[Dragaera] some comments on _The Incrementalists_

[Philip Hart]

Spoilers for _TI_ below.




Seriously spoilful.



Go read the book if you haven't.






(0. I don't agree with every design choice on the cover but all in all 
it's pretty wow.)

1. Note the shout-out to Mark Mandel (cited without the "Dr." style), who 
made so many contributions to this list back in the day.

2. 14-hour editing marathon?  I'd guess of course that with two authors 
there are fewer typos/thinkos/etcos.  I didn't notice any typos, actually.

3. I found the opening difficult to read - there's a lot of jargon in a 
short space (poker and in-group).  I've already forgotten what "titan" 
means - no, it must mean to spike.  Similarly there's a great deal of 
intro in the form of dialogue before anything active happens on stage. 
It's 1/5 of the way in before Irina shows up to add a secondary character. 
Compare Amber, where there's a lot of talking to start but also a bunch 
of action before any world-building discussion. This didn't much matter 
for me - I bought the book six months ago - but I wonder about folks 
picking it up and reading the first few pages.

4. Presumably there weren't always ~200 in the group, but I missed how 
it can grow.  Could Celeste have just made an extra stub and spiked 
someone with it?  I'm also confused about how the last century could 
have been so awful despite benevolent help newly empowered by advances 
in communications - maybe Celeste was busy in 1930 or so keeping the 
group from doing anything in Germany, for example?

5. Some of the handling of the developing friendship and romance ("Ren 
laughed, and my heart flipped--flopped") seemed a bit telling not showing, 
though actually it probably wasn't.  Maybe I don't feel enough of a sense 
of Ren's personality.  It's hard to accept her (really anyone) agreeing to 
be spiked - if you're not stronger than a soul that has survived many 
combats, your life effectively ends.  Ok, in her case she's under a geas. 
But then it's difficult to know what's her and what's Celeste - a theme 
of the book, in fact, but also a barrier to feeling for the character.

6. Bit about glowing - I would have probably found this romance- 
novelesque, but I've had the exact perception before in an equivalent 
situation.

7. I was getting ready to think, "Oh, great, another sex scene, these are 
always mistakes", but actually didn't.

8. Conversation about pronouns - I wanted to kick the characters for 
failing to take an incrementalist stance against Oskar.  Maybe a switch 
to Babel-17 (well, something less weaponized) wouldn't solve everything 
but it might make things slightly better, and maybe it does in Hungary etc.

9. It's all in-group stuff.  There's essentially nothing external - a 
waitress gets nudged, maybe a bartender doesn't, an entrepeneur is 
schmoozed slightly.  I'm not sure I cared quite enough about the 
characters for this.  The main characters are a revolutionary cell of 
sorts, and presumably this is what it's like to be in one - more 
instructive than compelling for me at least on a first read.  Well, 
there was stuff like Jimmy saying what they do is evil, but.  And 
Matsu is certainly cool, and Oskar having something of a point, etc.

10. Eyes - I was looking for his eyes, I held his eyes, his eyes scoured 
my face, eyes held to mine like an umbilicus.  Ok, but "gripping Oskar's 
face with his eyes" gave me a nasty shock.

11. I liked Celeste's story about the bird.

12. For me it was a bit hard to read this in the shadow of _Last Call_, 
which is another novel about deep memory, immortality, possession and 
submersion, and Las Vegas (chpater 7 of _TI_ is titled "The Barren [...] 
Wasteland").  I think _LC_ is one of the best sff novels I've read, so 
any other book on similar subject matter is at an unfair disadvantage.

13. I mentioned Amber earlier - that's because I felt a lot of Zelazny 
here, esp. in the garden sections of the book.  There was something 
reminiscent of Corwin's Pattern or the Primal Pattern in the latter part 
of the novel; and Celeste has something of Brand about her.  I don't 
know about the memory palace stuff and references to Wolfe (Latro) or 
to Crowley (Little, Big) but that's a very wide-spread trope.  Anyway, 
there's a lot of cool stuff in the details.

14. I really liked the making-up-a-ritual-and-it-working bit at the 
climax, but I also felt a bit deus-exed.

15. This seems like a very personal work - I'm guessing there's more SKZB 
in Phil than in Vlad or Billy Feng (another matzo ball soup fan) or etc. 
I had been thinking, "SKZB wrote the Phil parts and White wrote Ren", but 
it's all very integrated.  If I had read the book as it were unsigned I 
would have thought, "This is a typical SKZB novel with the unusual feature 
of a deeply-developed female 1st person POV". I wondered a bit about the 
theme of submersion in another personality in this context; not having 
read White makes identifying strands harder.  I'm mentioning this 
perception becasue I found it unnerving at points, or uncomfortable; I 
think of SKZB as someone who writes cool stuff, but the sense (perhaps 
entirely imaginary) I had at several points of looking into his interior 
felt invasive.  I just read the first poems in Sharon Olds's _Stag Leap_, 
a straight-up confessional about her divorce, but she's just a poet to me, 
if she wants to tell me about how her husband dumped her (It's not her, 
it's you) and how she felt abuot it, then whatever.  I've been reading 
SKZB since 1984 or 5, almost thirty years, so detachment is out of the 
question.

16. Having finished the book at 2 in the morning after I got it, I didn't 
feel the usual need to reread it immediately as I would have with a 
Dragaera or just Brust book.  I think I sort of got it and didn't feel 
the need to integrate it into some larger framework, though given the 
last point I will.  Maybe more's explained here than usual.

17.  Not 17 chapters, or n*17.  I didn't spot Devera - wasn't actually 
looking.