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I read one chapter (after a short three-paragraph prologue) on Monday and then read two more today, with Chapter 4 up next.

The prose is snappy, really enjoyable, with one-liners in virtually every paragraph. The first-person POV is likably unlikeable, if that makes any sense: a character so wicked they're fun to read, but perhaps you want to be on guard if you have a friend like that in real life.

I have, thus far, nothing bad to say about this novel, except that it's so Aussie that it doesn't bother explaining to readers who Molly Meldrum is. Thankfully, I don't have that problem.

I'm still unsure whether I'll keep reading this. I have this slight mood for something different, something darker and/or more cosmic, but if I'm ever putting this down, it's not because it's bad. Not at all!

I mean I did make a playlist from the songs listed at the end. Three songs each for 24 chapters!

music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjaaqfaJrcKDMCOcYsnKYLi3o50JVhOrT&si=WAs2SlG1NaBUlm04

Murder of Angels is a novel in two parts, and I've just finished the five chapters that make up Part One: Disintegration. (Since the previous update was Prologue and Chapters 1 and 2, what I have here is Chapters 3 to 5).

I've only read this book once before (unlike Silk, which I think I've read thrice or even four times in total), so there's a lot I don't remember about where it's going when I first began rereading. Having read this much now, I think I do remember how this ends. It oddly has to do with how the novel could end right here, on, um page infinity. (Actually, page + ∞ which is achingly beautiful, IYKYK.)

Part of me is now screaming, because I think I now recall what happened, but part of me of course is dying to fill in the blanks as to how how we'll get there, which is what Part 2: Wars in Heaven is all about.

All this isn't to say that what's left is merely a long epilogue. I guess it's somewhat close to what happens in the middle of movies like Mulholland Drive or Black Bear. And the latter parts of those movies and these novels will have to work hard(er?) given how easily audiences and readers can get invested in these characters from the start up to the end of the first half.

And again, this raises the issue of unlikeable characters doing unlikeable things. Readers of Murder of Angels must withhold judgment, I think, or they may end up putting this book down. I think it's best to read these and not think in terms of red flags but instead to ask why they are hurting and why they are hurting each other. That takes compassion, and I think, as hardbitten and tough as Kiernan's characters are, what they deserve is kindness and relief and consolation.

We more or less get the complete Silk backstory here—all you need to know—and if there's no more backstory in the second half, I think that's okay, even if there is more to say. (Revealing the mysterious figure in the prologue, for example.)

We also get a cosmology of a fantasy world that we don't enter yet, but which has been spilling over into Niki's reality. You may or may not choose to believe in the reality of these multiple worlds or stick to just the one. This novel supports both POVs.

If you've read Silk like I have, the "tall pale man" in the Lincoln Continental who claims that Spyder left him alive will strike you as most likely a character from that book. I think I kind of remember who that is, the one who got away. He's left pretty ambiguous in the prologue (his only appearance thus far), so I can't tell if he's supposed to be a bad guy. He's unhinged but that's no clue in these books.

If you can get through Silk and unlikeable (but extremely interesting) characters, you'll be fine with Murder of Angels. It also helps actually that there seem to be fewer characters this time around. Partly because of the way it's written, there are so many characters mentioned in Silk that it takes a while to realise that not all of them are directly relevant to the novel itself. Murder of Angels pares down the character count quite well, introducing just enough new ones while helping us recall the older ones who aren't in this book and focusing on the ones that are.

By the end of these two chapters, you get a sense of how the characters are connected, and the instigating events start happening, unsettling the "real-world setting" to reveal Something Else and Something Other through the cracks in reality.

But how Other is it?

Work kept me away, but I did manage to read three chapters, bringing to a close the first half of this novel, Part 1: The Very City Babylon. With what happens in Chapter 7 ("The Modern Regime," referring to and set in Nova Terra), that ends up quite an ominous title.

Before we get to that, however, Chapters 5 and 6 each bring in new developments, respectively, a trip to the planet of the selkies and an agreement with the octopods followed by a new planet Novakkad, which kinda feels like Asia, which has suddenly skyrocketed really quickly as a trading hub. Chapter 6 is especially notable because it gives us the De Tenebres (Esias and Lydia) encountering a society profoundly changed by the arrival of the octopods, now known as Multipliers.

Seeing it from their POV gave me chills that I didn't feel in the earlier chapters and the way the Esias and, later, Lydia flee (under the silent and urgent desperation of the krakens that pilot the traders' ships) to go back home to Nova Terra is quite panic-inducing, and the mention of Volkov in the end is quite chilling.

Chapter 3 is called RTFM, which is even more hilarious how half of it actually does give us a manual of-sorts in the form of an "orientation leaflet" that explains what the "Bright Star Cultures" are all about. It's informative and avoids accusations of being just infodump, because it's knowingly framed as a manual. That's not the only thing going on here, however, as Gregor and Elizabeth's daughter enters the picture, and a plan is formulated by Matt, Gregor, and the others to head to the planet where the selkies live (with some spider-monkeys). All this makes me wonder where the other original Bright Star crew members from Cosmonaut Keep (the novel and the setting) are.

Chapter 4 is called The Modern Prince and at one point Volkov is explicitly referred to as Machiavelli. Such machinations befitting this appelation play out in this chapter, Volkov patiently introducing new ideas to the 10000-year-old stable society of Nova Babylonia.

One prologue and two chapters in:

The prologue is more a recap of the backstory revealed in the previous novel Dark Light. I don't consider it redundant though and pretty much welcome it as a straightforward telling via a third-person omniscient (?) POV. It also adds something of a theory of evolution, contrasting how the more volatile processes on Earth (when compared to "simpler" asteroids) led to multicellular evolution, while "extremophile nanobacteria" evolved in the asteroids. The latter become gods, exponentially more intelligent (though that may also be the result of longer time spans). Good stuff to think about.

Like the previous two novels, Engine City opens with a starship arriving on a planet: this time it's the older civilisations of Nova Terra. I initially thought that we were moving from planet to planet (Mingulay to Croatan to Nova Terra) on the basis of technological advancement, but no, the point with lightspeed travel in these books is how they cause jumps in social development (technology of course but also fashion, discussions of which have appeared previously). So I think we're going towards older civilizations: the humans on Kyohvic, Mingulay were from the Bright Star (at least those who were ruling) or refugees from Croatan. Rawliston, Croatan seems to have been industrialised by pre-space age folks who first arrived as early hominids or as pre-20th century cultures (some reference to early Christians). New Babylonia, Nova Terra have been around for ten thousand years. There's an SPQR that appears so there is that Classical Roman link. It's described here as somewhat like Coruscant, and the world cultural geography is two main continents, one predominantly occupied by saurs and the other by humans, with some "transients" from either race. As for characters and plot, this is mostly Volkov and the De Tenebres. The key points here are how 200 years have passed since the De Tenebres left so they're now facing a family comprising the descendants of those who saw them off and also a really interesting epistemological debate with Volkov clashing with the intelligentsia of New Babylonia on how to "extract" the secret of longevity (V proposes the scientific method, but New Babylonia academics default to something more speculative, based on rationalism, logic, archival research, rather than empirics.)

Chapter 2 brings us Elizabeth and Gregor (WHERE IS SALASSO?!) on the southern hemisphere of Mingulay. This is great because it gives us a new view of Mingulay, unpopulated and remote. The two of them make a discovery that serves as evidence of another alien life form we've only read about rather than actually encountered...and there's a second encounter too with another migrant species from Earth: selkies! Great thing about this chapter is the way in which two species without a common language try to communicate with each other--successfully, too. I think I like how these novels have quite the optimistic feel to them, at least in this regard.