Review: Rift in the Sky, by Julie E. Czerneda

This is the third and final book of the Stratification trilogy and the bridge between it and the Trade Pact trilogy, of which it is a prequel. It's readable without reading the Trade Pact (although that series is overall better), but not very readable without the rest of the Stratification series.

Be warned that the publisher's summary of this book, found on Goodreads, Amazon, and other places you might read about it, is a spoiler for nearly all of the plot. It's not a very surprising spoiler if you've read the Trade Pact books, but still, publishers, don't do this.

Riders of the Storm left off with Aryl with a more stable situation, a new negotiated compromise with the Oud, and more information about the Om'ray, including the mysterious distant clan that no one visits. The origins of her world's balance of powers, and the goals of the outsider presence on her world, are both still opaque, but she's settled near the human Marcus and his archaeological site, so I was optimistic that we were about to learn more.

We don't. What the reader gets instead is more clan politics, worries about the new Om'ray powers that are eagerly adopted by the children of Aryl's clan, and only a few faint additional hints at the nature of the Cloisters. Aryl has more interactions with the Tiktik that finally lead to understanding more of the Agreement from the perspective of the other two races of Cersi (with rather dramatic consequences), and we learn quite a bit more about Om'ray reproduction. But there's next to nothing about how any of this strange and clearly artificial balance was created in the first place, or what the civilization that Marcus is so fascinated by truly is, or how it relates to the Om'ray, or even why the Om'ray clearly had advanced technology at one point in time that they no longer understand.

I hope the information that I wanted from this series is in the following Reunification series, since right now I'm irritated. (Although apparently not irritated enough to stop reading.)

On top of the frustrating lack of answers to nearly every question I had from the first book, this novel has a very odd structure, exacerbated by some strange decisions in how the Kindle version is configured. The last 100 pages are marked in the table of contents as "Teaser chapter" and appear after the dramatis personae. The Kindle reader even pops up the "rate this book" screen before that chapter, exactly as if the novel were over and this material were preview chapters of some subsequent book. I assumed it was a (surprisingly long) excerpt from the start of This Gulf of Time and Stars, the first book of the next trilogy.

It's not, although I admit I bought that book just to check for this review (I was going to buy it eventually anyway). That's a very good thing, since that last hundred pages was the only thing that salvaged this story for me, even though it uses my least favorite fictional trope.

The conclusion of the main story is weirdly abrupt. After lots of Aryl navigating the leadership of her clan, there's a very abrupt political shift (for magical reasons that I never found adequately explained) and the intensity of the pace picks up dramatically. Following some developments in the subplot with Marcus and some dramatic changes in the Agreement, Aryl and her people take drastic steps to resolve the situation, leading to the event that series readers will have been anticipating for the trilogy. But it's sudden and entirely unsatisfying, and if the book had actually ended there, this review would be much more negative.

Instead, the last part of the book takes us back into the science fiction setting of the previous trilogy and a reasonably entertaining cultural conflict. It felt much more like a Trade Pact story, and since my enjoyment of those stories is why I was reading this trilogy in the first place, I'm totally fine with that. Unfortunately, it's also infuriating because Czerneda forecloses on any answers to the historical questions I've been puzzling over for the whole trilogy. The details of how are spoilers, so I won't get into it except to say that I thought it was a rather cheap and unsatisfying device.

If you came this far in this trilogy, you may as well read the ending. Some pieces of it were moving, and I did enjoy the last part of the story. But this whole trilogy focused on the parts of Aryl's life that I found the least interesting and consistently avoided the questions that Marcus was asking and that I really wanted answered. I hope the following Reunification trilogy revisits this world and provides some resolution.

This is the last book of its trilogy, but there is a sequel trilogy to the earlier Trade Pact trilogy in the same universe that starts with This Gulf of Time and Stars, and it promises to tie the two trilogies together.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: Happy Ever After, by Paul Dolan

Paul Dolan is a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, but grew up a working-class kid in a council estate (UK public housing; the US equivalent is the projects) in London. This intentionally provocative book looks at a list of nine things that we have been taught to believe will make us happy and presents evidence against that assumption. Dolan's goal is to question social narratives of success and to advocate for a different philosophical basis for life decisions: minimizing misery (negative utilitarianism), rather than trying to maximize happiness.

Happy Ever After is an argument against rules and, specifically, against judging people by rules rather than outcomes:

There is nothing inherently good or bad in a social narrative in itself; it can only ever be judged according to the costs and benefits of adhering to it in a given context. I therefore adopt a consequentialist position in contrast to a deontological one. A consequentialist's view on theft would be that it is only ever wrong when it causes more misery than it promotes happiness, whereas a deontologist would be duty bound to argue that theft is always wrong because moral value lies in certain rules of conduct. A deontological perspective typically does not allow for the importance of context. And yet I would contend that it is morally right to steal to feed your hungry child.

This is obviously a drastically simplified explanation of a complex philosophical debate, but those of you who know my political beliefs probably see why I picked up this book.

Before I dive into the details, though, one note about accuracy. One of Dolan's most provocative claims is that marriage does not, on average, make women happy, a claim repeated in an article in The Guardian (now amended to remove the claim). This claim is not supported by the data he references in this book. It was based on a misunderstanding of the coding of results in the American Time Use Survey and has been subsequently retracted by Dolan.

This is a good caution to have in the back of your mind. Dolan, as is typical for a book of this sort, cites a lot of surveys and statistics. At least some of those citations are wrong. Many more are probably unreproducible. This is not a problem unique to Dolan; as the Vox article points out, most books are fact-checked only by the author, and even academic papers have fallen prey to the replication crisis. Hard factual data, particularly about psychology, is hard to come by.

How fatal this is for Dolan's book is a judgment for the reader. Personally, I'm dubious of most psychological studies and read books like this primarily for opportunities of insight into my own life and my own decision-making processes. Whether or not statistics say that marriage makes women happier on average, Dolan's actual point stands: there is no reason to believe that marriage will necessarily make any specific woman happier, and thus pursuit of marriage as a universal life goal is on dubious ground. The key contention of Happy Ever After, in my reading of it, is that we measure ourselves and others against universal social narratives and mete out punishment for falling short, even if there is no reason to believe that social narrative should be universal. That in turn is a cause of unnecessary misery in the world that we could avoid.

Dolan divides his material into three meta-narratives, each with three sub-narratives: reaching (composed of wealthy, successful, and educated), related (married, monogamous, and children), and responsible (altruistic, healthy, and volitional). For each, he provides some data questioning whether following that narrative truly makes us happy, and looks at ways where the narrative itself may be making us unhappy. Each chapter starts with a simple quiz that asks the reader to choose between a life (first for oneself and then for one's friend) that fulfills that narrative but makes them feel miserable frequently and a life that does not fulfill that narrative but in which they rarely feel miserable. At the end of each section, Dolan shows the results of that survey, all of which show at least some support (surprising to me) for choosing the narrative despite the cost of being miserable.

Some of these chapters I found unsurprising. I'm unmarried and don't intend to have children, so the chapters on marriage and children struck me as relatively obvious. Similarly, the lack of positive happiness benefit of wealth beyond a rather modest level is well-known, although I thought Dolan failed to engage sufficiently with the risk of misery from being poor. A significant motivation for pursuing modest wealth for many people is to acquire a form of self-insurance against financial disasters, particularly in the US with our appalling lack of a safety net.

I had the most mental arguments with Dolan over education. Apparently (and not very surprisingly) this is the social narrative that I buy into the most strongly. But Dolan makes good points about how pushing a working-class kid to go to a middle-class or upper-class university can sever them from their friendship ties and emotional support network and force a really miserable adjustment, and it's not clear that the concrete benefits of education in their life are worth that. This would be even clearer if we hadn't started using college degree attainment as a credentialing system for many jobs that are not reliant on specialized education only attainable in college. (I'm looking at nearly the entire field of computing, for example.) Dolan goes farther than I would in arguing that no college education should be state-subsidized because it's inherently unfair for working-class people to be taxed to pay for middle-class educational structures. Still, I keep thinking back to this chapter during US political discussions about how important it is that we create some economic path for every US child to attend college. Is that really the correct public education policy? (See also Hofstadter's point in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life that some of the US obsession with college education is because, by comparison to Germany, our high-school and middle-school education is slow, relaxed, unchallenging, and insufficient.)

Altruistic and volitional may require a bit of additional explanation. Dolan's point with altruism is that we value a social narrative of giving for its own sake, without ego or reward. (I personally would trace this to Christianity; this was the interpretation of Matthew 6:6 that I was taught.) He argues that letting people show off their good deeds encourages more good deeds and helps others increases personal happiness. People who are more self-oriented in their motivations for volunteering stick with volunteer projects for longer. I thought of free software here, where self-interested reasons for volunteering are commonplace and accepted (scratching your own itch) rather than socially shunned, and considered part of the healthy texture of the community.

The chapter on volition recaps some of the evidence (which I've also seen in other books) that less of our life and our decisions stem from individual choice than we would like to think, and that some of our perception of free will is probably a cognitive illusion. Dolan isn't too interested in trying to undermine the reader's own sense of free will, but does want to undermine our belief in the free will of other people. His target here is the abiding political belief that other people get the life outcomes they deserve, and that poor people are poor because they're lazy or make bad choices. If we let go of the social narrative of volition and instead judge interventions solely by their results, we have fewer excuses to not collectively tackle problems and fewer justifications for negatively judging other people for their own misery.

I'm not sure I recommend this whole book. It's delightfully contrarian, but somewhat slim on new ideas (particularly if you've read broadly about happiness and life satisfaction) and heavy on studies that you should be somewhat dubious about. I'm still thinking about the chapter on education, though. How much you get out of it may depend on how many of Dolan's narratives you agree with going into the book.

Also, although I didn't discuss it in detail, mad props to Dolan for taking on the assumption that striving to be healthy is a life goal that should override happiness. We need a lot more questioning of that specific narrative.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Cold Steel, by Kate Elliott

Cold Steel is the third book in the closely-linked Spiritwalker trilogy. This is one long, sprawling story rather than separable books. If you want to read it, start with Cold Magic, and beware of spoilers for Cold Fire in even cursory descriptions of Cold Steel.

Cold Steel opens with Cat in the hot Caribbean, where most of Cold Fire was set, but does not stay there. This is a proper end to the trilogy and wraps up all the loose ends: the peril Andevai was left in after the semi-cliffhanger ending of Cold Fire, the conflict over governance in Europe, the power of the cold mage Houses, the politics of the radicals, the conflict between cold and fire magic, Bee's entanglements in the Caribbean, Camjiata's war of conquest, and of course the Wild Hunt. There's a lot of plot to finish.

Somewhat unfortunately, what Cold Steel also contains in large quantity is Andevai being an idiot, Cat and Andevai failing to communicate for new (but dumb) reasons, and one of the characters developing into a full-blown arch-villain.

This is a series with a fascinating premise (a very complex alternate history with dragons, magic, humanoid dinosaurs, and a very odd sort of elven court) that I wanted to be a political drama but that the author wrote primarily as a romance. This is not entirely the author's fault; it's a serviceable romance if you enjoy two vastly stubborn people butting heads, falling in love, discovering that being in love doesn't prevent them from butting heads, and finally reaching some hard-fought compromises. But I thought the romance was the least interesting (and least original) thing that was happening in this series and wanted to get it over with so that the series could move on to the more interesting bits, and that opinion was not shared by the author.

The part that caught my attention, as noted in my review of Cold Fire, is the political cause of radicalism and egalitarianism. The history varies wildly from ours, but the politics are clearly late French Revolution writ large (without the church, which is interesting): princes and cold mages colluding to maintain an aristocratic, almost feudal order, resented by laborers and political radicals who are trying to form new governments of equality and to undermine historical privilege and systems of indenture. Into that mix, Elliott drops Camjiata, a brilliantly ambiguous figure who is this world's Napoleon. He uses the radicals, speaks on their terms, and claims to fight for equality, but he personally wants to conquer Europe and bring back the glories of the Roman Empire. He's a strategic genius, one of the smartest people in the book (that's a difficult characterization to write well and Elliott does a good job), but his agenda isn't that of the protagonists or, really, anyone else. Elliott gives the impression of Camjiata as something that happens to Europe more than a force that comes out of the politics everyone else cares about, which I found intriguing throughout the series.

Unfortunately, despite radicalism's central role in the plot and despite Cat's sister Bee finding an unexpected but believable place for herself as a leader, the politics don't go anywhere satisfying. There is little resolution for Europe here, just some personal impact for Andevai and Cat and a parallel mythical plot line with the Wild Hunt that I thought was a bit too obvious (although the resolution of it is satisfying). A series that wrestled with the political complexities of defining radicalism as a constructive form of government instead of an opposition resistance force (the shoal that, to simplify greatly, the real French Revolution ran aground on) would have been messy and challenging to write, but that was the book I wanted to read. Cold Steel alas turns somewhat away from that to personalize the problems and solve them primarily in the realms of magic and romance.

The other difficulty with this final book is that it's structurally a mess. There are too many loose ends to weave together, which results in some odd pacing and story structure. The book starts as a continuation of Cold Fire, involving Caribbean politics and magic, and builds up to a climax with the fairy world a third of the way into the book. Then comes a quiet interlude with Cat and Andevai that stumbles into a pacing gap where Cat is unhappy but not communicating, Andevai is ignoring her, no forward progress is made on the major plots of the novel, and there is a lot of frustrating talking. Pacing for the rest of the book comes in fits and starts, building up to a weirdly unsatisfying war and turning the broader politics of the series into a too-simplistic arc of personal animus, mustache-twirling evil, and magical penis-measuring. Even the ending, although eventually satisfying, provides another excuse for Cat to not talk to people about things that are important.

I'm probably making this sound worse than it is. I am glad I read the whole series. It's hugely ambitious and succeeds in being something different than the typical fantasy trilogy. The world background is one of the most creative I've seen, and if I found the politics unsatisfying in the end, that's only because Elliott attempted something far more ambitious and radical than most fantasy will go near. I think the first book was the strongest and the series sputtered to a conclusion, but it is a proper and satisfying conclusion and both Cat and Andevai, by the end of the series, are characters I enjoy spending time with.

Cold Steel by itself is a bit of a mess, but I still recommend the series as a whole, as long as you're in the mood for something long and complicated and not completely successful.

Rating: 6 out of 10