What do you think?
Rate this book
586 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2021
In Seven Surrenders I also named many who have been my teachers without knowing me, and name again the chiefest: Diderot, Voltaire, de Sade, Homer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Bester, Gene Wolfe, Osamu Tezuka, and also the many makers of I Claudius (books and TV), Revolutionary Girl Utena, Gundam, and Julie Taymor’s Fool’s Fire.
Mycroft Canner loves Romanova, they wouldn’t harm a shingle on its pretty roofs, not without direct orders from MASON, or Mason Junior, or a short list of hallucinatory dead people, but I can tell by that blink—right there, did you catch it? And the little eyebrow twitch?—that Mycroft has no such orders.
I felt like a hateful messenger in some Shakespeare history, come to tell the earnest peasants that the sides had switched again, and friends and ba’sibs must now kill one another, because some distant noble sneezed too near the king.
Friends help friends ignore the voices that tell us we’re not human, outside voices and in.
“…languages are precious enough to be worth people dying for. A human life has infinite value, infinite consequences over the universe of space-time, but apparently They think a language is another order of infinity.”Piety. I can’t think of any language worth anyone dying for.
Many have described to me the journey from feeling they could never maintain such a high standard to realizing that we already are.
Their comportment invites it, that toxic artificial helplessness that coded feminine in olden days, and makes us all fall over ourselves wanting to do things for Heloïse, so much so that we stifle when they try to do things for themself.
I could see you, across the sky, the crowded sea, a thousand black and winged shapes for every tardy, well-meant Peace-dove. But humans began digging a canal across the Gulf of Corinth more than three thousand years ago and finished it in 1893. It’s worth trying things again. Apollo Guardian of Strangers knows that it’s worth trying things again. Especially for such a goal as peacefall.
Free Speech, that old tool of plutocracy, the intoxicating, rosy blossom under whose petals parasite lies can breed and multiply until they devour all the garden. None of us wants that. I hope none of us wants that, but there are still Free Speech zealots in this day and age, and they’re just the type to have communications tech, to build a radio or study Morse code, and volunteer to join our network as a link and pass on . . . death. I’m panicking, I know it. Everyone understands why we need censorship... I do believe it was a pretty thing once, Free Speech, such a lofty notion, but we outgrew it with our communications revolution, as with our machine guns we outgrew pretty chivalry.Odium! Also odious:
our true beliefs are visible in what pokes above the psyche’s surface in those moments when the overflowing heart sings out in gratitude, and then we learn what name it calls: Nature, Humanity, Reason, God, Gaea, Fate, subtle Prometheus, or Providence that takes so much but gives this.
I hope the ideas, the fragile and imperfect Hives of 2454, and the battered but changing-for-the-better Hives of 2456, will help you rise with strength tomorrow morning as you lift your oar, or pack, or first aid kit, whatever task at hand, they’re all the oar so long as you still carry in your breast the ancient spark, contagious, shared from breast to breast, that has died out a thousand times, but never yet in every breast at once. We will.
"Older and more immortal is the enemy we knew we would awaken with our war. Distance."
"Distance," I repeated, and felt an oceanic echo in the word, a new and crueler facet of Jehovah's unrelenting Peer. "It is your war, Kohaku? I thought it wasn't, that it was Jehovah's war instead, but here we are Mitsubishi battling Masons over land, just as you predicted."
"My war has come," the number-prophet answered, slowly. "So has Tai-kun's, Perry's, Danae's, Apollo's. Distance makes one war a hundred wars. They speciate, like sparrows breeding alone on every island until they no longer recognise each other's chirps. See these Cycladic freedom fighters? They wage a rebel's war for home and liberty; they would no more abandon their islands to escort you to distant Tai-kun than your Shearwaters would abandon their dream of Tai-kun's better world to guard the Cyclades."
A dry sob hurt. "Then was it all for nothing?" I had to ask. "Jehovah's Act, trying to make two sides worth dying for? Did it all fail?"
"No. This is a fractal war. The larger shapes still lend their structure to the whole, and larger powers, by forging their macro-peace, will forge the thousand micro-peaces, too." His smile was shadow. "And not everything has fractured."
The trolley problem does not describe our reality. Physics is cruel in many, many ways, but not that way. Yet because we all debate it, normalise it, know it, we live psychologically in the trolley problem, expecting it to be the default ethics of our world. Yes, there are corollaries - deadly missions, quarantines - but if we had admitted our kinder reality, that Nature rarely burdens us with such a choice - Cinna? No, Martin! Martin! - might the Saneer-Weeksbooth founders, who saw they could save 50,000 lives by taking one, have asked themselves: Is there a better way to use this data than to kill? Did we poison our ethics with the trolley problem? Is it bad for us, our minds, our souls, to dive, even in thought experiment, into a universe so artificially unkind?