Reading roundup: RoL GN #4 + Philosopher's Flight
1. Ben Aaronovitch, Detective Stories (RoL comic #4) -- also the last currently-out thing in terms of in-universe chronology, the only one taking place after The Hanging Tree. Unlike the first three books, it's a collection of short stories (four individual ones) linked by the framing narrative of Peter's final interview in the process of getting himself promoted to DC (spoiler: he is successful). I thought that might make the book less satisfying, but I think the short form actually works better for me with graphic novels.
In particular, I enjoyed the fact that, even though the framing story is set at the latest point of canon, the cases Peter discusses are from various points of his Met career, and so feature a whole lot of Lesley -- Lesley before the accident, when they're both young and eager, just into probation (before Peter even meets Nightingale), Lesley coping with the events of the first book. I especially enjoyed the 2013 flashback to Lesley and Peter discussing the Samson and Delilah painting from a police perspective (with Lesley's "no Geneva Convention, no war crimes" sentiment being pretty ominous). Spoilers! And, of course, there's Lesley in the framing story, too: Lesley texting Peter to ask him how the assessment is going and congratulating him at the end, apparently genuinely.
The other thing these comic books do is provide a non-Peter POV absent in the novels, so it was very interesting to see that, apparently, unbeknownst to Peter, the Met brass actually had a pretty high opinion of him BEFORE Nightingale snapped him up ("very bright, very enthusiastic"), and worried about him burning out -- and see him having a future in administration, which, honestly, is a lot of what he's brought to the Folly. And apparently even Seawoll (that's Seawoll, right?) has come around to thinking of peter as "a fucking incorrigible lion of justice".
As always, a huge part of the fun for me is Peter being his dork self, with pop culture references ("Don't mention the war", quoting Vetinari, referecing Twilight ("Vampires?" "Not the glittery kind, sir.") And also it was fun to see Peter inserting random architectural trivia and notes such as "Farscape fan" into his mental observations while scoping out the crime scene, because of course he does.
My favorite part, though, is actually one of the included short-shorts: the one where Nightingale tosses the guy's boat in a tree for being rude/racist at Guleed, while being exceptionally dry at him.
I don't always love the visuals in these books, but it's always neat to get AN image for the characters. In this one, we get a picture of the World's First Anglo-American Sewer Luge team! :DDD And Postmartin, and young Stephanopoulos, and I guess Simone, or at least one of her sisters. And on a further pictoral note: Oberon, DAMN. I can't disagree with the "too beautiful to depart" sentiment. (Interesting that he gave Lesley an "amazingly unhelpful" pep talk... And came to have him paint her. (Her face doesn't look as bad as I'd expected on the picture that shows it.)
On a meta note, I feel lik BA is continuing to try to be thorough and inclusive on transgender stuff (presumably still making up for that whole thing with Ashs one-night-stand which had upset some fans). It's not on the level of having a(n awesome!) trans character as in The Hanging Tree, but I noticed the discussion that happens at one point about how blood that was DNA-analyzed to contain XX chromosomes could still belong to an apparently-male suspect (though that is ultimately dismissed as unlikely in this particular case) and Peter mentally correcting "wrong sex" to "wrong apparent gender" when scanning the crowd for a flasher.
2. Tom Miller, Philosopher's Flight -- ms_geekette recommended this one to me on the basis of my "magic school" love, and wow! It's only January, and I'm pretty sure I've 'met' one of my favorite books of the year, and very likely my favorite new author(/hopefully series?) for the year as well. This was entirely up my alley, and I loved every page of it (and was also impressed by this being the author's first novel, though writing is a second career for him, after doctor, so he's definitely got some life experience to draw on), and would happily have read about the next couple of decades of it, not just the one year.
This book is set in a slightly-alt-history United States with magic philosophy, in 1918, against the backdrop of the Great War. This is one of those "change one thing and follow the the implications AUs, where the one thing is the magic/philosophy -- and the fact that women have more of it then men. But the discovery of philosophy is recent enough (1750s, with continuing advances, that we aren't talking about swapped gender roles, but rather a very interesting interaction between them, which was a thing that I liked a lot. The protagonist is a young man with rather a lot of magic for a guy (which still makes him underpowered compared to a woman) who wants to follow in his mother's footsteps and join the Philosopher Corps elite Rescue & Evac unit, who airlift wounded soldiers from the battlefield by hovering (i.e. magical flight) -- since this universe's version of the Geneva Convention forbids the use of philosophy in battle, that is the most dangerous and direct army service for a philosopher -- and goes to study philosophy at an all-women's college in Boston.
I loved the magic, which has interesting and unusual divisions, put to tactile, detailed, and well-thought-out use, from military to industrial to ridiculous. I loved the history of the magic, which is presented via the prologue (which maybe should've come across as infodumpy, but it's couched in terms of military history and I found it fascinating) and chapter epigraphs quoting from in-universe historical books, training manuals, memoirs, and the like (alternating with future history primary documents, which I also liked) -- and the way you can trace that history into the social and political and scientific realms. This is definitely a magic-as-science book, referencing calculations and physics (and occasionally things like Fourier transforms, but you definitely don't need to know anything about them other than they sound scary!) Lots of fiddly details, lovingly described, just like I like it, but in a fun and believable character voice, with a lot of humour.
Speaking of character, I liked Robert, the protagonist and first person narrator of the book, a lot. He narrates his experiences -- from the harrowing to the embarrassing to the triumphant -- with a lot of humour and humility -- and rather more raw emotion than I was expecting (which I mean as a positive thing; he's an eighteen-year-old kid from the farm in a big city on his own, dealing with some very tought circumstances agains the backdrop of Seriously Bad Things). None of the other characters are as prominent, of course, but I liked a lot of the secondaries (mostly women, but also a few fine men) and appreciated the range -- from Robert's formidable mother and very siblingy older sister, to his tough-as-nails cantankerous grandma flying instructor, assorted university friends and acquaintances, the amusingly spacey dean (who seemed like he could benefit from some dried frog pills), etc., etc. About the only false note for me, character-wise, was the de rigeur school novel character of a bully, just because she was so unremittingly awful in every conceivable way as to be really boring.
The plot is, you know, a school novel plot, but punctuated by moments of school-related and also external excitement; nothing extraordinary, but it was definitely enough to keep me reading chapters past where I thought I was going to break for the day, just with how smoothly the narration flows and keeps the tensions. And thematically, I thought the book did a good job of making Robert impressive and admirable without turning him into a Gary Stu. His victories are sure as hell earned, and also believable, and wouldn't happen with a lot of trust put on the line for him by other people, contributing in lots of different ways and out of a range of motives. I was also pleasantly surprised that there wasn't a particular setpiece at the end that I had been expecting. There was just a tiny bit too much sap towards the end, but it was well-justified sap, and just a tiny bit -- and leavened with enough humour that I didn't mind. And the book left me really curious to know what happens next -- with Robert, and with the others, some of their futures hinted at in the prologue and the other documents, and the fate of philosophy in the US in general. If/when he writes another book in the series, I'm pre-ordering it.
I suppose there's one more thing I should mention outside the spoiler cut: I appreciated the book's take on gender dynamics, the prominent POC characters, and several queer characters, but all that does come with period-typical... well, pretty much every kind of -ism, and the bigots do get pretty nasty. I actually appreciated this -- it was interesting for me to see what effect women having power in this one sphere had on these things -- but this is definitely not one of those "historical-but-everybody-is-enlightened-and-uses-Tumblr-approved-lingo" books. Which, like I said, I find a plus, but I know people have different preferences in this regard.
Now, with spoilers!
Anyway, so! Let me get at the characters first: I liked Jake a lot (and that she and Robert are never a thing, and she tells him she'll "pick the good ones" for him from the crowds of girls who are sure to throw themselves at him, and he's wryly disappointed that she doesn't. I was really amused by Freddy Unger, with his bow ties and his theoretical brilliance and total inability to do practical philosophy, and am looking forward to seeing how he contributes to the war effort (does he invent a magical nuke? he's working on shielding he says, but hmm!) and becomes a war hero who's made mistakes, like Robert promises in the prologue. I don't know that I liked Danielle, but I respected her as a character and as Robert's love-interest -- disillusioned, angry hero of a botched wartime rescue attempt, who thinks she should've died in Galipolli, turned political activist, foreign-born daughter of a half-Arab mother and Yankee minister father, prodigee transporter (a type of magic that requires one to be well-fed, because you lose body mass in proportion to the load you transport). I'm curious if she's the mother of Robert's daughter, or someone who ends up martyred for the cause, or possibly both, as Grandma Weekes is mentioned in the prologue but a mother is not. I liked quiet Essie, with a hiden core of steel, and am looking forward to seeing her come into her own in R&E. I *loved* Gertude the crotchety retired instructor, and I think highlighted like 90% of the things she said. I liked the non-philosophical friends who contributed to Robert's success, too, and am especially looking forward to seeing Dmitri take up flight, as some of the future documents predict (although it would not have killed Miller to figure out that "Ivanovich" is not a Russian last name. I mean, unless he's in he US incognito using his patronymic as a last name for Reasons. Let's pretend it's that), and also looking forward to meeting Michael Nakamura the Japanese flyer who has been alluded to a couple of times.
Here's a thing I liked: Robert is special, sure, but he's not extraordinary. As Freddy points out, being 4 standard deviations above the mean for a man when it comes to philosophical power means he is one of a couple of thousand in the US -- it's just that he started early, given his family history, practiced hard to try to keep up with his older sisters, and pushes himself harder than anyone in their right mind would. He's a trailblaizer because he cares enough to become one, not because of any truly unique talent -- and it seems like we'll meet men who are as good at flying as he is, in the sequel. Another thing I liked is that the narrative does not bend itself into pretzels to hand him victories. I was afraid the Cup centerpiece would end with -- not Robert winning gold, which seemed very unlikely, but getting to shine in some other way -- like having to do a real-life rescue of an injured flyer, so everyone would see what a natural he is at that, and what a selfless soul. But, nope. He does ask the injured flyer if she's OK, and is cursed out by everyone for it, and then he continues on his way, and manages to dramatically squeak into third place because the girl he is racing makes a whole bunch of mistakes. (Actually, it doesn't hand out many victories at all. I was impressed by just how realistically trounced Radcliffe was in the Captain's Cup -- one gold, one bronze, and those only because the bigger schools were busy settling a score. No last-minute House Cup victory for Gryffindor in this one. And on a related note, one thing that surprised me, in a good way, is how often the desperate, daring rescue, getting the wounded person to the hospital before the stasis wore off, against near-impossible odds... ended up with the patient dying anyway. That's probably Miller's ER doc past being reflected there, but it was, IDK, sobering to see that even if Robert did his absolute best, all he managed was his own part of the relay, and that's necessary but not sufficient.)
The "moral" victories are also impressively, mm, understated or smudged. Like the whole thing between Robert and Maxwell Gannet: the only real victory is that he didn't kill Gannet after coming up to help him off the burning roof. Robert is himself ambivalent over whether he did the right thing, Gannet certainly doesn't thank him for it (and in fact says publically he'd rather be dead than polluted by stasis magic), and Robert's role in the whole thing is eclipsed by the newspapers focusing on Danielle, anyway. He does kill Gannet later, in self-defense/defense of Dar and Jake -- though not bearing full responsibility, since it's likely Gannet's own refusal to accept sorcerous healing that has his succumbing. And that's after Robert spent a good chunk of the book wanting to be a person who saves lives, not ends them. I think this is mostly a good thing, that it's not a straightforward moral throughline, but it was unusual. And as far as "empowerment", Robert's trail-blazing obviously has an effect -- it inspires a few others, it wins over some people (like Essie) who would have dismissed a man wanting to hover before they met him. But there is no major positive shift (at least not in the present-day timeline), no "and then the cafeteria applauded" moments. And it looks like things are going to get worse before they get better. Possibly my wonder at this speaks to my steady diet of YA last year, but anyway.
I loved the magcial worldbuilding, as I said. Not only is this properly magic-as-science, vectors and physics and measuring out things and taking wind readings, not only does every magical sub-field has its own specialists and lingo, and there are theoreticians and empiricists, not only are there schools specializing in philosophy (one of them in Sacramento of all places, and I wondered if that was the AU universe's stand-in for CalTech, given the "Institute of Philosophy" thing), and it's this whole believable structure -- but also there's something that I love a lot and don't see much of even in magic-as-science books -- a glimpse at the way philosophy and technology work together, sometimes just alongside each other, sometimes driving each other forward, sometimes subtracting. Cars seem to be evolving (though maybe a bit more slowly, given the rareness of the Packard) despite the fact that hovering is faster and presumably cheaper, and there's future in philosophical-mechanical flight, though not just yet. But it seems like transportation by philosophy has really taken the place of railroads (I mean... it's functional teleportation, and so you lose a passenger or two every once in a while... train accidents happen, too) -- but it was technological advances allowing for a better grade of aluminium which allowed transporting to become reliable enough for passenger travel. And you can see absolutely wonderful examples like Robert's hi-tech sky suit, where materials science has been aided by philosophy to create novel materials that enhance performance in a philosophical task -- this stuff is just catnip to me! :D As are its like the theoretician girls from New Hampshire coming up with a regulator design for a competition that is banned from the sport but becomes part of every commercial regulator, and the college's lawyers swooping down on Unger to patent his accidental permanent temporary ink spell -- magic integrated into industry, not just daily life. And the logistics around it all, too -- like lining up suitcases on the outside of the transport circle so that it's luggage that gets lost (as opposed to body parts) if the transporter misjudges her strength. I loved all this a lot, and would happily read just about the magical-assisted public infrastructure and industry for a whole book.
And then there's the alt-history implications, which were also interesting. It looks like philosophy and their pivotal role in the Civil War got women the right to vote right after the Civil War (vs 1919 like in the real world), but it looks like there's some backsliding of that to come? Because transporting was so dangerous early on, it was performed by slaves (teleporting cargo back and forth), and seems to be something that's currently the milieu of Black women still. It seems that, with smokecarving use in battle forbidden by the Rouen Convention, chemical warfare never became a thing in WWI (though people are concerned that they may start to use smokecarving anyway). It's interesting stuff, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this continues to play out and converge/diverge into the future.
The final bit I want to talk about is the... it's too narrow to call it "the gender stuff", because there's more to it than that, but calling it the "social justice" stuff feels wrong for this book. But I do think it does some interesting things with privilege and intersectionality, and I mostly appreciated how and what it did, though there was also at least one false note for me. On the surface, it does feel like a simple gender-flipped situation -- the men are the 'token minorities' in philosophy: Robert has to deal with gear designed to fit a different body type, is unable to use the locker room, is ridiculed for wanting to do something "unnatural" for his gender, hazed, forced to be much better than the majority to be taken seriously, etc. etc. etc. And I liked the way this was done, the different attitudes taken by various women in power and simply his peers, the way it affected him -- that he is brought to tears of humiliation and rage several times, how vulnerable he feels when facing a woman in a philosophical "duel", how resigned at the thought of trying to compete with someone who IS intrinsically, physically better than him in the Cup. At the same time, he IS a man, and outside of the realm of philosophy he does have power and privilege. He is physically stronger than the women who push him around; political power is still the men's realm (and Dar tells him that they will listen to him more than they'll listen to her). Robert has the privilege of "passing" as not-a-philosopher (in fact, that's the default for him, unless he's somewhere he's known). And besides the gender stuff, there are class things going on -- the sharp divide between the rich society girls and the Contingency cases (male and female), people with internal connections (like Rachael), locals vs back-country hicks like Robert. It's all interestingly mixed in and more complex than I was expecting, honestly. Although I could've definitely done without the almost verbatim "not all men" quote.
Quotes:
"I earned a richly deserved D- on that essay. Unger got his paper back without a grade. Professor Yu had been so excited that she'd forgotten to mark it.After several lunches with the best theoretical minds at Radcliffe, Yu and Unger concluded that he'd made a mistake in his mathematical model and that the actual time to run his experiment would be on the order of 20,000 years. Unger published his work the following spring in The Annals of Theoretical Empirical Philosophy, to overwhelming disinterest."
"Among my well-wishers [at the hospital] were Jake and Francine, who visited to complain about having to teach my class of Ones. A few minutes later, the Ones hovered over en masse to complain about having to be taught by Jake and Francine."
"Grounded! Without exception. Spread the word == if Mrs Woodrow Wilson stops by to borrow a regulator, she's grounded. If the ghost of Lucretia Cadwallader requests a tour of the city by air, she's grounded. If Jesus Christ himself puts down wearing his Holy Shroud of the Skysuit and begs for a cupful of powder in return for eternal salvation, he's grounded too!"
"Back in '11 they said to me, 'Gertrude, you're too old to fly.' So I instructed at For McConnell. Then this year they said, 'Gertrude, you're too mean to teach. We've got a war on and we don't want every third girl quitting.'"
Unger on Robert learning German: It's at least getting recognizable as something other than very confused Dutch."
Historical quote: "I've never killed a man. But I have separated many an enemy from a fresh supply of oxygen and allowed him to breathe himself to death."
About what Mrs Cadwallader had her historical corpswomen pack, "[the list] included a 'black parasol of good quality silk (1)' as well as a 'cavalry saber, single-edged with scabbard (1; to be issued upon muster).' While it is difficult to say which item proved less useful, the Corps has since incorporated both into its standard dress uniform."
Jake, to Robert: You're coming with me. If [Danielle]'s mean to you, I'll hit her. And I swear to God, if you start crying in front of her, I'm going to hit you."
So, yeah. This was tons of fun! Can't wait for the sequel (which seems to have a title -- The Philosophers War -- but no pub date -- and more from this author in general.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1069296.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
In particular, I enjoyed the fact that, even though the framing story is set at the latest point of canon, the cases Peter discusses are from various points of his Met career, and so feature a whole lot of Lesley -- Lesley before the accident, when they're both young and eager, just into probation (before Peter even meets Nightingale), Lesley coping with the events of the first book. I especially enjoyed the 2013 flashback to Lesley and Peter discussing the Samson and Delilah painting from a police perspective (with Lesley's "no Geneva Convention, no war crimes" sentiment being pretty ominous). Spoilers! And, of course, there's Lesley in the framing story, too: Lesley texting Peter to ask him how the assessment is going and congratulating him at the end, apparently genuinely.
The other thing these comic books do is provide a non-Peter POV absent in the novels, so it was very interesting to see that, apparently, unbeknownst to Peter, the Met brass actually had a pretty high opinion of him BEFORE Nightingale snapped him up ("very bright, very enthusiastic"), and worried about him burning out -- and see him having a future in administration, which, honestly, is a lot of what he's brought to the Folly. And apparently even Seawoll (that's Seawoll, right?) has come around to thinking of peter as "a fucking incorrigible lion of justice".
As always, a huge part of the fun for me is Peter being his dork self, with pop culture references ("Don't mention the war", quoting Vetinari, referecing Twilight ("Vampires?" "Not the glittery kind, sir.") And also it was fun to see Peter inserting random architectural trivia and notes such as "Farscape fan" into his mental observations while scoping out the crime scene, because of course he does.
My favorite part, though, is actually one of the included short-shorts: the one where Nightingale tosses the guy's boat in a tree for being rude/racist at Guleed, while being exceptionally dry at him.
I don't always love the visuals in these books, but it's always neat to get AN image for the characters. In this one, we get a picture of the World's First Anglo-American Sewer Luge team! :DDD And Postmartin, and young Stephanopoulos, and I guess Simone, or at least one of her sisters. And on a further pictoral note: Oberon, DAMN. I can't disagree with the "too beautiful to depart" sentiment. (Interesting that he gave Lesley an "amazingly unhelpful" pep talk... And came to have him paint her. (Her face doesn't look as bad as I'd expected on the picture that shows it.)
On a meta note, I feel lik BA is continuing to try to be thorough and inclusive on transgender stuff (presumably still making up for that whole thing with Ashs one-night-stand which had upset some fans). It's not on the level of having a(n awesome!) trans character as in The Hanging Tree, but I noticed the discussion that happens at one point about how blood that was DNA-analyzed to contain XX chromosomes could still belong to an apparently-male suspect (though that is ultimately dismissed as unlikely in this particular case) and Peter mentally correcting "wrong sex" to "wrong apparent gender" when scanning the crowd for a flasher.
2. Tom Miller, Philosopher's Flight -- ms_geekette recommended this one to me on the basis of my "magic school" love, and wow! It's only January, and I'm pretty sure I've 'met' one of my favorite books of the year, and very likely my favorite new author(/hopefully series?) for the year as well. This was entirely up my alley, and I loved every page of it (and was also impressed by this being the author's first novel, though writing is a second career for him, after doctor, so he's definitely got some life experience to draw on), and would happily have read about the next couple of decades of it, not just the one year.
This book is set in a slightly-alt-history United States with magic philosophy, in 1918, against the backdrop of the Great War. This is one of those "change one thing and follow the the implications AUs, where the one thing is the magic/philosophy -- and the fact that women have more of it then men. But the discovery of philosophy is recent enough (1750s, with continuing advances, that we aren't talking about swapped gender roles, but rather a very interesting interaction between them, which was a thing that I liked a lot. The protagonist is a young man with rather a lot of magic for a guy (which still makes him underpowered compared to a woman) who wants to follow in his mother's footsteps and join the Philosopher Corps elite Rescue & Evac unit, who airlift wounded soldiers from the battlefield by hovering (i.e. magical flight) -- since this universe's version of the Geneva Convention forbids the use of philosophy in battle, that is the most dangerous and direct army service for a philosopher -- and goes to study philosophy at an all-women's college in Boston.
I loved the magic, which has interesting and unusual divisions, put to tactile, detailed, and well-thought-out use, from military to industrial to ridiculous. I loved the history of the magic, which is presented via the prologue (which maybe should've come across as infodumpy, but it's couched in terms of military history and I found it fascinating) and chapter epigraphs quoting from in-universe historical books, training manuals, memoirs, and the like (alternating with future history primary documents, which I also liked) -- and the way you can trace that history into the social and political and scientific realms. This is definitely a magic-as-science book, referencing calculations and physics (and occasionally things like Fourier transforms, but you definitely don't need to know anything about them other than they sound scary!) Lots of fiddly details, lovingly described, just like I like it, but in a fun and believable character voice, with a lot of humour.
Speaking of character, I liked Robert, the protagonist and first person narrator of the book, a lot. He narrates his experiences -- from the harrowing to the embarrassing to the triumphant -- with a lot of humour and humility -- and rather more raw emotion than I was expecting (which I mean as a positive thing; he's an eighteen-year-old kid from the farm in a big city on his own, dealing with some very tought circumstances agains the backdrop of Seriously Bad Things). None of the other characters are as prominent, of course, but I liked a lot of the secondaries (mostly women, but also a few fine men) and appreciated the range -- from Robert's formidable mother and very siblingy older sister, to his tough-as-nails cantankerous grandma flying instructor, assorted university friends and acquaintances, the amusingly spacey dean (who seemed like he could benefit from some dried frog pills), etc., etc. About the only false note for me, character-wise, was the de rigeur school novel character of a bully, just because she was so unremittingly awful in every conceivable way as to be really boring.
The plot is, you know, a school novel plot, but punctuated by moments of school-related and also external excitement; nothing extraordinary, but it was definitely enough to keep me reading chapters past where I thought I was going to break for the day, just with how smoothly the narration flows and keeps the tensions. And thematically, I thought the book did a good job of making Robert impressive and admirable without turning him into a Gary Stu. His victories are sure as hell earned, and also believable, and wouldn't happen with a lot of trust put on the line for him by other people, contributing in lots of different ways and out of a range of motives. I was also pleasantly surprised that there wasn't a particular setpiece at the end that I had been expecting. There was just a tiny bit too much sap towards the end, but it was well-justified sap, and just a tiny bit -- and leavened with enough humour that I didn't mind. And the book left me really curious to know what happens next -- with Robert, and with the others, some of their futures hinted at in the prologue and the other documents, and the fate of philosophy in the US in general. If/when he writes another book in the series, I'm pre-ordering it.
I suppose there's one more thing I should mention outside the spoiler cut: I appreciated the book's take on gender dynamics, the prominent POC characters, and several queer characters, but all that does come with period-typical... well, pretty much every kind of -ism, and the bigots do get pretty nasty. I actually appreciated this -- it was interesting for me to see what effect women having power in this one sphere had on these things -- but this is definitely not one of those "historical-but-everybody-is-enlightened-and-uses-Tumblr-approved-lingo" books. Which, like I said, I find a plus, but I know people have different preferences in this regard.
Now, with spoilers!
Anyway, so! Let me get at the characters first: I liked Jake a lot (and that she and Robert are never a thing, and she tells him she'll "pick the good ones" for him from the crowds of girls who are sure to throw themselves at him, and he's wryly disappointed that she doesn't. I was really amused by Freddy Unger, with his bow ties and his theoretical brilliance and total inability to do practical philosophy, and am looking forward to seeing how he contributes to the war effort (does he invent a magical nuke? he's working on shielding he says, but hmm!) and becomes a war hero who's made mistakes, like Robert promises in the prologue. I don't know that I liked Danielle, but I respected her as a character and as Robert's love-interest -- disillusioned, angry hero of a botched wartime rescue attempt, who thinks she should've died in Galipolli, turned political activist, foreign-born daughter of a half-Arab mother and Yankee minister father, prodigee transporter (a type of magic that requires one to be well-fed, because you lose body mass in proportion to the load you transport). I'm curious if she's the mother of Robert's daughter, or someone who ends up martyred for the cause, or possibly both, as Grandma Weekes is mentioned in the prologue but a mother is not. I liked quiet Essie, with a hiden core of steel, and am looking forward to seeing her come into her own in R&E. I *loved* Gertude the crotchety retired instructor, and I think highlighted like 90% of the things she said. I liked the non-philosophical friends who contributed to Robert's success, too, and am especially looking forward to seeing Dmitri take up flight, as some of the future documents predict (although it would not have killed Miller to figure out that "Ivanovich" is not a Russian last name. I mean, unless he's in he US incognito using his patronymic as a last name for Reasons. Let's pretend it's that), and also looking forward to meeting Michael Nakamura the Japanese flyer who has been alluded to a couple of times.
Here's a thing I liked: Robert is special, sure, but he's not extraordinary. As Freddy points out, being 4 standard deviations above the mean for a man when it comes to philosophical power means he is one of a couple of thousand in the US -- it's just that he started early, given his family history, practiced hard to try to keep up with his older sisters, and pushes himself harder than anyone in their right mind would. He's a trailblaizer because he cares enough to become one, not because of any truly unique talent -- and it seems like we'll meet men who are as good at flying as he is, in the sequel. Another thing I liked is that the narrative does not bend itself into pretzels to hand him victories. I was afraid the Cup centerpiece would end with -- not Robert winning gold, which seemed very unlikely, but getting to shine in some other way -- like having to do a real-life rescue of an injured flyer, so everyone would see what a natural he is at that, and what a selfless soul. But, nope. He does ask the injured flyer if she's OK, and is cursed out by everyone for it, and then he continues on his way, and manages to dramatically squeak into third place because the girl he is racing makes a whole bunch of mistakes. (Actually, it doesn't hand out many victories at all. I was impressed by just how realistically trounced Radcliffe was in the Captain's Cup -- one gold, one bronze, and those only because the bigger schools were busy settling a score. No last-minute House Cup victory for Gryffindor in this one. And on a related note, one thing that surprised me, in a good way, is how often the desperate, daring rescue, getting the wounded person to the hospital before the stasis wore off, against near-impossible odds... ended up with the patient dying anyway. That's probably Miller's ER doc past being reflected there, but it was, IDK, sobering to see that even if Robert did his absolute best, all he managed was his own part of the relay, and that's necessary but not sufficient.)
The "moral" victories are also impressively, mm, understated or smudged. Like the whole thing between Robert and Maxwell Gannet: the only real victory is that he didn't kill Gannet after coming up to help him off the burning roof. Robert is himself ambivalent over whether he did the right thing, Gannet certainly doesn't thank him for it (and in fact says publically he'd rather be dead than polluted by stasis magic), and Robert's role in the whole thing is eclipsed by the newspapers focusing on Danielle, anyway. He does kill Gannet later, in self-defense/defense of Dar and Jake -- though not bearing full responsibility, since it's likely Gannet's own refusal to accept sorcerous healing that has his succumbing. And that's after Robert spent a good chunk of the book wanting to be a person who saves lives, not ends them. I think this is mostly a good thing, that it's not a straightforward moral throughline, but it was unusual. And as far as "empowerment", Robert's trail-blazing obviously has an effect -- it inspires a few others, it wins over some people (like Essie) who would have dismissed a man wanting to hover before they met him. But there is no major positive shift (at least not in the present-day timeline), no "and then the cafeteria applauded" moments. And it looks like things are going to get worse before they get better. Possibly my wonder at this speaks to my steady diet of YA last year, but anyway.
I loved the magcial worldbuilding, as I said. Not only is this properly magic-as-science, vectors and physics and measuring out things and taking wind readings, not only does every magical sub-field has its own specialists and lingo, and there are theoreticians and empiricists, not only are there schools specializing in philosophy (one of them in Sacramento of all places, and I wondered if that was the AU universe's stand-in for CalTech, given the "Institute of Philosophy" thing), and it's this whole believable structure -- but also there's something that I love a lot and don't see much of even in magic-as-science books -- a glimpse at the way philosophy and technology work together, sometimes just alongside each other, sometimes driving each other forward, sometimes subtracting. Cars seem to be evolving (though maybe a bit more slowly, given the rareness of the Packard) despite the fact that hovering is faster and presumably cheaper, and there's future in philosophical-mechanical flight, though not just yet. But it seems like transportation by philosophy has really taken the place of railroads (I mean... it's functional teleportation, and so you lose a passenger or two every once in a while... train accidents happen, too) -- but it was technological advances allowing for a better grade of aluminium which allowed transporting to become reliable enough for passenger travel. And you can see absolutely wonderful examples like Robert's hi-tech sky suit, where materials science has been aided by philosophy to create novel materials that enhance performance in a philosophical task -- this stuff is just catnip to me! :D As are its like the theoretician girls from New Hampshire coming up with a regulator design for a competition that is banned from the sport but becomes part of every commercial regulator, and the college's lawyers swooping down on Unger to patent his accidental permanent temporary ink spell -- magic integrated into industry, not just daily life. And the logistics around it all, too -- like lining up suitcases on the outside of the transport circle so that it's luggage that gets lost (as opposed to body parts) if the transporter misjudges her strength. I loved all this a lot, and would happily read just about the magical-assisted public infrastructure and industry for a whole book.
And then there's the alt-history implications, which were also interesting. It looks like philosophy and their pivotal role in the Civil War got women the right to vote right after the Civil War (vs 1919 like in the real world), but it looks like there's some backsliding of that to come? Because transporting was so dangerous early on, it was performed by slaves (teleporting cargo back and forth), and seems to be something that's currently the milieu of Black women still. It seems that, with smokecarving use in battle forbidden by the Rouen Convention, chemical warfare never became a thing in WWI (though people are concerned that they may start to use smokecarving anyway). It's interesting stuff, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this continues to play out and converge/diverge into the future.
The final bit I want to talk about is the... it's too narrow to call it "the gender stuff", because there's more to it than that, but calling it the "social justice" stuff feels wrong for this book. But I do think it does some interesting things with privilege and intersectionality, and I mostly appreciated how and what it did, though there was also at least one false note for me. On the surface, it does feel like a simple gender-flipped situation -- the men are the 'token minorities' in philosophy: Robert has to deal with gear designed to fit a different body type, is unable to use the locker room, is ridiculed for wanting to do something "unnatural" for his gender, hazed, forced to be much better than the majority to be taken seriously, etc. etc. etc. And I liked the way this was done, the different attitudes taken by various women in power and simply his peers, the way it affected him -- that he is brought to tears of humiliation and rage several times, how vulnerable he feels when facing a woman in a philosophical "duel", how resigned at the thought of trying to compete with someone who IS intrinsically, physically better than him in the Cup. At the same time, he IS a man, and outside of the realm of philosophy he does have power and privilege. He is physically stronger than the women who push him around; political power is still the men's realm (and Dar tells him that they will listen to him more than they'll listen to her). Robert has the privilege of "passing" as not-a-philosopher (in fact, that's the default for him, unless he's somewhere he's known). And besides the gender stuff, there are class things going on -- the sharp divide between the rich society girls and the Contingency cases (male and female), people with internal connections (like Rachael), locals vs back-country hicks like Robert. It's all interestingly mixed in and more complex than I was expecting, honestly. Although I could've definitely done without the almost verbatim "not all men" quote.
Quotes:
"I earned a richly deserved D- on that essay. Unger got his paper back without a grade. Professor Yu had been so excited that she'd forgotten to mark it.After several lunches with the best theoretical minds at Radcliffe, Yu and Unger concluded that he'd made a mistake in his mathematical model and that the actual time to run his experiment would be on the order of 20,000 years. Unger published his work the following spring in The Annals of Theoretical Empirical Philosophy, to overwhelming disinterest."
"Among my well-wishers [at the hospital] were Jake and Francine, who visited to complain about having to teach my class of Ones. A few minutes later, the Ones hovered over en masse to complain about having to be taught by Jake and Francine."
"Grounded! Without exception. Spread the word == if Mrs Woodrow Wilson stops by to borrow a regulator, she's grounded. If the ghost of Lucretia Cadwallader requests a tour of the city by air, she's grounded. If Jesus Christ himself puts down wearing his Holy Shroud of the Skysuit and begs for a cupful of powder in return for eternal salvation, he's grounded too!"
"Back in '11 they said to me, 'Gertrude, you're too old to fly.' So I instructed at For McConnell. Then this year they said, 'Gertrude, you're too mean to teach. We've got a war on and we don't want every third girl quitting.'"
Unger on Robert learning German: It's at least getting recognizable as something other than very confused Dutch."
Historical quote: "I've never killed a man. But I have separated many an enemy from a fresh supply of oxygen and allowed him to breathe himself to death."
About what Mrs Cadwallader had her historical corpswomen pack, "[the list] included a 'black parasol of good quality silk (1)' as well as a 'cavalry saber, single-edged with scabbard (1; to be issued upon muster).' While it is difficult to say which item proved less useful, the Corps has since incorporated both into its standard dress uniform."
Jake, to Robert: You're coming with me. If [Danielle]'s mean to you, I'll hit her. And I swear to God, if you start crying in front of her, I'm going to hit you."
So, yeah. This was tons of fun! Can't wait for the sequel (which seems to have a title -- The Philosophers War -- but no pub date -- and more from this author in general.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1069296.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).