Some manifolds, like Westerhaven, are cosmopolitan, embracing social and technological complexity, including a self-confident curiosity about the cultures of "neighboring" manifolds, while others, like Raven, follow a more insular weltanschauung, eschewing overt technology in favor of an existence ostensibly closer to nature, not blinding themselves to the advanced technology that makes their lives possible but choosing to cast that technology and its effects in other terms.
One morning, Livia Kodaly, a young musician and singer of Westerhaven, is enticed into Raven by an adventurous older friend, Lucius Xavier, to investigate rumors of "Impossibles"—anomalies that somehow escape the censorship of the tech locks. There they witness the appearance of strangers who claim to be the mythical ancestors of Raven's people, returned bearing Impossible gifts. In the ensuing confusion, Lucius disappears, and a terrified Livia flees to Westerhaven.
It soon becomes clear that the ancestors are invaders, come to "bring your people out of their fantasy-land and back to reality." Somehow these outsiders, followers of something or someone called 3340, are able to dissolve not only manifolds but the tech locks themselves. Livia, her best friend, Aaron, and a Raven refugee named Qiingi launch themselves from the besieged coronal in an unlikely spaceship, hoping to find help. Instead, they find the Archipelago. Based on an inscape without tech locks, the Archipelago is made up of post-humans more or less like Livia, godlike beings who were once human but are no longer, powerful AIs representing the government and factions of the populace, and even more powerful AIs called anecliptics, remote and enigmatic denizens of the Lethe Nebula who may be responsible for it and the coronals floating there, including Teven Coronal.
Livia and the others are soon drawn in to the Byzantine politics of the Archipelago, where the invisible hand of the anecliptics assures a sterile peace and order. Only the Good Book, a role-playing system of subtle self-organizing potential, seems to offer humans a chance of escaping the anecliptics' benign control. But the Good Book is more than it seems, and discovery of its secret leads Livia back to Teven Coronal and an apocalyptic confrontation with 3340.
A trilogy's worth of ideas
The above description does not even scratch the surface of the dizzying yet exhilarating complexity of Schroeder's novel, a sequel of sorts to 2001's Ventus. Its pedigree goes back to classic conceptual-breakthrough novels like Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, Clarke's The City and the Stars and Aldiss' Non-Stop. But Lady of Mazes is no throwback. Its presentation of multiple simultaneously existing virtual realities and mental states is as adroit as anything in the early work of Neal Stephenson, and its gently satirical approach to post-human space opera, both on the personal and social scale, is nearly as sophisticated and well handled as that of John C. Wright in The Golden Age. Like Wright, Schroeder not only reinvigorates genre elements that have become stale or out of fashion, he takes seriously the notion of science fiction as a literature of ideas. An unapologetic strain of philosophical, political and moral argument runs through the pages of Lady, without detracting from the sense of headlong adventure and discovery that will keep readers turning those pages well past their bedtimes.
How to write about post-human characters in a way that does not paper over their physical and psychological differences from the human norm yet still renders them emotionally accessible to human readers? Perhaps only a novel filled with incomprehensible characters whose actions seem arbitrary, whose motives are inscrutable and whose very language frustrates translation could lay claim to being authentic in its portrayal of the post-human. But even if such a novel could be written, who would want to read it? Schroeder avoids this difficulty by focusing on characters inhabiting the gray zone between humanity and post-humanity, like Livia, Qiingi and Doran Morss, a prickly Archipelagian of immense wealth whose ambition is to become a god. They are close enough to us to engage our empathy, yet far enough removed to seem wonderful and strange. They provide as well a convenient bit of scale against which to measure other entities, like the god Choronzon and 3340 itself, that are ultimately beyond human grasp.
Livia is the novel's heart and soul, and Schroeder skillfully traces her evolution under the press of events. Her relationships with her friends, her understanding of her culture and herself, all undergo radical stress and change as she is impelled away from everything familiar, toward a future she would never have dreamed possible, much less chosen for herself. Meanwhile Morss, much to his own surprise and little to his liking, finds himself drawn toward Livia, in the process moving away from his cherished dreams toward a future equally unimaginable. Change, both without limits and within them, is one of Schroeder's main themes, and he pursues it on scales large and small to wonderful effect. He is also a very witty writer, peppering his far future with such delightful inventions as "art bombs," which produce "propaganda blasts": "Throw a missile at 'em, they convert its mass and energy into a thousand new operas and throw 'em back at you." Schroeder's control slips toward the end of the novel, when events become frantic and confusing, but not enough to detract significantly from what is really a brilliant performance, a novel of high ambition executed with the talent and imagination to match.
Lady of Mazes is the second novel I've reviewed recently whose title completely escaped my comprehension. Can we please get back to titles that actually have relevance to the novel in question? —Paul
