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nostalgebraist · 1 month ago

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on exordia (a "rant"?)

Yesterday I said I'd write a longer post about Exordia. Here it is.

This will be... sort of review-shaped, but not quite a review? I dunno.

I'll try to avoid spoilers, although some amount of (largely minor or indirect) spoilage will be inevitable.

As I said in my earlier posts, there was a lot I liked about this book, but also a lot that frustrated me. This post will focus almost entirely on the latter; it will be a big long list of gripes, which I'm posting mostly to relieve a certain mental pressure that built up over the course of the reading experience.

I want to clarify at the outset that the negative angle here doesn't faithfully represent by overall stance toward the book.

Yes, I often found it extremely annoying, but it was a lot of fun, too – often it was both, at the same time. I am normally a pretty slow reader, but I sped through Exordia's 500+ pages very quickly; even when I was annoyed with this or that feature of the book, I was pleasantly engrossed, too. And I feel like writing out a bunch of thoughts about it, which has to mean something good, right? Even if those thoughts are critical in nature.

----

Why do I feel like writing so much about the book? And why do I care so much about the fact that it was "frustrating"? (There are lots of bad books out there; sometimes, I read them; in itself, this is just business as usual, and not worthy of note.)

I think it comes down to what I said in my first post (see link above). Because Exordia feels so much like something I would absolutely love, I feel more incensed about its flaws than I would be about the more thoroughgoing flaws of something that was simply, wholly, and straightforwardly bad. There's a tantalizing sense of unrealized potential, unfulfilled promises.

Exordia would be so good if it were good.

----

Talking about this book's flaws is difficult, because most of them are closely related to one another, and it's difficult to break down that big ball of tangled-up string into manageable chunks.

But there are a few things that are relatively self-contained, so I'll pick them off first. (The main course starts in section "3" below.)

Oh, also: this ended up extremely long. As in, just over 10,000 words. If you wanted to read 10,000 words of Exordia critique today then this is your lucky day I guess.

----

1. frontloading

Exordia has a very strong opening. When I was 30 pages in, I was almost certain that I would end up loving this book and recommending it to everyone I knew.

Ha! Little did I know!

----

The book is divided into five sections called "Acts."

Act One is very brief. It ends on page 38, less than 10% of the way into the book.

And it's very, very good. Or more precisely, it's very, very promising, as a way to begin a story.

Right off the bat, we get two instantly charming and intriguing characters, with an instantly charming and intriguing dynamic.

Then – starting barely five pages in – we are suddenly assailed by a rapid-fire barrage of incredibly cool sci-fi shit. Bizarre neologisms, alien biology and psychology, quasi-theological revelations about physics and the early universe! "Narrative prisons"! "Weapons that mark their victims for damnation"! An "observatory" that can see the afterlife!

All three of those examples I just quoted are from one single page (p. 21).

And Exordia is over 500 pages long.

I was like: holy shit. If this is what it's like now, what is the rest of it going it be like?

Well. Now I've read the rest of it, so I know. What was it like, then?

----

What it's like is this:

On page 38, Act One ends.

Act Two begins by switching over to a completely different set of characters.

In Act One, it seemed obvious that we were meeting the book's main characters. All the usual conventions of novelistic storytelling were practically screaming at us: behold, the protagonists! Better figure out how you feel about them in short order, reader, because you'll be strapped in with them for the long haul.

But – psych! Turns out that we are not strapped in with the Act One characters for the long haul. Eventually they do show up again, but they spend most of the book on the sidelines due to a succession of plot devices which seem designed specifically to keep them there.

The fast pace slows to a crawl.

We discover that we're in a completely different genre: not wild-eyed cosmic science fiction, but Tom Clancy military-techno-thriller. And so a large fraction of the text, by volume, is stuff like this:

"What's up?" Mike Jan asks, like they've just bumped into each other at the gym. "Something bad?" "Something undetermined," Erik says. "One of the EBADs broke. One more check, then we go in." So they do a final test on their MOPP protection, which is an absolute nightmare in the rising sun. Masks that fog up if the seal isn't perfect, baggy JSLIST oversuits, paper wraps that turn bad colors if they contact known agents (what good will that do?), gloves and booties over their boots. All perfect for poaching them in their own sweat. "Can't see shit in here," Ricardo says, without unhappiness: just the condition of things. "I know. Mike, bodyguard Anna. Skyler, get the drone up. Ricardo, load a mouse. All call signs, Zero-Six, now proceeding into the target area. Out." They walk straight toward Blackbird. Skyler flies a quadcopter drone ahead: a Teal Drones Golden Eagle with a fifty-minute charge. Ricardo Garcia follows its course, waving a ten-foot spear with a live mouse in a plastic lattice canister. The idea is that the mouse will die in time to warn the rest of them. "Pretty out here," Mike Jan remarks. "Looks like a Windows desktop." Of course Mike has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life.

I'm sure some people like this kind of thing – it's an established genre, after all, and it sells well. But it's not really my jam, and (more importantly) it's not what the opening led me to think I was getting myself into.

(Sidenote: the last two lines in that quote have nothing to do with the point I'm making, but I included them anyway, because they confuse me and I want to know whether I'm missing something that would make sense of them. "Has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life" is apparently meant to be some kind of telling character detail, and it's delivered as though we'd immediately grasp its significance. But what IS its significance? "Oh, we all know those guys – the ones who don't change their desktop wallpapers. You know what I'm talking about, wink wink." Huh???)

The new characters are mostly U.S. military/government/intelligence guys (at this stage anyway – later on there will be even more new characters, and then more, etc). The book tries its hardest to make us care about them, but it's fighting an uphill battle because it has to work against our frustration at the bait-and-switch that has been pulled on us.

Plus, frankly, they're just not all that interesting. Sorry.

Sooner or later, we realize that Act One was the odd one out. When Act Three arrives, it's just "Act Two: The Sequel" – and so on. Except in a few parts very close to the end, the book never recaptures the energy and wonder that it used as a hook in Act One.

It gets worse. Remember how I said that Act One rapidly reveals a bunch of sci-fi lore to the reader?

Well, a large fraction of Acts Two through Five are a mystery story in which the new, less-interesting characters study a classic BDO and try to figure out what its deal is, plus a bunch of related ancillary mysteries. And in some cases, the reader can guess the answers long before the characters get there, because the answer is something we were told back in Act One.

(This is only possible, by the way, due to the previously mentioned sidelining of the Act One characters. These characters re-appear, and the other protagonists get to know them, but for most of the book the two groups are unable or unwilling to communicate for some reason or another. If these communication blockers weren't there, the Acts Two+ guys could just ask the Act One guys what was going on... and the book would be several hundred pages shorter.)

This is a baffling structural choice.

I have no idea how one could possibly try to justify it; I simply can't think of any arguments in its favor, even bad ones.

2. the path, grant!

This isn't even a complaint, per se. Just something about my reading experience that seems like it should get mentioned in this post, somewhere.

In a lot of ways – big and small, important and trivial – this book feels weirdly close to the kind of thing that I would write myself.

Indeed, it feels weirdly close (in a lot of ways, big and small etc.) to some things that I did in fact write, myself.

Namely, Floornight and Almost Nowhere.

I'm not claiming that Seth Dickinson ripped me off, or anything. It seems very unlikely that he's read any of my work, or even heard of it. Like I said in my earlier post, it's probably all just a matter of shared influences and/or pure coincidence.

Still, I have to talk about it, because I couldn't stop noticing it.

In the first ten pages, I learned: this is a story about first contact with aliens. It involves a lot of exotic invented terminology, and the worldbuilding includes novel connections between fundamental physics, psychology, and ethics.

And I thought: wow, this sure is right up my alley. Nice!

On page 11, the book started talking about the Shahnameh.

Ten pages later: souls are real! But this is arguably bad, because it's been used as the basis for exploitative and dystopian technologies.

I dunno, it's not like I has a monopoly on that concept. (I stole part of it from Madoka, for one thing.)

Nor, as I happens, do I have a monopoly on the concept of "wacky eccentric scientists who live in a remote setting apart from most of humanity, studying Lovecraft-style mind-bending entities from the beyond." That's just taking well-worn, well-liked tropes and combining them in a natural, appealing way. (And what's more, I stole part of it from Annihilation.)

But in any case – monopoly or no – Exordia does in fact have those wacky scientists, and that remote zone, and those creepy, soul-physics-related objects of study.

It also has a character named "Anna" – with a sort-of-similar role in the story to Almost Nowhere's Anne.

And a character named "Rosamaria," who...

But I'm sure you can guess how that sentence ends.

Some of this stuff is hard to talk about without violating my rule about spoilers.

But, uh, that said – remember that big scene about 2/3 of the way through Floornight, the one with a raised platform that gets used as a stage? The one in which [HUGE FLOORNIGHT SPOILER] happens?

And then the chapter right after that, which has an unusual name, because it portrays things from an unusual point of view?

Oh, you haven't read Floornight. Well, then. Do you remember that scene near the end of Exordia...

Some of the "connections" I thought I saw are flimsier than this. Some aren't really much of anything, in retrospect. Early on we learn that the aliens have some technology called "the way of knives," and I thought: ah, just like AN's "knife-power"! But in fact the two things have nothing else in common. And surely I don't have a monopoly on the word "knife."

I dunno. How about this? Is this anything?

The Ubiet burbles away in her arms: clarification and amplification of aretaic event in self-like past, recursive self-caricature by protoprecosmic influence, WARNING WARNING WARNING pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! Until that word, pathology, starts to sound like path-ology, the study of paths. The discovery of the way.

3. the geeky badass hive mind

Okay, here begins the part I called "the main course" above, where I lay out the really big thing that irked me about Exordia.

Hmm... where to start...

There is a problem with the characterization in this book. There is also a problem with the narration in the book.

These two problems are sort of the same, and the fact that they are sort-of-the-same is itself a noteworthy symptom of the problem.

Whoa, whoa – too broad, too abstract! Let's start with something small and concrete. Something that anyone who's read the book will have noticed, and which I am definitely not the first person to complain about.

So: Exordia is full of geek culture references.

The characters make incessant references to specific sci-fi/fantasy books, anime series, video games, and popular movies and TV shows. The 3rd-person narration also does this frequently.

It gets pretty "cringe" at times.

Here's a very early (and hence memorable) example. Anna, our Act One pseudo-protagonist, is learning the deep secrets of the universe from a snake-headed alien. The alien tells her that souls exist.

And in response, Anna says:

"Souls? You mean immortal souls? Are those real? Is this some kind of, like, Evangelion thing?"

I was like: seriously? Seriously? Come the fuck on.

But a moment later, I got my balance. I thought: wait, I see what this is. This is a character trait. It's a feature of this person, not the book/world.

Anna is a person who makes these kinds of nerdy, "cringe" references at inappropriate times, just like (as we learn in the first few pages) she is a person who has been fired from multiple jobs for being too abrasive, too upfront with people. That tracks. There's a coherent person, here, and I'm getting to know her.

Ha! Little did I know!

Act One ends, and Act Two starts.

We are introduced to our first "Acts Two+ protagonist": Clayton Hunt, Deputy National Security Advisor in the book's alt-universe version of the Obama administration.

Clayton is a slick charmer, a skilled and versatile liar, a power-hungry schemer who deliberately orchestrated his rise through the ranks of the National Reconnaissance Office bureaucracy. He is – if we are to judge by his (disturbing) past deeds, which are recounted as crucial backstory – a cold-hearted psycho sonuvabitch who's way, way too eager to kill people "for the greater good." At first glance, he seems to have nothing at all in common with Anna (too honest for her own good, a basically normal person struggling to keep her basically normal life afloat, etc).

Does Clayton make nerdy, often "cringe" geek culture references – incessantly, come hell or high water? You bet he does.

We meet Clayton's once-and-future best friend and right-hand man, Major Erik Wygaunt: Rhodes Scholar, badass soldier, doctrinaire quasi-deontological moralist. Totally different guy from either of the forenamed – or so one would think.

But in practice, in what he actually does and says? Erik is exactly the same sort of argumentative, obscure-trivia-knowing, geek-culture-referencing dork as Clayton and Anna and – yes – virtually every other character in the book.

Here's a typical passage, from page 86. Clayton (dialogue in italics) is in conversation with Erik (no italics):

“My guess is that Blackbird is dispersing some kind of communication agent. It seeks out information-dense substrate and … interfaces with it. Tries to use it to grow a message or a system. It’s trying to talk to us by amplifying patterns it finds. Not how I’d go about first contact. But how I might do it if I were very, very strange.” Erik can’t help making a technical protest: like they’re both optimizing their colonies in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguing over the details of the science fictional technologies in play. “Then it should be bursting open every cell in our bodies. If it’s looking for information coding, then DNA would be the first thing it’d find. Seven hundred megabytes of digital data in each cell.”

By this point, I had long since discarded my "characterization for Anna" hypothesis. I'd gotten the hang of what was really going on.

And so I didn't even blink when, on page 103, a character is introduced as "Captain Davoud Qasemi of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force" – and he immediately begins rattling off the names of specific video games he liked as a kid, rambling about the homosexual overtones in Top Gun, and saying things like "It's marvelously ironic! It's so classically ironic that it's invented pederasty and gone to war with Sparta."

That's just how everyone in the world talks, apparently.

Everyone in the world. This book is about a Kurdish village that is suddenly crisscrossed with deployments from the U.S. and Russia and China etc., in what seem likely to be the last days of the human race; it is, in large part, about the culture clashes and strained attempts at international collaboration that result from this arrangement.

But the characters are helped along in their efforts by the fact that there is at least one culture to which they all belong.

They would all seem perfectly at home sitting on a big couch in a dorm common room at some nerdy liberal arts college, nominally watching a movie but in fact talking over most of the dialogue as they strive to out-do one another in the game of pointing out its scientific and historical inaccuracies.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is a perfectly fine way to be.

But it is not the only one.

----

It is probably clear that I did not like this aspect of the book. But why?

Well, there is the thing I just mentioned, about how it undermines the attempt at portraying culture clashes. But that's not the only problem, and it's not really the main problem.

What else, then?

In his (in)famous essay about "hysterical realism," James Wood wrote (my emphasis):

By and large, these are not stories that could never happen (as, say, a thriller is often something that could never happen); rather, they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them. They are not stories in which people defy the laws of physics (obviously, one could be born in an earthquake); they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion. This is what Aristotle means when he says that in storytelling “a convincing impossibility” (say, a man levitating) is always preferable to “an unconvincing possibility” (say, the possibility that a fundamentalist group in London would continue to call itself KEVIN).

Exordia is not hysterical realism, and it contains plenty of events which deliberately contravene the (known) laws of physics. Nonetheless, while reading it, I kept thinking of that line about "defying the laws of persuasion."

In the case of any one character, the traits I'm pointing to would be perfectly acceptable. (We saw this with my reaction to Anna, above.)

What's more, they would be acceptable even if they went against the expectations set by other attributes of the same character. The world is huge, and contains billions; every oddball combination of traits you can imagine quite possibly does exist, at least in someone, somewhere.

And besides: as Wood says, the "laws of persuasion" are not the same as the "laws of physics." The requirements needed for something to "feel plausible," in a work of fiction, are not the same as the requirements needed for something to be plausible, in real life.

But there is a set of requirements in the case of fiction. It's just a different one.

Meet the terms of the contract, and the reader will happily "suspend their disbelief," even in the face of actions and dialogue that would be extraordinarily unlikely in the real world. But if you break the contract? Then piling on more "realism," more geeky period/setting detail and laws-of-physics plausibility, will only heighten the disconnect and slide things further into the uncanny valley.

It's like watching a 3D 60-fps movie, back when Hollywood was going through its simultaneous 3D and 60-fps fads.

Yes, yes, there is technically more information, it's technically closer to the signal your senses would receive from the real world. But you have broken the terms of the illusion, suspended the suspension of disbelief, and so I am no longer seeing your world and characters, anymore. I am seeing the remaining gaps in your inevitably flawed illusion.

On page 136 of Exordia, we meet a female Kurdish shepherd. She's an extremely minor character, really just a horror-movie extra who's there to get picked off (ambiguously, "off-screen") by the spooky powers at play, and thereby give the reader an (ambiguous, tantalizing) hint of what those powers can do.

But, as is the convention in such matters, Seth Dickinson gives her just a smidgen of characterization, to humanize her before she goes.

What kind of person is she, this poor doomed shepherdess?

You already know the answer, don't you?

Tonight she thinks only of her sheep. Oil smuggling paid for her phone and the rifle on her back, but this flock is part of the village’s common wealth, and she is responsible for it. Or so her mother is always reminding her. And even if she watches too much anime and spends too much time getting into fights on Facebook, she wants to do her mother proud.

She watches too much anime? Fine. Maybe she does. Maybe she does.

Maybe – if it were only her. If the seams in the illusion were not showing through so plainly.

I'm a fairly cooperative reader. The implausible and the impossible do not bother me. I am capable of believing just about anything.

But not like this.

----

The characters of Exordia are geeks. That much I've covered already.

They are also badasses, every one of them. Geeky badasses.

That's the phrase that came to mind, pretty early on, when I was trying to formulate what bothered me about these guys. "Every single character in this book is a geeky badass," I thought.

I'm sorry. It's a very, uh, "cringe" phrase. But that too is apposite.

What do I mean, "badasses"?

For one thing I mean that they are hypercompetent. They know all kinds of stuff – geek culture trivia, academic esoterica in seemingly every discipline, hands-on working knowledge of whichever military or scientific devices the plot needs them to use. They are quick on their feet, relentlessly thoughtful and logical, cool under pressure (or hot under pressure in an impressive and charismatic manner), capable of creative problem-solving.

They never fail.

Nothing fazes them. Or rather: when they are fazed, it is brief, and they look great doing it, and it doesn't matter in the end anyway.

Many of them have dark, traumatic personal histories (exciting! dramatic! potentially sexy!), but however bad their trauma, it does not dare disturb their hypercompetence when the latter is at work.

This book is about the cataclysmic end of the world-as-we-know-it. It contains a staggering quantity of violence and death: on-screen and off-screen, mass-scale and intimate, dealt out by a diverse range of human and inhuman actors and weapons. But no one ever just breaks down in the face of it all. Or rather: if they do "break down," they do so only briefly, and they look great doing it, and...

One of the main characters is, explicitly, an alcoholic with PTSD. But this doesn't really ever come up as a serious obstacle, either to her or to anyone else. Mostly, it just means that she jokes around with the other characters about being the town drunk, sometimes, in between one moment of epic badassery and the next.

One might argue that this is sort of... I don't know, "tasteless"? I don't know. I had some sort of problem with it, anyway, that or some other one.

For a book that is so thoroughly about nerds, it is remarkable how little it contains in the way of humiliation. Of straight-up, unalloyed uncoolness.

As always, things start off with uncharacteristic promise. In the first few pages, Anna loses her job, then breaks up with her boyfriend in a very awkward manner and instantly regrets it.

This, remember, is the same character who says that cringe line about souls and Evangelion. So far, so good! We've gone from zero to #relatable in record time. We have a confirmed blorbo, stable under laboratory conditions. Sources familiar with the situation report that she is "a hot mess" and "literally me."

But that's all in Act One (may it rest in peace). Soon enough, Anna is taken up into the geeky badass hive mind, and from then on she too is never seen to fail. Except in a cool way, sometimes.

Soon enough she is just like the rest of them. Quick-witted, effortlessly articulate, situationally aware, ready for anything, an endless font of witty geek banter.

Is this bad? Why?

I'm not sure. Maybe I just don't like it. Maybe there's nothing more than that.

But... okay, look. This is a book about the likely end of the human race, about humans trying to work together in the face of cultural differences and mutual mistrust. It wants you to hope. In its moments of triumph, it wants you to feel proud of your whole species.

And, in the name of these goals, it tries so very hard to humanize its characters. It tries, it tries! They have so many traits, so much specificity! They will tell you all about their home towns, their cultures, their hopes and dreams and fears! Look, look, the book says: surely these are people? Look at them, they're doing so much people stuff!

But at the moment where "being human" might entail "not being effortlessly cool and badass literally all of the time," the book suddenly relents. That cannot be allowed, of course. Every threshold can be crossed, except that one.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't relate. I'm not a badass. I do embarrassing shit all the time, and I'll probably just go on doing it until the day I die. I don't think I could hold my own with these demigods in the anime-referencing game, much less the high-pressure-military-operations game.

I guess "people" are like this, sometimes. But only because the world is big, and so for every X, there are some people who are X, somewhere.

This book is about the human race, except it isn't. To be human is (among other things) to kind of suck, and no one in this book kind of sucks, not even the military psychopaths, not even blorbo-candidate Anna.

On page 10, Anna asks her alien how she views humanity, and the alien's characterization is humorously blunt, underwhelming, and undignified:

“You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck. [...] “You are wired for small social groups, so all human organization degenerates into power trading and gossip between a tractably sized elite, no matter the stakes. You have two sources of authority—dominance and prestige—which conflict in interesting ways. Something killed most of you, and so your survivors are very inbred. Very similar. Your meat smells the same.”

Act One really is so very different from the rest, isn't it?

Ah, those were the days!

4. differentiation of hive mind tissue

In the last section, I argued that the characters were overly similar. Possessed of the same "geeky badass" traits in a way that defied "the laws of persuasion."

That is true, but it's not to say the characters don't have distinguishing traits. They definitely have those.

But even here, in the realm of differences, something feels... off. To me, anyway.

It's sort of like this:

To a zeroth-order approximation, every character in Exordia is identical. Just another dollop of homogeneous geeky badass paste, scooped up from the same wellspring as all the rest.

That's only the zeroth-order approximation. Look closer, and you can see differences.

What kinds of differences?

Well, here's an example. There's a character named Chaya. Who is she? Besides a geeky badass, I mean?

She is [takes a deep breath] a Ugandan-Filipina Catholic butch lesbian plasma physicist!

That's a long list of traits, but it was very easy for me to recall them all from memory just now, even though Chaya is just one member of this book's long roster of protagonists. Why?

Because whenever Chaya appears in a scene – whenever she says anything, and whenever the narration is filtered through her perspective – these traits are mentioned over and over again.

Virtually everything that she says or thinks is:

A) Narrowly pragmatic, directly related to what's happening in the immediate plot, could have been said/thought by any one of the characters

B) Directly related to one or more of the traits listed above (e.g. she's Catholic, so she's praying or talking about God with one of the irreligious / differently religious characters)

C) Some mixture of the two (e.g. she is making some smart practical comment about a current dilemma in the plot, which any one of the characters might have said, except that where one of the other characters would have said "fuck!", she says "mama Mary!")

I almost feel kind of gross, dissecting a character in this way. Especially when it's a character like Chaya, who I kind of liked!

I almost feel that way, but then I remember it's not really me doing the dissection. The characters come this way, marked with convenient labels for ease of disassembly.

I said I "kind of liked" Chaya, and I did. When I was reading the book quickly, swept along by the story – when I sort of defocused my brain, and didn't pay too much attention – I felt that she was a likable character. She had the general shape of a "likable character." My brain could match her against familiar templates, and accept the match, if I let my brain work without too much conscious deliberation.

When I focused harder, though, the joints began to show.

When I focused harder, I could watch (well-crafted, clever) lines of dialogue and narration flow past, and see through the Matrix to the calculated flecks of trait-relevance which adhered to each and every one of those lines.

This is a Chaya section, so I am getting told over and over again about God and rosary beads and plasma physics and what Uganda is like and what the Philippines is like and the woman Chaya has a crush on and how Chaya has a crush on that woman and how these two have a vaguely butch/femme dynamic.

(Sidenote: although this book seems like it's taking great pains to be culturally sensitive – or, perhaps, because of that fact – I kept noticing that the American characters are not constantly thinking and talking about what America is like. Only the people from places presumptively unfamiliar to the reader do that kind of thing. And it almost feels like the American characters are given more "slots" in which to fit distinct character traits, because they don't have to spend any slots just to establish their national origins.)

These are the Chaya topics. I am being told about them, and I will be told about them later, in other Chaya sections. Except for "the plot," these are the only topics I will ever be told about in Chaya sections.

If this were a Clayton section, I would be hearing for the 50th time about how Clayton is manipulative and conflicted about his manipulativeness. Or, hearing about one of the other Clayton topics. There's a list of those, with maybe five or six items, just as there was with Chaya. In Clayton sections, you hear about these things, and only these things.

It reminds me of the kind of improv where you're handed a brief description of your character, and have to immediately start acting as that character, with no time to prep. There's no way you could invent a whole fleshed-out human being in under a second, of course. So you lean hard on the traits listed on your character sheet. You find ways to weave one or more of them into each and every line. See: I'm doing it right! I'm playing my character!

----

Exordia's characters have no small traits. Only big ones, like "being Catholic" or "being Chinese." They do not act whimsically or inexplicably, ever; they do not play against their fixed types, ever.

Real people are microscopically detailed, incompressible, differentiated from one another by millions of little quirks that are essentially arbitrary and cannot be satisfactorily "explained" except by narrating huge segments of their life histories ("see, that's where it came from," one might say, after relating years of experience in unsparing detail).

In fiction, this stuff can't possibly be conveyed in full, and so a faithful portrayal of its consequences tends to just look like "noise," arbitrary behavior, the whimsical, the inexplicable.

Which is fine. Good fictional characters often come with such halos of static around them. It's a part of making a fictional world feel real, rough-edged, lived-in.

And on the other hand, sometimes it's fine for a fictional character to just be a type, and play out that type. A lot of science fiction is this way: it simply isn't much interested in character, which is okay, because it has other interests with which to keep your attention.

But Exordia is trying to have it both ways.

It's not just a standard hard SF story where the characters are types, and are clearly and only those types, and that's okay. Compared to that sort of story, Exordia spends way more time lingering on its characters, "zooming in" on them. Inviting you to consider them, study them, love them.

But this causes a feeling of intuitive wrongness, an uncanny valley effect. We should be zoomed in far enough to see the details, the noise-haloes. So where are they?

You can zoom in and in, but all you see is a magnified version of the stuff you'd already seen at lower resolution. A surface of unreal smoothness, unmarred by dust or fuzz.

4b. so meta

It's annoying (I keep using that word...) to talk about these aspects of Exordia, because the book involves a sci-fi conceit that could potentially explain its unusual flatness of character.

Explain it in-universe, I mean. As a "real" thing that causes these people to be this way, for a specific reason, in a specific place and time. Leaving everyone outside of the frame potentially intact, with dust and fuzz still in place.

(Wait, that was in Floornight too! Huh. I literally didn't realize that until just now.)

I'm not going to say anything more about this due to the spoiler rule, except that I don't think it really works when you think about it. The stated causes don't actually match up with the effects: the former are too narrow in scope, the latter too pervasive. The characters are flat even when the sci-fi flat-causing mechanisms aren't supposed to be in effect.

At most, I guess you could say the flatness is "thematically appropriate." Connected to other stuff that the book talks about, elsewhere. But... I dunno. Who cares? What's the point?

4c. the voice of the hive

Like a lot of modern fiction, Exordia is mostly written in studiously maintained free indirect speech.

If you don't know (or don't remember) what that is, the Wikipedia page I just linked has a nice example, which I'll reproduce here.

Quoted or direct speech or narrator's voice: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked. Reported or normal indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world. Free indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?

It's third person. But the third-person narration is commingled with the perspective of one of the characters (where this focal character can vary over the course of the text). Often the "narrator" just says stuff as though it's objective reportage, when in fact it is (and the reader knows it is) what this specific character thinks or believes.

The use of free indirect speech accidentally provides a useful way to "directly measure" the characterization problems described above.

Consider: although the book is written this way almost all of the way through – and you can discern that fact if you pay attention – it is easy to forget in the moment that it is written this way.

Why? Because, although the narration follows the thoughts of one character and then another, the characters are too similar to one another for this to make much of a difference.

Mostly, the narration just describes things the way you'd imagine a "geeky badass" might describe them, with lots of flashy clever phrasing, and lots of arguably pedantic detail about science / engineering / military matters / etc.

Free indirect speech already blurs the distinction between the authorial voice and the character voices, by design, but here the blurring is taken to its limit, and the distinction collapses entirely. Is "the author" describing events this way? Or, is one of the characters describing it in that way? Or not them, but a different character? We can't tell, because all of these people would say precisely the same string of words.

Of course, we can usually tell who the focal character is, because the items listed on their character card are getting sprayed all over the place. If every other sentence of the narration mentions a Clayton topic, then Clayton must be the focal character, and likewise for the others.

Even here, though, there's a curious departure from the way free indirect speech works in most other books. Note that referencing the "Clayton topics" is not the same thing as conveying Clayton's moment-to-moment thoughts: the former is a fixed list of 5 or 6 items, while the latter presumably roves all over the place as time passes.

I say "presumably" because if the characters' thoughts do rove around in this way, we mostly don't see it. All we hear about is their "topics," again and again.

Maybe these are Clayton's thoughts; maybe Clayton is an obsessive monomaniac who just thinks endlessly about the fact that he's manipulative and so on. Maybe they are all like that. Who knows? It's impossible for me to tell, because the narration is ambiguous in this odd, specific way.

One section, late in the book, begins as follows:

An awful light from the sky finds Anna. She’s, barely, smart enough not to look straight at it.

I was briefly startled by this. I interpreted that "barely smart enough" remark as something said by the omniscient third-person observer. I was like: dude, that's kinda harsh, isn't it?

But a few sentences later, I realized: oh, the focal character in this scene is Anna's mom. It's Anna's mom who's judging her like this. That makes sense.

This particular example is just sort of a narration glitch. I'm not sure it'd be possible to avoid the effect I'm describing, here, without rewriting the scene so it's clear who the focal character is before the "barely smart enough" judgment occurs.

But this case stuck out to me when I encountered it, because that feeling of disorienting perspective-realignment – although it's just kind of awkward, here – is what good multi-character free indirect speech usually feels like, all the time.

"The book should have more of this," I thought. "It should be constantly calling the characters stupid, or whatever, from the perspective of other characters."

(It's not like that doesn't happen at all, mind you. It just happens way less than usual, and way less than it ought to, IMO.)

"With this much perspective-shifting, I should be getting vertigo," I thought. "So where is it? Why is everything so smooth?"

5. the forbidden word

My division into sections is sort of breaking down, here. There's a thing I want to mention that doesn't really deserve its own section, but doesn't quite fit anywhere else. Whatever.

It's yet another annoying quality of Exordia's characters. ("Wait," you're saying. "You said you enjoyed this book?")

Basically everyone in this book is so...

Look, guys, I really don't want to say "woke," okay? If no one ever used the word "woke" again, we would live in a better world. I have said it twice already in this paragraph, and thus made our shared world worse, twice. Sorry.

I'm just not sure what else to call it.

They're feminists. They're against racism, and it's not the kind of hollow and unreflective "opposition to racism" that (e.g.) most Americans will assent to if you poke them about it – no, these people have subtle, thought-through ideas about racism, and its causes.

And so on, w/r/t other forms of bigotry, and the like.

And it's not just that the characters hold these views, themselves. These views are a fluid in which they swim, in a mostly invisible fashion. Everyone assumes without asking that everyone else is like this, and acts accordingly.

Or, more precisely, all the main characters are like this. There are a few bit players who are vaguely suggested to have more right-wing attitudes: the "Mike Jan" who we briefly met above, he of the unchanging desktop background, seems like the type of guy who'd watch Alex Jones, for instance. And on really rare occasions – like maybe 2 or 3 times total – some barely characterized nonentity will actually say something racist or sexist, but nothing much comes of it (remember, our mains are emotionally impregnable badasses), and then the guy who made the comment gets beheaded by an alien laser on the same page or something.

Meanwhile, all the Important Characters are (I guess) invisibly equipped with Important Character Detectors that let them hone in on each other, ignore the hapless maybe-bigoted redshirts around them, and proceed immediately into sophisticated conversations about social justice with one another. No need to feel out the other party's general point of view beforehand: this guy's a protagonist. He's cool, he's one of us.

Is this bad?

I mean, if it is, it's not really a big deal, I guess? Not compared to the other issues I talked about earlier, the deeper ones that plague the fundamental ingredients of the work (character, plot, structure).

But I did find it kind of offputting. Especially at first, before I'd accepted that the Exordia world is just like this.

I remember specifically being startled by an early scene, during the part where the Act One characters are getting introduced to the Acts Two+ characters, in which Anna and Erik suddenly – without warning or preface – launch into a discussion of Kurdish feminism, and potentially distorted/simplified/problematic Western views of Kurdish feminism, and whether Kurdish feminism really matters at all in light of the dire geopolitical position of the Kurds, and that sort of thing.

Again: the problem is not that this is "implausible," in itself. We barely know Erik at this point, and insofar as we know him it's mostly as some hardcore soldier type of dude, but – sure, whatever. There are plenty of feminist men in the military, I'm sure. The military is big, it's got all kinds of people in it.

Again: the violation is not against the laws of physics, but against the laws of persuasion. It's not that this couldn't happen. It could!

And yet.

"Yes, this could happen. I guess it could. But like, come on. Really?"

Sometimes the reader is a harsher master than reality.

And beyond that, this just seems like... I don't know. Like a half-assed, cowardly way to make your book "about" social justice in some sense, without ever really confronting the topic head-on?

A book in which everyone verbally agrees with one another about their enlightened views is not a book about the content of those views. It's just a book in which some characters happen to agree with one another about some things, and also some other stuff happens.

(I'm being at least sort of unfair here: the book really is "about" the Kurds and the Anfal campaign, for instance.)

For a book about culture clashes and genocide and the struggle for international collaboration under tense circumstances, Exordia has a remarkable lack of ideological tension. Or even non-ideological international tension, depicted "on-screen."

Mostly, people in the book... just kind of instantly get along with each other? And then immediately start exchanging packets of nerd banter and/or trenchant commentary on the evils of U.S. imperialism. Members of the geeky badass hive mind, recognizing one another on sight, conversing in the native language of the hive.

Once again: is this bad? Even if so, how bad is it, really?

I think, maybe, that if your book is about the sorts of things that Exordia is about, then sometimes your characters should very much not get along immediately. That they should be riven apart, and driven to extremes, by identity and ideology – if not forever, then at least for a time.

Maybe.

6. proof by intimidation

Man, this post is long!

And somehow I haven't really touched upon what Exordia's prose actually feels like, most of the time, word by word.

That's what this last section is about.

I don't mean the prose style, exactly. Actually, the prose style per se is... really good, mostly! I don't have that much to say about the ways in which it is good, but for the sake of balance and accuracy, I ought to make it clear that they exist.

Seth Dickinson is clearly a very good writer. In the "writes high-quality prose" sense, at least, and – despite all that I've said – in plenty of other ways too. (I'm told that his other books are better than this one; I will probably read them sometime. And I look forward, warily but with a considerable measure of hope, to his future work.)

But. You know what's coming. This post is negative-only. I've got something bad to say about the prose, it seems. Not about the style, but about... something else?

What, then?

Well, let me show you some examples.

He [i.e. Clayton] has seen enough satellite timelines of mass graves to know exactly which stage the corpses have reached. Their skin and bone cells are still alive. Their suits are bloating with gases now. Death signals the beginning of a final uprising, when the three pounds and 60 percent (by count) of your cells that are bacterial clients claim their last meal. They eat you so greedily and so well.

Sixty percent, huh. TIL!

I didn't know that, but Clayton did, apparently. (Free indirect speech in action.)

Of course he did. Clayton is a geeky badass, and like all of his kind, he knows every gee-whiz fact (and factoid) in existence.

And like all geeky badasses – like the book itself – he is not shy about letting you know that he knows.

What else does the book know? Here's some chemistry:

Their X-ray frequency gun isn’t working. Maggie Gaboury breaks out the breakdown spectrometer. A neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet laser attacks the hull; the plume of excited vapor releases a rainbow of light that the spectrometer can read like a bloody fingerprint.

"Breakdown spectrometer"? I've never heard of those. Am I supposed to know this? Is it important?

Two pages later:

The US Radar 110XLS is designed to survey down to two hundred feet below ground, seeking out oil deposits and land mines. Emme didn’t expect the radar to work—after all, their radios are burned out, and radars are giant radios. But radio doesn’t go through metal. The radar’s storage unit protected it. So now they’re aiming it at this alien hull, which Joel says isn’t metal. It’s some kind of stable excimer, or Rydberg matter.

"Ah, the US Radar 110XLS, huh?" I say, smiling and nodding.

Just keep smiling and nodding, I tell myself. Keep your mouth shut. Or else Seth might catch on that you're a fucking moron who doesn't even know what a "breakdown spectrometer" is.

Later, here's some physics:

She knows how matter behaves around black holes. This thing is not behaving like a black hole should: it ought to be pulling in nearby air, forming a friction fireball. It’s not. But even if it isn’t actively pulling, some air is going to move into it anyway. Air molecules at room temperature move shockingly fast—about 350 meters per second.

350 meters per second. Smile and nod. Smile and nod.

God, I'm dumb. All the fucking things I don't KNOW.

The areas which the book knows all about, and which I know virtually nothing about, are too numerous to name. Does it know aeronautical engineering? And astronautical engineering? You bet:

Volume around 12,000 cubic meters. Assuming the same density as a 747, this implies a mass of 5,400 metric tons, just short of two fully fueled Saturn V rockets. Blackbird has wings, but they’re too thick to produce much lift. The fuselage shows no sign of area ruling for efficient transonic flight. It’s not a plane. As a spacecraft design, Blackbird almost makes sense. The entire fuselage could serve as a lifting body while Blackbird glides down to a water landing. In space, the wings and their jagged trailing edges could act as radiators. There are no visible engines, but maybe the tail stuck in the mountainside is the exhaust.

That all sounds logical enough, I guess. But then again, if it wasn't, how would I know? Man, I don't even know what the phrase "area ruling" means.

Perhaps, despite my pretensions, I am not in fact cut out to disparage this book at all. It's above my pay grade. It's smarter than me.

You want more? Here's, um, a "BLEVE":

The blast tips the nearest helicopter on its side, snapping rotors, the fueling hose lashing like hell’s elephant. The helicopter carries a tank of helium cryogen for food storage and magnetic resonance systems. The heat of the fireball envelops the tank and pushes the helium above its boiling point. It tries to revert to a gas but it can’t: no room in here! For an instant the tank holds back tons of super-pressurized liquid helium trying to boil off into gas. Then a seam fails, and every molecule inside flashes to steam. The result is a BLEVE: a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion. It ruptures the kerosene fire and kills the luckier men instantly. The inert helium snuffs the fire and replaces it with a zone of asphyxiation and paradoxical cold. The blast wave slaps the lab complex’s tunnels taut and snaps the laundry lines in Tawakul.

Maybe you knew what that was already. Not me!

Is... is that what the blast wave resulting from a BLEVE would do, under those circumstances? Look, I'm not saying it isn't. I'm not casting doubt. I'm just saying, I have no clue.

Did Seth Dickinson do some sort of calculation, here, to make sure this made sense? How much research did he do, how much homework? Did he run simulations?

This stuff reads like he did. It reads like he was so careful, so laboriously conscientious about the science and engineering details, that he just has to tell you everything he learned along the way, or else it would all be for naught.

The book knows about military hardware. Oh god does it know about military hardware. The following excerpt is merely a drop from an ocean:

A column of Spetsnaz BMD-4s roll south down the riverside road, bristling with hundred-millimeter rifles and thirty-millimeter autocannon and anti-tank missiles and active hard-kill defenses. Spetsnaz riding atop their transports watch every incremental tick of the compass. Brand new Azart-P1 radio sets squall with static, still picking up the aurorae hidden behind the low gray sky.

Seth, is there anything you don't know?

I'm not even touching on the learned, labored excursions into history and geopolitics, here – just focusing on the science-y parts for brevity (ha ha, "brevity," I'll be here all night).

But even then, there are plenty more domains of science and engineering left to cover! Behold:

The copper tracks that connect components on the board have been duplicated, as if the etching process was performed twice before the final UV burn. Some of the pin connectors have dwarf copies. The CPU socket is crusted in a dark mass, like over-applied thermal paste.

The world is vast, nearly as vast as my own ignorance of it. Would you believe I have no idea what "over-applied thermal paste" looks like on a circuit board?

Like Seth, I do an arguably excessive quantity of research. Look, I spent a while this morning finding all those quotes, and there's no way I'm going to leave them un-quoted after all that work, okay? Here they come:

The KingFisher can read DNA sequences at targeted locations, but it can’t physically examine the structure of DNA. For that, she needs to get purified DNA extract from the KingFisher machine, then mount the DNA on slides of mica and put them under an atomic force microscope.

But of course. (Smile and nod.)

Did you know that certain ways of getting killed cause you to ejaculate as you die? Clayton does!

"Gunshot trauma to the cerebellum causes post-mortem erection and discharge," Clayton says.

More physics, and some speculative engineering:

The engine that forms the “quill” is a sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion rocket. This is a fancy way to say that it turns spin-polarized heavy hydrogen and light helium into a continuous thermonuclear explosion. This is itself a fancy way to say that it runs on a rolling nuclear fireball. The magnetically confined tailpipe puts out about 100 grams of helium-4, protons, loose neutrons, and unburnt hydrogen-helium fuel every second. Add gamma and X-rays for taste, and, in situations where you need extra thrust at the cost of efficiency, dump some extra mass into the beam as a kind of afterburner. The resulting exhaust plasma moves at 3,500 kilometers per second: Mach 10,000, or about 1 percent of lightspeed.

Even more:

Some of the atoms take direct gamma-ray hits to their nuclei, breaking apart the strong-force bonds that tie protons to neutrons: a process called photodisintegration.

Did we really need to be told, after having this phenomenon explained to us, that it was called "photodisintegration"?

I mean, maybe we did. Or at least, maybe I did.

Since, you know.

Since I didn't know that, before.

Of course I didn't.

----

One last time: Is this bad? If so, why?

Maybe the problem is that I've written too much fiction, myself. (And SF, even, sometimes.)

And so, I can no longer look at this stuff and just think, "ooh, cool science facts, described in a flashy way. Fun!"

Instead, I just feel an immediate, intimate sense of exhaustion.

"God, how much work this must have been. How long it must have taken to gather all this info, and double-check it, and integrate it with the story in the right places."

(The fact that it has to actually suit the story means that a lot of this kind of "homework" never even makes it to the page, because the plot points that might once have required it get edited out or modified! Ugh, I'm feeling drained just typing this.)

Exhaustion – and self-doubt.

"God, so many things to potentially get wrong in an embarrassing way. So many fields that I'm an amateur-at-best in. And since I'm writing fiction, I'm taking those fields 'out of distribution,' taking them places that have never been studied by their real-world practitioners! Fuck, I have to make novel predictions! I'm screwed. Everyone is going to know exactly how much of an idiot I am."

This isn't just about science, mind you. It's about everything. Writing fiction inherently requires one to assume a posture of staggering arrogance, or what would be staggering arrogance in any other context.

"Here's what happened, to these people who are not like me, in all these places I've only visited, at most. Here is exactly what they did and said and even thought, inside their heads, where no one else could see. How the hell would I know, you ask? It's simple: I know everything. I know all the things there are to know, about all the things that exist. (And the ones that don't exist, for that matter.)"

I do manage to assume the posture, at least for long enough to get the words written when I want them written. But outside of that trance-like state, I start to doubt myself.

Who am I to do this thing? My ignorance is vast, nearly as vast as the world of which I'm ignorant.

And it's there, in that world, that they live. The readers. Aren't they going to notice how badly I'm getting it all wrong? They will, won't they?

This is neurotic, I know.

And so, perhaps the only thing that we're learning here is the following:

A) I am a writer who is very intellectually insecure, and

B) Exordia is a novel with a majestic stock of implicit intellectual self-confidence.

Is that bad? Could it be bad, "objectively," apart from my issues? I mean, surely not, right?

Nonetheless, I notice that reading Exordia filled me with this kind of tetchy, defensive intellectual competitiveness – which is a thing that most books do not do to me, though "my issues" remain a constant.

Perhaps – to psychologize myself further – this objection is downstream from the others, and has no life of its own. Perhaps I just felt annoyed with the book for other reasons, and at the same time felt like the book was asserting itself to be superior to me in some sense, and so I felt a need to say:

"No, all of this is bad somehow, because if it were good it would mean this whole book is good – and that would have dire implications for my own work, given how similar-and-yet-maybe-inferior it is to the incredibly-annoying-and-yet-objectively-superior novel Exordia."

Which is... extremely neurotic, and self-regarding, and also barely even makes sense. I don't want it it just be that, but maybe it is.

(The legitimately high-quality prose did not help, in this respect. It really is good! Five hundred and twenty-nine small-print pages of good. It's so fucking polished, way moreso than anything I could ever imagine putting out. And so fucking clever, so fucking smart...)

(Jeez. Get it together, man.)

----

However, there is one more thing that I notice.

There are works of fiction that make me feel smart, and works of fiction that make me feel dumb.

And I think, all else being equal, it is preferable to make the reader feel smart. Not by cheating, not by lowering your intellectual standards to what you imagine the reader can handle. But by trusting them, and then giving them something hard in a way you trust them to digest themselves.

Rather than... I don't know, bludgeoning them into cowed reverence through sheer force of accumulated, exhaustive, exhausting showing-off?

I don't know how objective this quality is, this feel-smart/feel-dumb thing. I'm sure it's reader-relative to some extent, maybe a huge extent. Maybe it varies so much that it's not even worth talking about in the abstract; you just gotta hope the right reader finds your stuff, and feels smart.

Still, here I am, talking about it.

What defines the works that "make me feel smart"?

Mainly that they are complicated and difficult by virtue of the complicated and difficult novelties they create, as part of the creative act that they are. They involve things which are equally hard for anyone to wrap their mind around, because no one had ever needed to wrap their mind around such things at all, before the work existed.

That, and the fact that these works – despite being inherently complicated and difficult – do not talk down to you, or hold your hand too much.

They act kind of like you already know what their deal is – which you don't, but then again, no one does. (The playing field is level.)

They say:

"Congratulations. You have passed the entrance exam. Welcome to the class. It will be hard, but I trust you to do your best. If you aren't smart enough now, perhaps you will become so, by your own efforts, by the end. Good luck."

They expect the reader to be a genius, but they know, deep down, that the reader is not really the right sort of genius – not yet, anyway. That is the point of presenting the challenge: so that you will rise to it, and see a new kind of thing, beyond what you had believed to be the horizon.

This is how I feel about Homestuck, say, or The Quincunx.

Or The Lymond Chronicles, or The Recognitions, or Ulysses.

Some of these are extremely dense with learned and carefully prepared authorial research. And, where this is the case, they are certainly not shy about showing it to you.

And yet, these works make me feel smart.

And then, there are works like Exordia, which make me feel dumb as fuck.

The end!

#long post #litcrit

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