the darkest hour feel to a soul-sucking new low and signaling to the audience that a(nother) ‘do-over’, deus ex machina style, is going to be in the works in book six

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 “Flawed yet good, but did I mention flawed?”

[Six ain’t bad: it’s not as low as it sounds, as you can see here.]

This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, skeptic of gods out of the machine since forever and contributor at NOAF since 2013.

Microreview [book(s)]: The Post-Human Omnibus edition, by David Simpson

An intriguing speculative look at the implications of Moore’s Law for humanity’s future

Simpson, David. Post-Human Omnibus edition. Podium Publishing: 2014.

Buy it here. 

At one point, this collection, actually four books in one, referenced Arthur C. Clarke’s famous idea that any form of technology, if far enough ahead of another civilization’s, is essentially just like magic. That insight certainly applies to the level of technological sophistication of the post-human civilization described in Simpson’s vision of the future—and this has both positive and negative implications. It’s fun, to be sure, to speculate about a nanobot-based civilization in which virtually anything can be made, as it were, out of thin air (much like that Johnny Depp movie).

Magic!

But it has limited applicability to today’s world, as that sort of magical, commuting-to-Venus-using-only-my-magic-magnetic field idea is so far beyond today’s technology that it has no useful connection to the ‘real’ world. This sort of speculation about the rapid pace of technological progression is still interesting, though, and some more theoretical aspects of the society of the future, especially the debate about strong AIs and so forth, struck me as far more interesting than the fanciful imaginings of futuristic bolts of green energy or space-time travel. Moreover, Simpson is at his descriptive best in scenes of combat, and struggles a bit more on the characterization side, or rather, on the likeability of his characters. Craig is, at least to my mind, a deeply unsympathetic character without really achieving anti-hero status; he’s just kind of a jerk, and that proved to be an obstacle to my engagement with the series; similarly, the poetically named James Keats was less impressive, because less relatably human, than he could have been with another treatment. In Simpson’s defense, Keats is a sort of bridging figure, standing in the gulf between humanity and post-humanity/AI/etc., and that might explain his slightly alien nature.

In any case, my favorite of the four-book series is definitely the outlier, the final book (Human Plus), a mystery which, while relatively easy to unravel, is much closer (temporally and in all other ways) to “our” reality today, and as such beats the pants off the hocus-pocus in the more futuristic explorations of humankind’s destiny throughout the first three books.  The book wrestles with one of the key questions about any machine intelligence: what sort of ethical understanding would such a being likely have? Is there any way of guessing or predicting such an entity’s perspective on humankind? There have certainly been plenty of sci fi doom-saying movies about the dangers of AI, and how such a creature would surely regard humankind as a threat to its own existence and seek to eliminate that threat. But what basis is there for this sort of fear? Put differently, could machines be capable of altruism?

The rest of the series, which extends decades into a future made remote and unrecognizable by the rapid advance of technology, is still plenty entertaining, just less philosophically rewarding than the final book. If you’re a fan of this sort of technological exploration of humanity’s future, then you will doubtless enjoy the entire series; but I suspect many will find Human Plus especially worthwhile.

Objective assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for crafting an excellent prequel in the final book, Human Plus, with the most human, believable character of the whole series; +1 for expertly playing out several thought experiments about what might happen in the future if Moore’s Law holds

Penalties: -1 for drifting so far into the future the ‘technology’ of the posthumans is essentially just magic, and as such has few lessons for us lowly Earthlings today

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 “An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws”

Note that 7/10 is better than it probably sounds—check here for details of our scoring policy.  

Zhaoyun has been reading and reviewing this sort of sci/fi (as well as fantasy) here at Nerds of a Feather since 2013, so for literally dozens of months now, and shows no signs of letting up yet!

Microreview [book]: Echopraxia by Peter Watts

The Predator and the Prey

Echopraxia sounds like it's the start of a bad sci-fi TV series. What happens when you put hibernating monotheistic monks, an acolyte, a pilot, a military officer, a biologist, a vampire, and a small army of zombies on a space ship heading for the sun? Not wacky hijinks, as TV would tell us, but something much, much better.

Echopraxia follows Daniel Brüks, a so-called baseline human for being non-augmented in a time where everyone is augmented, in the role of the main character and the biologist in this crew. Daniel gets swept up in an attack on a Bicameral Order monastery and winds up on the Crown of Thorns, a Bicam ship headed for a platform close to the sun. How he ended up on the ship, what his role is, and what their mission was to begin with is all revealed in a more or less break-neck pace.

The story moves rather fast but not at the expense of approaching some topics of excellent discussion. The Bicameral Order practice science with faith. They're posthumans trying to find God. Heaven is also a place, and you can talk to people there. Brüks is a skeptic, and his discussions with the acolyte Lianna touch on the importance of faith and the role of God in a posthuman world. The pilot seemingly hates him, and the colonel takes him under his wing, but both of them are on the ship with their own motives.

And then there's Valerie. Valerie, the vampire. You see, science resurrected vampires, and they're even more lethal than most stories portray. They're so dangerous that they're normally kept contained and separate from each other because of the threat they pose to everyone else. She's got the classic vulnerability to crosses, but she's leaner, smarter, faster, and stronger than anyone else on the ship. She's rivaled only by her zombie bodyguards. They're not the shambling type, but the mindless, strong, hard to kill type. She's obviously the wild card of the crew and she's the most intriguing character among them.

The mystery of how the crew was assembled and what their mission is is the central conceit, and it's fantastic. Everyone has their own motives for being there, except Brüks, but even he has a purpose. The way Watts pulls the crew together and then jams wedges between them is excellent. There is a constant feeling of building tension as the crew learn more about each other, and it's extremely satisfying when everything pops.

If I have one complaint, and it's incredibly minor if you're a fan of hard sci-fi, it is that it is sprinkled with technical jargon. However, even if you don't grasp it all (I'm no biologist, so I didn't), it conveys enough to get the gist. It doesn't necessarily detract from the story, but it will give cause to slow down a it.

Slowing down, though, is hard. Echopraxia moves swiftly and doesn't let up once it gets started. It's very hard to put down because of the intricate relationships of the crew. Though it's the second part of a series, it doesn't suffer from "middle of a story" problems, but it did make me want to go back the first part. It's the kind of story that asks a lot of questions, answers most of them, but left me thinking about it long after I finished it. It's excellent.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 great use of unknown motives to build tension

Penalties: -1 might be jargon heavy for some readers

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 (very high quality/standout in its category)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Watts, Peter. Echopraxia [Tor Books, 2014]