This is my second review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is The Triangle Age by David Aumelas. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Earth is adrift. Its mass is spent, the moon ditched, and the sun is not even a memory. Five thousand humans live in its last city, Thule. None know where they started or where they are going, least of all Lowell.

Lowell scrubs the pipes beneath Thule. He knows where to push silt and how to break down a beluga carcass. For everything else he listens to Renth. Renth is a foot taller than anyone else in Thule and yet has never fallen in the reservoir, never been locked in a smoker. She knows the pipes matter. She listens to Lowell, and Lowell talks to no one else. He doesn’t need Thule, only Renth, height and all, until she pushes him down the deepest hole in the pipes.

To return to Thule, he will brave incineration, muskoxen, the vacuum of space and a giant fan. He seeks Renth, her embrace or her death, and to deliver a message he does not understand.

My Review

I was intrigued by this book from the scouting round, where we read the first part of each book to come to our quarterfinalists. It was clear it was well-written in a spare, interesting style, with a lot of mystery and brutality. Finishing the full book as a quarterfinalist, I found the strengths that were present in the opening parts continued throughout, although the story got a lot more convoluted and weird as it progressed. Taking another look at the blurb, I can see that some of the spoilers I was worried about avoiding are in there, although there’s a lot of detail left to discover.

Plot and Characters

The book stays entirely with a low-level pipe worker, Lowell. We meet him in the pipes below his city, where he explores, cleans, and maintains that system. We get the idea that his world is small, a single city with only a limited surrounding environment. Nearly everyone in the city works in one of several castes, helping the city survive. There’s also some intrigue, as it appears Lowell has been sent down into the pipes with an unsuspecting companion whom he’s been assigned to murder, and this isn’t the first time he’s had that kind of assignment. That’s the setup, and what happens as the book progresses starts there and cascades into a series of adventures (and misadventures) as Lowell figures out more of what’s going on in his little world. We stay solidly in his close 1st-person POV for the whole book.

It wasn’t immediately apparent to me, since I jumped into the book without reading the blurb, but the story is that Earth has mostly died, and the people in its remaining city, Thule, are clinging to life helped by (often failing) technologies that they don’t understand. Some of this world is deliberately confusing as it is revealed (e.g. the Sun isn’t where it should be, and the ecosystems seem pretty weird). Much of that confusion comes from the fact that all of this is interpreted by Lowell, whose interpretations are based on his understanding of his primitive society in Thule and through his religion, which he only partly understands, that borrows heavily from the Inuit tradition. The book is full of Inuit mythology adapted to the futuristic (yet primitive) setting. Lowell ends up discovering more about how the world and his society work, and exploring a lot more of it, but his interpretations are always colored by his primitive upbringing, his religion, and his limited understanding of the world.

My Thoughts

For me, the book’s strengths are several. It is absolutely not afraid to be weird, and to obscure what is going on behind its thick layers of mood and imaginative future history mixed with a society that is both highly technological and also stone age. Lowell and the many, many interesting people he meets do not line up in standard archetypes of villains and heroes. Everybody is both good and bad, and only a very few even know enough about their world to make anything other than individual moral decisions. And the morality they live under is something very different from modern Western traditions – life is a lot cheaper, and conflict and fear and exploitation are common. I was often surprised and intrigued by decisions Lowell and others made in the book, because they often weren’t what I would do. It is a credit to Aumelas that he accomplished that while making the characters individually and collectively consistent (mostly). The cultural vibe is also strong with this one. I’m not sure to what extent Aumelas is borrowing Inuit mythology and religion – I’m not an expert in that at all, and I don’t know if he has a personal connection to it – but that strong flavor permeates the whole thing, and if you’re willing to go with what can sometimes feels a little like cultural appropriation, it adds a richness and a flavor and an intriguing difference from traditional sci fi.

Where the book was weaker for me was in the story, which I found somewhat frustrating. That frustration comes from a big choice, one that deserves some credit, but it also made the book at times feel random and unsatisfying. That choice is to make Lowell ignorant of most of what he runs into in his many journeys, which makes him often misinterpret people and places and make impetuous, foolish decisions. That turns his journey often into more of a misadventure than an adventure, and it can make him a frustrating person to follow. In a way, I suppose he is like a character from a myth, wandering the Earth buffeted by the whims of the gods, which is a style of storytelling that has entertained people for thousands of years, but because we as sci-fi readers know a little of the truth of what he finds, his flailing and errors for me became tiresome, even if they were consistent with his character and experience. The most frustrating moments of this kind of thing were when he met people or entities who could absolutely have told him what he needed to know, but either they were vague about it, or he did some rash, foolish thing that kept him from learning. This is one of those books where if people had just had a few more conversations, the whole thing would have gone a lot more smoothly, and there was often no real reason not to have those conversations.

There’s also a lot of coincidence, with some significant deus ex machina moments. If you view the book as a myth – as Lowell probably experienced it – with a primitive person on a journey arc coming into contact with unexplained forces and powers, then the machinations are to be expected, but it does remove a lot of agency from Lowell and his companions, which made me sometimes wonder why we were experiencing the story from his viewpoint.

There’s some interesting musing on morality and tough choices, even though Lowell usually lacks the information to make informed decisions, but it’s interesting to see how he adapts his (very weird) situation to his religious upbringing and tries to find his way, often blundering, sometimes seeming completely amoral or evil, sometimes trying to help and protect. Several of the other characters and entities live with him in this highly conflicted space. Where it works, it’s interesting and tense, but where it doesn’t, it seems deliberately lurid or shocking and exploitative.

Summation

I can almost guarantee you haven’t read another book like this. It’s creative, it’s gloriously weird, it manages to hold both the primitive and the futurist in one space with neither ceding control, and it is almost always unexpected. I’m glad I had a chance to read it for the competition.