A playful, charming world of swords and knaves in The Riverside Series

From The Week of May 20, 2013

Power is a fascinating and revealing component of civilization. For though it is sufficiently potent to rewrite the past and reprogram the future, to swell the influence of nations and crush the will of unfortunates, it is virtually impossible to evenly distribute. Power is neither tangible nor zero-sum. It can expand and contract, ebb and flow, on levels as grand as governments and as small as conversations. And yet, despite its elusiveness, power is forever being chased. For its accumulation can, at worst, ensure one's future and, at best, place one on an untouchable pedestal from which the world is malleable and enjoyable. This great game of trade and acquisition cannot be stopped. It can barely even be regulated. It is simply what humans do, consequences be damned. This Ellen Kushner illustrates to charming effect in her Riverside Series.

At the foot of a sprawling city shaped by nobles and blessed with beauty lies Riverside, a lowly quarter of knaves and workers who toil quite literally in the shadow of power. For it squats at the base of a hill upon which the rich and powerful plot and frolic, scheme and operate, its denizens barely heeded by the largely incestuous powerbrokers who occupy the upper reaches of its society.

For the most part, the citizens of Riverside are content with this arrangement. For the nobility has agreed to largely leave them be, to act as they please, within reason. Perhaps this is in deference to Riverside's enduring spirit. Perhaps it is an acknowledgement of its quiet menace. Or perhaps it is simply convenient for the duchesses and chancellors to ignore the little people while drawing from their depths talented arms to wield swords in their honor. For though Riverside might well produce many other goods, its most notable export is swordsmen, trained champions paid handsomely by nobles who seek, through duelling, to settle points of honor. Sometimes, these questions are small, requiring the combatants to engage only until the first drop of blood is shed. However, other times, only a death can settle a slight.

This dangerous game naturally produces its fair share of heroes, shadowy figures who are as skilled with the blade as their reputations are darkly grand. And though they fight in the name of the nobility, dependent upon them for their livelihoods, their code has nothing to do with the settling of noble questions. They perform as much for the glory of the contest as for the coin that will flow into their purses, delighting in the clash of steely wits that convinces them that they are alive.

Entangling the powerplays of the nobility with the fortunes of the swordsman, The Riverside Series is a delightful, dramatic romp through a land of political machinations and difficult, classist realities. Ms. Kushner combines the playwrite's sense of flair with a Romantic's aesthetic to create a familiarly medieval world where the intersection of plots and swords creates a wealth of vengeance and humor, tragedy and triumph. These emotions and outcomes drive these interconnected tales forward, enthusing them with dark wits and sad laments that call to mind films like The Princess Bride and the themes of Shakespeare, a land where playfulness and consequence can coexist without risking the story's slide into the darkness of depression or elevation into the airy-fairy of the inconsequential.

Though The Riverside Series pulls in any number of charming commoners, the story primarily revolves around the life and family of Alec Campion, a powerful nobleman whose appetites are as unpredictable as his moods. His languid charm is perfectly rendered by Ms. Kushner who invests Alec with a wonderful sense of indolent pride and endless power. It's through alec that we come to understand the series' political views. For it is he and his friends who pick up and toss away the lives of those beneath them, using them as pawns in their games until they grow tired of them and move on. Their machinations with one another are invariably more important, more vital, more real, than the consequences to the outsiders who happen into their orbits. Such would be impossible if not for the enormous disparity in power and wealth between the two classes which, though analogous to any number of past realms in our world, draws the closest comparison to Renaissance Italy.

A review of The Riverside Series cannot pass without commenting on its sexuality. Ms. Kushner, who began this journey in the late 1980s, has penned a truly post-gender fantasy series. Her characters are utterly unself-conscious about their tastes, or their habits. Yes, they judge one another for them, but only as a means of finding their place, finding their pleasures. In this, the series is not only groundbreaking, but its shamelessness allows the reader to improve his understanding of the essence of love, its boundlessness and its multi-facetedness. For this is a force that is only limited by the limitations we give it, not by anything else. Whether we find joy in the arms of those who are like us, or unlike us, matters not as long as we find joy in someone. This subtle but pervasive message is conveyed with grace and class in a series that, sadly, is as transgressive in 2013 as it was in 1987, when the journey began.

No, The Riverside Series is not weighty fare. It likely will not linger long, its schemes evaporating into the mental caverns in which we harbor the facts of past adventures. However, its quiet messages about sexuality and gender, power and class, make it eminently worthwhile. (3/5 Stars)

The extraordinary labors of a revolutionary in Sperber's Karl Marx

From The Week of May 20, 2013

No life is without challenges, moments of crisis and uncertainty that leave us grasping for answers and yearning for stability. The daily intersection of personalities and fortunes essentially ensures that something, at some point, will go wrong. But it's one thing to understand that life has its difficulties; it's entirely something else to deliberately steer one's existence into the winds of such uncertainties, to face them head on with brashness and truculence, and to do so while knowing full well that it may be decades, even centuries, before any of one's labors will make a meaningful difference. The will that must be required to never take the easy road, to forever endure the hardships of deprivation, in the name of a singular goal is remarkable. Mr. Sperber elucidates in his winningly thorough biography.

One of the most pivotal figures of the last 200 years, Karl Marx was a German political philosopher and armchair economist who lived during the twilight of empire. A polemicist who believed strongly in the corruptive power of the elites, his writings provided the intellectual fuel for a series of revolutions that would, after his death, sweep away the monarchies of eastern Europe and replace them with a powerful and equally corruptible proletariat, or people's party, that aimed to create a Marxist heaven on Earth by empowering the collective whole at the expense of the greedy individual. Though he would not live to see any of his predictions, or his beliefs, put into practice on a national scale, he became, in death, a people's hero, an intellectual whose complete and eloquent rejection of the disproportionate allotment of power and money in western society made him the godhead of 20th-century communism.

But though we know the legend well, how well do we know the man? For while Marx's role as the father of the resistance to capitalism is well known, almost forgotten is his poverty, his love for his children and his enduring devotion to his wife who, despite her upper-class upbringing, stood with Marx throughout his tumultuous life which was characterized by a scarcity of, and thus a desperation for, money. His partnership with Freidrich Engels is well-documented, but less so his unwillingness to let go of a decades-old family dispute, nor his struggles to maintain ownership of the movement he was creating, nor his deficiencies as an orator which counterbalanced, in every way, his excellence as an author. Hell, he spent more time as a newspaper columnist than he did as a revolutionary, a fact which, along with the other revelations of the man's existence, make this towering figure a creature of complexity and fascination.

Though it delves, at times, too deeply into the murky waters of economic theory and German philosophy, Karl Marx is a potent and thorough biography of a most dour and engaging man. Mr. Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri, has gathered up Marx's works and his letters, his deeds and his friendships and fashioned from them a chronicle of the life of a giant of history, a man who has had as many deeds done in his name as some deities. The portrait that emerges from this meticulous assembly is of a man who struggled to find his place, a man who fought his enemies and his slighters at every turn, a man who spent more of his life as a political refugee than he did of a citizen of any country, and a man who knew everything about money and power except for how to make either. For this, he is both a creature of amazement and pity.

The author's characterization of Marx is simultaneously the work's best and worst feature. On the positive side of the ledger, Mr. Sperber removes the mask that history has placed on Marx, revealing him to be an emotional individual whose stubbornness often outstripped his good sense. His willingness to invest his entire life in the erudite refutation of capitalism, as practiced by the western powers, is downright remarkable in light of the Sisyphean nature of the war he was trying to wage against a completely entrenched system. And yet, this brings us to the negative. For Mr. Sperber does very little to actually explain why he was so devoted to an unwinnable war. The author illuminates Marx's influences, his schooling, his family history, his citizenship of the authoritarian Prussia, all of which go some way to sketching out an outline for his motive. But the unimaginable personal deprivations Marx suffered in the name of simple defiance demands a clearer description of what drove him to such atypical lengths. This is a man who endured the better part of a lifetime of financial humiliation, all in the name of exposing a rotten system. Why, when he so clearly possessed the talents to excel within that system?

In every other way, Karl Marx is a satisfying read that breaks the philosopher's life down into manageable sections, each of which succeeds in shedding light on Marx and his world, on 19th-century politics and 19th-century despotism, and on the eternal conflict between socialism and capitalism. But its occasional detours on the road to enlightening its readers prevents it from being truly great. (4/5 Stars)

Ordinary lives during the Cultural Revolution in Under The Red Flag

From The Week of May 13, 2013

Traditions are difficult to uproot. For humans are, by and large, creatures opposed to change, huddling around the fire of what's known while periodically peeking out at the darkness of the scary unknown. It's perfectly natural, then, to codify the truths we understand and impose them upon subsequent generations. From time to time, however, this chain of traditions is broken, interrupted by governments that seek to impose upon us their ethics, their ideals. They do this even while fully aware of the cognitive dissonance this creates within a public trying to marry generations of knowledge with months of political re-education. The results are understandably tragic and that is demonstrated to wonderful effect in this collection of short stories from Ha Jin.

China under the Cultural Revolution was a dangerous and merciless place. Thousands of years of Chinese history and tradition was forced to make way for a new, Maoist world, a theatre of imposed Communism that compelled all those within its grasp to not only act according to a new morality, but to meet standards of organized, centralized productivity never before seen in this country, much less in the world. Driven by a need to compete with a West awash in capitalistic competition and anchored by industrialized workforces, this new world sought to reach its hands into the lives of every-day Chinese to prod, manipulate, coerce and threaten them into contributing to the whole. No aspect of private life was exempt from government scrutiny which possessed the power to make even the brave tremble.

From lasciviousness to food-hoarding, from heroes created from happenstance to villains forged from jealousy, Under the Red Flag knits together a tapestry of rural and semi-rural, mid-century Chinese, men and women who largely endure the misfortune of being born in a chaotic time. Mr. Jin, who has won numerous awards for his literary work, steers clear of the tales of great and consequential men, choosing instead to document, with fiction, the lives of ordinary people growing up during the dawn of the modern Chinese state. In this, we come to understand the ripple effects caused by the uneven application of a new set of rules. For where some might implement them out of an earnest belief in the new China, others implement them with only personal gain in mind, using them to indulge their own biases, their own desires, their own jealousies.

It's often said that nothing great can be created without breaking a few eggs. Well, these are the broken eggs, lives distorted and set adrift by a new set of standards. For all this, though, Mr. Jin's tales are not heavy-handed. On the contrary, it's to his credit that each tale of woe and adolescence, of confusion and desperation, is enjoyable and affecting. And yet, at every turn, we see the shadow of the Cultural Revolution flickering at the edge of our vision, its caresses, its influences, subtly and drastically altering a way of life so familiar to generations prior. In this, Under the Red Flag Manages to not be in the least bit depressing. It is, instead, a testament to human adaptability, to the awareness we all possess of life's fleeting nature, and how we are, in some sense, subject to both external forces we cannot control and internal desires we cannot resist.

This is a brief and effective introduction to Mr. Jin's work. A fascinating glimpse of a world that, though it has slid into our past, will certainly rise again. For governments invariably seek to impose the moralities of the moment upon the publics they purport to serve. It is merely a question of how bold they are willing to be in the forging of that idealized future. (4/5 Stars)

The enduring damage of family violence in A Cupboard Full of Coats

From The Week of May 13, 2013

As much as we may wish to whitewash our pasts, to scrub them of missteps and misdeeds, the truth is always with us. It lives on in our dreams and in those thoughtful silences that bring us face to face with our darkest desires, those times in which, because of pain or envy, we fell from grace to yearn for what we'd never admit to the world. We comfort ourselves with the notion that we are not those desires, that they are simply outbursts of frustration and anger, but this doesn't make them any easier to deal with, not in a mind that cannot hide from itself, not when it's so plain to us that we are largely responsible for our own terrible misfortunes. This is nearly as difficult a truth to express as to confess and yet Yvette Edwards does it with style in her engaging work of British fiction.

A mother with a job and a future, Jinx Jackson should have plenty to live for, but she is a woman haunted by her past. Fourteen years ago, when she was but sixteen, growing up in an islander-heavy part of London, she witnessed the murder of her mother, an event which caused her to emotionally distance herself from the world. Instead, she poured her energies into mortuary work, the systematic and artistic restoration of the dead that possesses the power to transform how the family views the fallen, replacing pain with peace, dismay with closure. But Jinx's days of hiding have come to an end. For not only has her marriage dissolved, not only is her emotional distance caused her to be an alien presence to her five-year-old son, an old friend has shown up on her doorstep for the first time since those terrible, bygone days, and he's disinclined to leave without revisiting old wounds that may well jar free truths Jinx would have rather stayed hidden.

A snapshot of immigrant London of the 1980s, A Cupboard Full of Coats is an enduring portrait of a life derailed by secrets and jealousies. Ms. Edwards, in cycling between the present day and the months surrounding the death of Jinx's mother, endows her protagonist with humanity and cruelty, empathy and viciousness, contrasting emotions that can only be simultaneously present in a spirit riven by conflict and guilt: at not doing more, at not being better. The author unfolds the mystery of the book's central death with mesmerizing deliberateness, methodically introducing us to Jinx's abusive stepfather who gradually succumbs to the white-hot rages only experienced by the acutely jealous. This tragic unraveling, as unstoppable as a freight train, artfully mirrors the disintegration of Jinx's life and mental health in the present where she has virtually alienated everyone who cares for her.

Knowing all of this, Jinx should be an exceedingly unlikeable character, an isolated depressive who drags us down into her well of loneliness, and yet this is not at all the case. In showing us who she used to be, and in giving us a glimpse of who she wishes to be, Ms. Edwards succeeds in attaching our sympathies to Jinx which makes the book's potent conclusion all the more affecting. Moreover, the emotional and psychological harm we see befall Jinx transforms her into a creature for whom we can safely root, or can we?

This is a lush novel, full of rich foods, colorful stories, engaging accents and dark deeds which is remarkably enjoyable for the grimness of its subject matter. A significant achievement for a work of quiet, period fiction. (4/5 Stars)<(

The dawn of womens sufferage thoroughly remembered in Seneca Falls

From The Week of May 13, 2013

though the advance of human civilization can be characterized in many different ways, surely none are more appropriate than the march towards personal freedom. From the technologies that have reduced our labors to the philosophies that have opened our eyes to injustice, the last few centuries have seen a great flowering in individual liberty along with the dawn of the great experiment of multiculturalism that is the hope for a peaceful, cooperative future. But though every important indicator, from crime rates to legal rights, is pointed in the right direction, there are still many among us who resist these societal changes, clinging to the old, familiar ways at the expense of the rights of individuals to be whatever they wish to be. Call it traditionalism; call it conservatism. Its name is meaningless next to the damage it does, not just to the reputation of our societies, but to the lives of the minorities crippled by its narrowmindedness. Few works demonstrate the cost of this conservatism better than Sally McMillen's excellent and edifying history of women's suffrage.

But for the last 150 years, the history of the west has been the history of privileged white men. They were the scholars, the lawyers, the judges, and the legislators. They wrote the laws and voted in the elections. They were society. Not until the rise of Mary Wollstonecraft in the mid-eighteenth century did the wider public gain a female voice not born of royalty and even she was marginalized by man's almost complete inability to see, in the masculine, monochromatic nature of his colleagues, a devastating bias towards homogeneity. Privileged man believed himself superior to other forms of humanity. He possessed the sharper intellect that carried him through his schooling and into the work place. Woman was simply too innocent, too soft for his work. And black man, well... He belonged out in the fields, working alongside his brutish brothers.

But with the coming of the nineteenth century, this male dominated world began to crumble. As education began to proliferate through the west, society's marginalized groups began to wonder why they were excluded from society's most vital arenas. The placating words and the patronizing head-pats were no longer sufficient to keep them quiet. For though they were of a different gender, a different color, a different culture, they were still human, capable of reason, of compassion, of intellect.

In America, this inchoate movement coalesced around a handful of key figures who rebelled against the roles society proscribed for them in order to state clearly that they deserved to be equal with the white man. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Frederick Douglass, from Susan B. Anthony to Sojourner Truth, this movement gained voices and leaders that resulted in conventions and platforms, in rallies and protests, in newspapers and lobbying. And though their drive for freedom from the expectations of white men would not be realized for nearly 70 years, their tireless advocacy would eventually pay off in the most spectacular expansion of rights in human history, one that far eclipsed even the enlightenment of Ancient Greece. This is their struggle.

As thoroughly researched as it is wonderfully realized, Seneca Falls is a work of history worthy of the extraordinary women it chronicles. Ms. McMillen, who has written extensively on women and the American South, draws upon the writings of the key figures in both the abolitionist and women's rights movements to animate the standardbearers of a most remarkable fight for human equality. Stanton, Anthony, Mott and Stone explode off the page, their deeply divergent personalities realized in a manner that convincingly portrays not only their singular devotion to the cause, but the inevitable sparks and conflicts that arose between them over the leadership of the movement they'd all, in one way or another, given themselves to advance. Their steadfastness in the face of both internal conflicts and the appalling patronization that they suffered from the ruling class is nothing short of an enduring model of how to change the world for the better.

Though Ms. McMillen's ability to capture the movement in all its trials and tribulations is first rate, she also earns plaudits for not shying away from the warts on the characters of the towering figures that propelled the women's rights movement. Elizabeth Stanton's resentful racism is revealed here in shocking detail, so much so that it should put to bed any criticisms of the opinions Abraham Lincoln held at the time. Moreover, the personal disputes that saw the women's rights movement unhelpfully fracture into two rival organizations are also extensively covered, causing the chronicle to be as much a work about the difficulties of minority movements as it is the women's movement itself. For it possessed its absolutists and its collaborators, its fiery speakers and its quiet workers, figures who clashed with one another as often as they did with those set against them.

This is outstanding work that has personality and flow, rivalry and diligence, rage and triumph. It devastates and informs. We can ask for nothing else from a work of history. (5/5 Stars)

Technical brilliance and corporate imbecility in Dealers of Lightning

From The Week of May 13, 2013

As much as corporations have helped to create and empower our modern world, supplying it with pools of labor and capital to bring products to our markets, they are no wiser than we are. Despite their fortunes being inextricably linked with being able to predict what's next, they cannot escape the biases, doubts and cynicism that befall us all. How is this possible? Because, while corporations possess far more intellectual might than the individual, they often fail to channel that might in any kind of productive way. Having emerged as a result of innovation, they become machines for printing money, not machines for making bets on the future. Some corporations escape this trap, but most invest in harnessing the next generation of companies, bringing them under their own umbrellas and praying that this infusion of innovative energy keeps them relevant for just a little while longer. But while this strategy works in the shortterm, the piper must eventually be paid. Few demonstrations have made this point more eloquently than Michael Hiltzik's history of Xerox Park.

Birthed in the first wave of technology firms that spawned companies like IBM and Eastman Kodak, the Xerox Corporation was a mid-century American titan. Its copiers ruled offices the world over, reducing to mere moments jobs that had once taken people hours to complete. Their brand became so ubiquitous that its name became synonymous with copying, a reality that will embed Xerox in the cultural consciousness for as long as the culture has documents to copy.

Flush with profits, Xerox could easily afford to make bets on the future which is what it did in 1970 when, in what was then just becoming the Silicon Valley we know today, it created Xerox Park, a research and development lab staffed by the first generation of computer scientists who had actually been exposed to these hulking machines while in university. Helmed by healthy egos and powerful personalities, Park became a theatre of experimentation that not only nursed key inventions like Ethernet which, even today, empowers networked computing, it created laser printers and personal computers, early models of the machines that would soon transform our world. This remarkable tide of innovation would culminate in the Xerox Star, a 1981 office product that married a personal computer with a graphical interface that could be manipulated with a mouse. The Star would also prove to be park's downfall, a grossly expensive commercial failure that heralded the mainstream arrival of IBM, Microsoft, Apple and the rest of the corporations that executed the technological revolution.

Packed with riveting characters and corporate dysfunction, Dealers of Lightning is a tour de force. Mr. Hiltzik, an American journalist, vividly captures not only the dawn of the mainstream computer age, detailing the early versions of the technologies that are so commonplace today, but the egos and the jealousies, the intellects and the foibles, of the men and women who created it. All this while painting a devastating portrait of Xerox's corporate culture, one which completely blinded the company to the reality that it held the intellectual keys to virtually every vital component of modern computing, keys it frittered away out of foolishness and ignorance.

The work is narratively driven by the young minds at Park. Drawing upon interviews and personal recollections of the principals who participated in human civilization's most glorious revolution, Mr. Hiltzik animates a host of fascinating characters who range from the irascible to the humorous, from the artistic to the introverted, capturing at once their brilliance and their frustrations. For in as much as these recent college graduates of the flower-power generation were churning out the technologies of tomorrow, their efforts seem to have been blocked at every turn by a company that understood them as poorly as it understood the future.

This leads us to the work's most effective theme. For while the quirks and the rivalries that characterized Park's geniuses are interesting enough, Dealers of Lightning is fundamentally about the abject failure of Xerox's corporate culture. Mr. Hiltzik convincingly describes Xerox as a company that had long-since parted ways with the notion of being a company about technology and had become a company about making money. He details how its fleet of managers focused on making sure the money faucet was stuck open, that this was their only concern, a reality that understandably doomed the company to a most appropriate irrelevancy. For no corporation that squandered the foundational technologies of our generation deserves to be the steward of information technology, a mantle Xerox thoughtlessly sacrificed for the sake of riding the gravy train until it ran out of track.

One would expect, then, that Dealers of Lightning would be a stinging indictment of Xerox. It's not. The blunders and the blindness so wonderfully depicted here is at least 30 years in the past, far too long for there to be any rawness to these wounds. Instead, this is a work of warning in the form of an epitaph to Xerox's cultural relevance, that it isn't enough to simply hire smart people and set them loose on the problems of tomorrow, that one must embrace change or die. No amount of money can help a corporation avoid this fate.

Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)

Survivalists, cold wars, and a Hellenic future in The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy

From The Week of April 29, 2013

As much as we treasure free will as a concept, many of us do not exercise it. For the world as we know it must have structure. It must have rules. And if those rules are to have any force or effect, there must be individuals willing to enforce them, to follow orders that they might find personally distasteful or disagreeable. This is the bargain these individuals make with society, the ignoring of their own right to choose in the name of advancing the greater good. But what if the orders they are asked to execute are so monstrous, so unimaginably beyond the greater good? What does the order-follower do then when all her training tells her to do what she's been told? Then the individual is divided between their duty and their honor, between the smart thing and the right thing. And heaven pity her if she chooses wrongly. Laura Reeve demonstrates in her uneven trilogy.

In a future where the limitations of faster-than-light travel have been circumvented by N-space travel, human civilization has reached for and grasped the stars. Humanity now inhabits any number of worlds and space stations, journeying between stars almost as commonly as as they once traversed the roads of old Earth. But for all this technological freedom and planetary diversity, harmony is an exceedingly scarce commodity. For once the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano on old Earth made inhabiting that planet challenging, at best, and Hellish, at worst, Earth and its colonies calcified into two distinct and antagonistic factions that, even many decades on, continues to fester.

One of the central events in this hot and cold war was the ostensible destruction of one of the Terran factions star systems via the use of a banned weapon capable of annihilating stars. This genocidal act not only fuelled Terran enmity towards the Autonomists, the one-time colonies of Earth that banned together in defiance of its power, it instigated a hunt for the war criminals who carried out the mission to destroy an inhabited star system.

Major Ariane Kedros was the pilot of that mission. An augmented human, re-engineered to survive the psychological stresses of N-space, she belongs to the autonomist's intelligence directorate, an organization of special operatives tasked with black missions in the defiance of the colonies. However, since that fateful mission, which now haunts the major's dreams, Kedros' service to the directorate has become somewhat involuntary, a forced relationship that, thanks to their protection of her identity, she cannot exit. For should she force their hand, they might reveal her true identity and consign her to a short, brutal life on the run.

With this blackmail firmly in place, the directorate tasks Kedros with a series of dangerous missions that result in the enemy suspecting her true identity. And yet, for as much as the Terrans may want to kill Kedros, she might well have access to something even greater than revenge, an alien artifact, that she and her partner discovered floating in space that belongs to no culture humanity's ever encountered. Revenge or discovery, justice or knowledge... Whatever the Terrans choose, Kedros will have to endure. For she will never escape her past.

A trio of action-packed mysteries, all of which, in some way, stem from Kedros' past, The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy is an adrenalized but ultimately unsatisfying adventure through an inventive future world. Providing virtually no backstory for her bewildering amalgam of current and future technologies, languages, cultures and disputes, Ms. Reeve relies on her readers to tease out the vital links that will offer some sort of context to what is otherwise a dizzying array of alliances and cultures that fail to track with our own.

From all appearances, Ms. Reeve has used the Peloponnesian War as inspiration for her two primary factions, with the role of the democratic Athenians taken up by the autonomists and that of the autocratic Spartans represented by the Terran League. For anyone lacking in familiarity with this most ancient Greek conflict, the Terrans will appear to be as utterly unrecognizable to us as their motives are to the autonomists. This is not cleverness on the author's part, a slow unspooling of a dense and interesting mystery that's gradually filled in as the narrative progresses. It is a failure to communicate, to provide a basic framework from which the reader can intuit the rules of the game.

The setting, though, is only the beginning of the flaws here. Ms. Reeve fails, at virtually every turn, to endow her characters with three-dimensionality. Kedros' partner, her boss, even the Terrans who pursue her, are all only partially realized people, a constellation of dim stars that are only here to provide a means by which Ariane Kedros can act. Kedros herself, meanwhile, is a mass of contradictions. She is the embodiment of self-pity and guilt for what she's done, and yet she at no point exhibits remorse for what she's done. On the contrary, she insists that she would do it again. Perhaps this is merely bravado, but it certainly suggests an inconsistency of character that is all-the-more devastating for it being rooted in the trilogy's major protagonist. In fact, the only individual in this entire saga who appears to have consistent motives is one of Ariane's past crewmates who has been tormented and twisted by her guilt.

There are virtues here. The Minoans, Ms. Reeve's alien race, are fascinating creatures with a fairly original society and relationship with their technology. Moreover, the third human faction, space-born generationalists who have built enormous ships with which to slowly explore the universe, are a fascinating, inward-looking culture that is worthy of the time Ms. Reeve spends with them. However, these virtues are even more frustrating when one realizes that Ms. Reeve has genuine talent, especially for imagining alternate societies. She merely fails to fully animate them and bind them together with plots that will showcase them.

At times, a thoughtful and engaging exploration of the limits of human endurance, but ultimately marred by an unwillingness to take full advantage of the pieces of the puzzle... (2/5 Stars)