Anyway, it's a great escapist read with nice pictures of rocket ships on the front and indeed at every chapter break. Who says trad SF is dead? Well, me actually, this isn't SF, it's straight up fantasy; just because the plot revolves around what Lee calls "calendrical science" doesn't make it not self-evident magic. I bet someone is going to mention Clarke's Third Law at this point. BZZZT!!! WRONG! Read it again:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.Does not say: Any magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology. Re-take Logic 101 if you think these statements are equivalent. Some smart-arse will now ask how you can tell the difference between magic and technology or science. Well, start with etymology. Science is Latin for knowledge. Simples. Technology is Greek for know-how, that is, applied science. Magic, on the other hand is the art of the Magi, who were some actual sect/tribe in the Parthian empire, but per the common translation of the Gospels, were generically "Wise Men", where here wise pretty much means having knowledge over and above your common Hom. sap., so...er... OK, let's try again.
Forget about all that stuff about magic not working unlike science because although magic definitely doesn't work (except when it does, in which case it's applied psychology) you end up claiming that Newton's mechanics is magic because it doesn't really work, unlike quantum mechanics, assuming that does work (and let's hope you haven't read anything about the Measurement Problem). But anyway, since there is no actual magic as such I can't point to a laboratory demonstration of the difference; the best we can do is look at how magic works in stories that are widely accepted to be completely impossible, i.e. fantasy.
According to one Western theory of magic, the trick is to ask for help. A magic spell is nothing more than a ritual to get in touch with and toady up to some powerful entity who is in a position to get the job done, by methods the magician doesn't need to worry about. There is no fundamental difference between this kind of magic and the hard core of religion, a contract between a worshipper and their god. In point of fact, this method can sometimes work well if the entity is the Parthian Emperor or the American President or the Head of Department, but strictly speaking it's only magic if the entity is a demon, spirit or otherwise non-existent, in which case the flaw is blatantly apparent.
There are other approaches: for instance sympathetic magic which says that if A and B are a bit alike in some way (the more ways the better, which is why you put the actual toe-nail clippings of your rival in your wax model before stabbing it) then if something happens to A something analogous is bound to happen to B. Astrology is supposed to work something like this ("as above, so below"), although the precise nature of the analogy between, say, the Moon being in the second house, and every Sagittarian getting run over by a milk float on Tuesday, has always escaped me. Yet another theory of magic is that it is all about the power of words, especially True Names. Ursula K. Le Guin took this from the Native American cultures her anthropologist father used to study, and wove it into the most poetic of all magical systems. To know the true name of a thing is to know its essence, and that knowledge is literally power. A spell is simply a command in the True Language, and all things, animate and inanimate, must obey such a command. Earthsea is in truth made of nothing but words. And even in the real world this apparent lie carries a powerful truth. Things of overwhelming importance to millions of people: nations, tribes, political parties, even money, to a large extent, are not just described by words but in essence are words; the thing the words supposedly describe can change utterly but the allegiance is to the word, not the thing.
What, if anything, do all these magics have in common? Underlying them is a deep category error to which humans are particularly prone, which is simply to make people much more important to the state of things than they really are. In its simplest form it conflates "why did this happen?" with "who did this, and why did they want to?". If something cannot have been done by a human it follows that it must be due to some more powerful or at least less visible kind of person: a fairy, a demon, a god. There is no particular mystery here: us simians are particularly social animals and our big brains have evolved precisely to interpret events in terms of the actions of others. That we sometimes can conceive of explanations in terms of unmotivated natural laws is a lucky byproduct of evolutionary overshoot. The magic of words and sympathetic magic are a step more complicated: here, we are confusing the human way of thinking about things with the thing itself.
The physicist Stephen Weinberg once described how to distinguish what he politely describes as "would-be sciences": astrology, clairvoyance, channelling, telekinesis and so on, from the real stuff. He showed by example that we have explored the world well enough already to discern a dense explanatory net: when we ask why? why? why? and follow the answers confirmed by experiment, each explanation points to a smaller and simpler set of laws, and today these chains of "why" reach just a couple of equations of fundamental physics before we have to admit that we have run out of answers. The would-be sciences, says Weinberg,are utterly disconnected from these chains of explanation. But they are also united in inflating human abilities, or at least significance. In most cases the implication is that people, or at least some people, operate directly at the fundamental level of reality, bypassing all known natural laws. Even astrology claims that the position of the planets in the sky as seen from our particular speck of interstellar dirt have a direct, specific, and personal impact on each person's fate. In my terms, all these would-be sciences are instances of magical thinking.
This was supposed to be a review of Machineries of Empire, so let me get back, at last, to that. Lee's premise is that the ritual calendar followed by the population of some planet, solar system, or Galactic quadrant can affect the operation of 'exotic technologies'. In particular, the Hexarchate derives its decisive military advantage from technologies that depend on regular ritual torture and executions. Now, per Clarke's law, it would certainly be possible to simulate this with technology. Seed your victim society with smart dust capable of monitoring human nervous systems and connect it to a dead man's switch on your gravity cannon that turns off the gun if insufficient agony has been recorded, or recorded at the wrong time. There is not the slightest hint in the books that any such monitoring system is in place. But suppose it was; the real question is why would you do it? Especially for military technology, why give your opponent a completely unnecessary way of disarming you, as indeed occurs at various points in this trilogy? So the plot only makes sense if human ritual behaviour directly affects fundamental physics, which is magic pure and simple and as Weinberg shows us, utter bollocks.
So what do we have here? Revenant Gun is a fantasy novel with a super-evil antagonist with no redeeming features apart from being the smartest man in the galaxy and quite a good dancer; although for added pathos the protagonist is in love with him. The good guys are a disparate bunch who are more likely to attack each other than their common enemy, who is practically unkillable anyway. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Our protagonist is a likeable person, actually two different likeable people due to fairly straightforward SFnal machinations, although sadly they are also a genocidal mass murderer (a regrettable recent trend, this). There are some cool applications of SF tropes, for instance spaceships with "variable geometry" don't have swing-wings but instead are using hyperspatial tunnelling to give senior officers a shorter walk from their quarters to the bridge. There are cute robots heavily into trashy TV sagas, just like Murderbot (well, maybe cuter than Murderbot). The writing is smooth and the story is gripping, and despite the bizarre premise it's possible to follow the plot and fathom the scheming of the characters in some detail. This is a definite improvement from the first book in the trilogy, Nine-Fox Gambit. It's not that I object to being dropped into an apparently incomprehensible situation and expected to figure out the world without explicit help from the author. That's more than half the fun of SF. But Nine-Fox Gambit went on and on making no sense, especially in its central battle scenes. I eventually gave up looking for any kind of logic (even magical logic) behind the technobabble, and just read it for the character development, which remained captivating. It's possible that the later books made more sense because I was getting used to the world, but I think Lee really has upped his plotting game.
Revenant Gun is nominated for the Science Fiction Achievement Award, aka the Hugo, named for Hugo Gernsback, who was a charlatan and, depending on your level of charity, either an appalling businessman or a crook. But he really believed in better living through techology, and his garish magazines inspired a generation of American kids who would one day land a man on the Moon. The underlying message that this book sends to their grandchildren is that a world of rockets, space stations and interstellar travel is as impossible as a world of crystal castles, dragons and fairy shape-shifters. I would be sorry to see it get a Hugo Award.
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