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You know, my day’s been rough, and I don’t want to take the effort to soften this, so take it with a pinch of salt. I like efficiency fantasies a lot, so I had hopes for this. Alas!

Maybe people in offices really do talk like this? I feel like they don’t though. Maybe it’s just that this is absolutely how I talked on the internet as a teenager, but the cod-formal/professional-but-trying-to-sound-sinister register that the protagonist and Leviathan take in dialogue lifts me right out of the story, it’s very unconvincing. Every time Leviathan and Anna have a conversation it feels like watching two badly made chatbots interact. I get that it’s an evil corporate efficiency power fantasy, it’s just, eh. If we saw her deciding to develop it/reflecting on it, or other people reacting to it ever in ways other than ‘unearned fear/respect’, it would feel more intentionally silly and I’d find it less jarring. Some of the lines that are supposed to be cool section-enders straight up do not land, like - “Anna, just because you’ve built unknowingly on top of a graveyard doesn’t mean those bodies aren’t in the ground.”? This is if anything More clunky in context. And everybody working for Leviathan ends up speaking a bit like this! Even in casual conversation - Vesper says “It seems like folly to abandon it now”, in a conversation that otherwise is on of my favourites in the book & has a refreshingly appropriate register for its intensity. At least when Supercollider speaks grandiosely it’s intentionally overblown, like, explaining the concept of chess in a self-absorbed speech. When they do it… I can’t tell! I think the author thinks it’s cool!

I like how the good working environment quickly makes Anna willing to do stuff she feels or felt morally uncomfortable with, and her intense feelings about her boss combine to make the whole thing subtly dreadful. The parallels between her work now and the things she criticises heroes for, and between her and Quantum, or between her weird bad boss relationship & Quantum’s (or Accelerator’s), are interesting and do make me like this book a lot more. And you know, showing the relationship between her and Leviathan as fucked up but still not pulling away from it or plainly condemning it is a balance I do kind of wish more ‘this dangerous powerful man will kill anyone who touches me’ fantasies struck. Her relationship with her best friend feels well-observed - I believed that messy friendship, & the things she focused on when thinking about it.

That said, the fantasy Anna becomes - of someone who always knows the right quip to make the person you’re talking to uncomfortable and ‘win’ the conversation - is not one that has appealed to me since I was a late teenager, so I’m probably harsher on it than I would be otherwise. This is another book that pings the ratfic radar for me, though not as strongly as some previous. There’s a lot of numerically quantifying harm (based on real academic work), offsetting damage through donations to Greenpeace, the kind of nerd fantasies of being amazing at quips and always in control, and also creative and disgusting use of superpowers. I could just be wrong about that.

Anyway. It’s an easy read despite all that! It left me feeling frustrated but it did make me laugh a few times. If you want a competence fantasy about doing efficient, loyal spreadsheet work in a villainous organisation using your rare ability to know more than others (and your cool cybernetics) for your hot boss, causing him to reconsider his personal philosophy and you to grow as a person, read And I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You by astolat.

It’s…. well. It’s mostly fun!

I have a fondness for self-indulgent stories about logistics competence, and for ‘vaguely historical and/or fantasy setting but you are the guy who builds the traps in the megadungeon’ type light novel silliness. You get fun worldbuilding and usually a funny & refreshingly blunt narrative voice. This has these things, which is why I listened to it after reading half of it a couple of years ago. And it executes on those things well! Lots of stuff about little details of mechanics in this world, which as it’s a lightly reskinned roman empire world are fairly indistinguishable from mechanics in our world (I say this with next to no knowledge of roman weaponry and production, or indeed physics. I managed not to think about history for basically this whole book, which is a feat for me; classics scholars may hate it.)

The stuff on empire and loyalty is interesting, though I didn’t find it very consistent or, to be honest, very persuasive. But it was still interesting!

Alright, spoilers ahead, n also more negative stuff. . . . . . . . . . . . . The ending is, like, fine. I like a good tragedy - this didn’t Quite work as a good tragedy for me. I would have liked him to have to grapple with the aftermath a little more, personally, instead of being a Martyr of Stubbornness or whatever. Maybe the author is speaking to an interest/fear/desire that I do not have.

In audiobook form it was particularly obvious all the times the author reused turns of phrase, which was: enough times & clunkily enough for me to think ‘huh, that was sloppy’. This is pretty minor though. The main thing is: the misogyny!

You can make your character a salt-of-the-earth Complicated misogynist who, no, look, there’s loads of women he respects, and who the narrative respects cos they’re so skilled in engineering or chess! You can do that, and have him literally have a woman sleep with him as payment for something (which he doesn’t do) and immediately betray her, resulting in her gruesome death, and have that misogyny never punished by the narrative. You can’t do all that and frame it as ‘a necessary evil, makes you think, huh?’ or ‘ah, he’s cranky but he has a good heart, time to move on with our perspective on this character not particularly changed’ or ‘ohh this guy, stuck in his ways, but a charming idiot’ and have me still fully enjoy this book. It really feels like a lot of classic sci fi and fantasy I bounced off growing up over and over again because it was so clearly written by straight men who never really thought about what women, or men with different experiences, might find uncomfortable in a story. A story that makes its readers uncomfortable on purpose can obviously be fantastic - but where this book does that I feel like it’s going for shock value and not following it up with actual thought, ‘omg her scalp!!’, and in most of the misogynistic bits it doesn’t seem like the author intends for the reader to be uncomfortable at all, to any extent beyond ‘haha, main character, what a weird but relatable guy’. If you’re going to have your antihero-ish main character have a fun little chat with his gentlemanly paragon friend where he makes a direct rape joke, and you’re deploying it in the same way you deploy all your other jokes - like a fun characterful bit of patter to ease your reader through some exposition - then you’ve gone wrong somewhere. It’s not deconstructed sexism just because he gets a tragic death with his daughter beating at the door, or because he’s a Complicated Guy who Values Women Sometimes (in-narrative, he values women when he is in love with them, is their father, or they are in love with him), or because you talk sympathetically about how women have it particularly hard in this world. There isn’t like… a little card that you can get that lets you joke about raping women and have it succeed as a light comfortable joke.

Anyway. 2.5/5 for the novel-length logistics competence self-indulgence, I found that fun enough and the whole thing about loyalty and moral behaviour compelling enough to still in general enjoy this book. Wish it had been a bit more polished.

My sister likes this series, so I borrowed this on a whim from the library audiobook app. A pleasant light audiobook not needing much engagement, with two different readers covering the different perspective characters. I am not entirely convinced by the recasting in these books of fantasy-Victorian English exploration, archaeology and scientific expeditions as essentially benign, positive and only occasionally corrupted by scurrilous non-academic interest, but that did not detract very much from it, especially since this book Does engage with racism personal and societal, and I think it does that pretty well. In form, it has a lot of translation & notes on translation of an ancient text, which is pretty fun if you’re the kind of person who likes to read research notes.

All in all, fun, and works standalone even though I can tell it kind of spoils the endings of previous books by showing their main characters’ post-book situations! I am fairly likely to pick up another of these if it becomes available as a library audiobook & I want some more of the same kind of adventure.

Spoiler zone below. . . . . . . . . . . —- I also enjoyed the autistic character! It’s nice to see clearly neurodivergent people treated nicely in fiction. I would like to see Cora get that archive desk, and make friends & branch out into a freer life. And I’m glad that Audrey’s connection with Mornett was neither flattened into ‘I was over him the second he was racist’ (the passage from her diary talking about how he’s not Really racist, just has these very reasonable concerns, and can’t people be civil? was SO uncomfortable because it was I think very well observed) nor developed into ‘now that he has stopped imminently destroying Draconian artefacts and plotting to restrict their rights (and apologised for his incredibly shitty behaviour) he is a suitable romantic prospect again’. The way that played out was pretty satisfying for me.