Customer Reviews

Lady of Mazes

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Karl Schroeder's new novel is the real thing -- head-snappingly cool SF, with big and clever ideas, almost believable transcendence, and a way to map human scale stories into a world where "post-human" powers exist. It's set in the fairly far future, in a Solar System populated by humans living in space habitats, by post-humans -- humans who have gained "god-like" computational powers, and possibly by aliens. Ultimately the story concerns people trying to live human scale lives, yet also lives with meaning -- and various solutions are suggested. This is ambitious stuff. Schroeder -- one of the most reliably ambitious young writers we have -- doesn't quite pull off everything he tries, but he makes a brave stab at it.

The protagonist is Livia Kodaly, a diplomat living in a human society, or "manifold", called Westerhaven. A "manifold" is a set of technological and social values adopted by a community, and enforced by implants and virtual reality. Thus in one manifold people live in what seems to be roughly a traditional Native American tribe; while in another flying machines and guns might be allowed, but not spaceships. And so on. As it happens, these manifolds coexist on a single space habitat, Teven Coronal -- something like one of Iain M. Banks's "orbitals", or a mini-Ringworld. VR mediates people's interactions so that people from different manifolds can be in the same place and not see each other. In some manifolds, like Westerhaven, people have "societies", groups of friends who can always be present (if usually as simulations, with conversations stored for the "original" to experience later if necessary).

This setup is pretty cool -- reminiscent in some ways of John C. Wright's Golden Age trilogy. But it turns out not to be the point of the book. For Westerhaven and its fellow manifolds are under attack by a mysterious entity called 3347, which seems determined to undermine the "tech locks" that maintain the identity of each manifold. Livia and her close friend Aaron Varese, along with a newly met man from another manifold, Raven, escape in a flying house. And soon we are introduced to the main stream (perhaps) of human society, a cluster of habitats from which Westerhaven has been isolated.

Here people also live lives mediated by VR, so that they might seem to be in almost any environment -- a cartoon world, an old city street, a Scottish manor, etc. -- while in "reality" (whatever that might mean) they are living in artificial space habitats broadly similar to Teven Coronal. Social life in these habitats is controlled by various means -- AIs called collectively the "Government," and composed of independent AI "votes," for one example. Or, for another crucial example, groups of people living according to the Good Book -- a set of rules for social interaction.

Best perhaps to let Schroeder tell his story from here. Livia and her friends continue to search for help in saving their home Coronal. But they are also seduced by the prospect of life in the "wider" world, as it were, with its less limited horizons. And there is also the lurking presence of post-humans, and of the mysterious "anecliptics," the beings who have among other things shielded Teven Coronal from interaction with the rest of the Solar System. Some people are looking for ways to become "gods" themselves.

Ultimately Lady of Mazes asks: "What does human life mean?" or "How can life be meaningful if 'reality' is an infinitely malleable construct, and nothing basic ever changes?" Or similar questions. Livia, not surprisingly, has a central role to play. At times the story bumps into a common problem of wild far future stories -- how can we believe or understand the technological wonders that seem to drip by fiat from the author's pen? But in the end I felt the book mostly worked. And the closing passage (before a slightly anticlimactic epilogue) is truly lovely.

Lady of Mazes is very loosely connected to Schroeder's earlier novel, Ventus, but the story is completely independent. Not having read the earlier book will not affect this one.

Livia Kodaly lives in a space-based habitat, in a culture that to some degree neighbors and to some degree overlaps in physical territory with other cultures that are separated from each other by software horizons that prevent members of one culture from using or even perceiving the technology and artifacts appropriate to other cultures. Livia herself is part of a small group that can perceive and interact with other culture, and who act as cultural ambassadors and take on the task of deciding when declining cultures have been sufficiently abandoned that their resources can be reallocated to thriving existing or new cultures. This is a contentious enough task that Livia's life is hardly stress-free even before Qiingi, a man from a more nature-oriented neighboring/overlapping culture tells her that the Ancestors-the people Livia's culture calls the Founders-have returned and are behaving very strangely. In short order the horizons separating the many cultures of the habitat are under full-scale attack and falling rapidly, while Livia, Qiingi, and Aaron, an old friend of Livia's, are fleeing for their lives, knowing nothing about their enemy except that it's apparently called 3340, and it hates the horizons that let the cultures maintain themselves intact.

Up to this point, they at least know what the rules are supposed to be. Once they make a truly insane escape from the habitat and their unlikely vehicle gets picked up, things get much stranger. Livia, her friends, and the people they meet in what, from their perspective, might as well be Wonderland, all have to completely rewrite the way they think the world works, and why. The question of who or what among the contending parties might be the bad guy, if there is one, becomes amazingly, and amazingly satisfyingly, confused. After the first third of the book, there's really nothing that can be said about it that wouldn't simultaneously be both a spoiler, and completely misleading.

Highly recommended.

This is a very well written piece of science fiction that combines hard science fiction (Niven) with more imaginative work (Dick). I am astounded to find that I am the first to write a review. This is a very good book. The premise is that people live in various artificial communities/satellites, and also in various artificial mental constructs. What happens when these constructs are challenged? Very, very unusual and fine story. I highly recommend it if you enjoy this genre.

That Karl Schroeder built an intricate, well-thought out world is clear from page one. But the way he proceeds to involve the reader, to bring us into his world, is off-putting and confusing.

In a style echoing Gene Wolfe and other "the pleasure is in figuring out what we're talking about" sci-fi writers, Schroeder jumps from one "in the middle of" story to another, using a litany of Schroeder/Lady of Mazes-specific proper nouns, to describe what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward cyber/sci-fi plot.

If there's a cool idea in here, it was lost to me in the folds of weird terminology, purposely confusing descriptions (not evocative but just annoying), illogical character behavior, and unbelievable cultural constructions.

Which is a shame, because half of Lady of Mazes seemed almost to reach that transcendental plane of sci-fi that goes beyond sci-fi and says something new about life/society/whatever (a la Gene Wolfe, Susan Palwick, Connie Wills, PK Dick), but the other half is lamely entrenched in high-school computers'n'rockets genre fiction.

Lady of Mazes is a novel full of big hard SF ideas, but here the emphasis was on hard, rather than big, as in Hard to Read. When I saw the publisher's description, I wondered if it was so Hard to Read that the jacket copy writer couldn't figure out how to synopsize it (in fact, the book jacket has some other copy, but it's provided in the form of quotes from Charles Stross and Charles Harness). Schroeder comes up with some delightful futuristic, post-human scenarios, but he does it so convincingly that at times it's a struggle just to keep up with what's going on since I'm just a regular non-post-human human.

This novel is by no means entry level SF, which is fine--not all SF is written for the novice reader (nor would I want it to be). However, this book was chosen as part of the Tor/SCI FI Channel cross-promotion program called "SCI FI Essentials" (in which a science fiction novel is chosen each month to be featured as the "Pick of the Month" and will be featured on SCIFI.com and possibly in SCI FI Magazine), and such a complex and difficult read would, I think, do more to turn off new readers than bring in new ones. People who think cutting edge science fiction can be found on the SCI FI Channel (or on TV in general) aren't ready for this sort of thing.

Moh's Hardness Scale is a "a crude but practical method of comparing hardness or scratch resistance of minerals" (see below). I tend to categorize hard SF novels by how hard they actually are. Ben Bova writes hard SF, but what he writes is very accessible, entry-level type stuff. What he writes could be considered say, gypsum hard SF. On the other end of the spectrum is Charles Stross who writes ambitious, yet incredibly dense and challenging SF, or diamond hard SF. This novel isn't quite a diamond, but comes close, as corundum hard SF.

So if you're a hardcore SF geek, this book is sure to entertain, though the effort of reading it might turn your brain to goo. Don't say I didn't warn ya.

I loved this book. I usually only buy books after I've done a lot of searching and research at Amazon, finding books that chain off of other books I like. However, this book I randomly picked up at a bookstore, but was interested when the back cover and pre-title page quotes were from authors I was into, Baxter, Stross, etc. So I bought it, and it sat on a shelf for a few months. I just went on my honeymoon and brought it along to read on the airplane, and I was sucked in! There aren't many sci-fi books that made me want to fill-in my wife as I went, to tell her about the latest plot twist, the newest shock that made me chuckle in understanding while I read it. Luckily for her, I told her just enough that she wants to read it to, but without spoiling. For me, the worth of this novel can be summed up in this: I think I'm going to re-read it in a year or so. That's an honor that very, very few books have recieved for me. Most sci-fi novels, like movies, I read once and then move on, not likely to ever check it out of the library again, let alone feel the need to own them. But this is a book I'm happy to own, as I think it'll get read a few more times in the coming years...

This is yet another example of a modern science-fiction author with a generally good (though narratively problematic) concept being unable to pull it off and resorting to superficially drawn characterization to propel the story.

The human story-line here is pitched at about a 4th-grade emotional level, while the plot conceit (though right in-step with modern SF perspectives toward the virtualization of human discourse) is insufficiently supported.

Don't waste your time.

Despite the gushing praise on the cover this is not "hard" sci-fi in any conventional sense. It's really quite mushy. I read Ventus and Permanence and enjoyed them, but this one is making me re-think purchasing any more of his books.

After your first dozen science fiction books and movies that constantly rely on the ploy that "nothing is what it really appears", the concept wears thin. Especially when a book is packed with virtual worlds, and mysterious and ill-defined groups, whose motivations and relationships unravel one-by-one. It becomes predictable. The technical and social issues are superficially treated (compared to say, "Permutation City"), and one of the pivotal ones, "3044" is unviably lifted from today's video role playing games. My final feeling was that author Schroeder was wandering lost after half the book.

This book is not for the casual sci-fi reader. Karl Schroeder has an extremely vivid imagination and he has set up a complex, difficult-to-comprehend world. It is a challenge read, but just be patient and you will get out of this book what you put into it.

Take time to contemplate the people and environments with which you're presented; not just what they look like, and how they work, but the values and culture they represent. If you put some thought into this book, you'll get a lot out of it.