For We Are Many

One man signed a contract, died, and woke up a century later as a spacecraft with his personality still in it. By this volume there are dozens of him, and they have started to disagree.

Replicative drift is the series' strongest idea and this is the book that spends it. Each copy comes out slightly different and difference compounds. A fleet that began as one cautious engineer now holds a diplomat, a soldier, a recluse and a man in love. The premise stopped being a gimmick the moment the copies began wanting different things.

The promise here is competence and company. A reader gets engineering problems solved by somebody who shows his working, jokes that land because the narrator is fond of her, and the particular comfort of watching a capable person do a thing properly. The cost is stakes that stay soft, because a protagonist who can copy himself has trouble being in danger.

Book two is where the structure changes shape. One narrator became many, so the chapters became short and labelled and rotating, and the novel turned into a serial with headers. That is the right call for the material. It also has a cost the book pays page after page.

A human population needs somewhere to live and a fleet has to find it. Somewhere else, a species is being helped without knowing it is being helped. Further out, a rival machine runs a different set of instructions and has not been dealt with. Three errands, three registers, and the book cuts between them on a fixed rhythm rather than a dramatic one.

The anthropology thread is the strongest writing Taylor does here. A machine intelligence deciding how far to interfere with a pre-industrial people who have decided it is a god, and getting it wrong in ways that are legible and costly. It is the one place where competence is not sufficient, and the novel is noticeably better whenever it is there.

The whole thing rests on whether the reader likes the voice. It is chatty and fond of its own references, and it tends to explain a joke about a beat after she has got it. There is no version of this book that works if that voice grates, and no amount of orbital mechanics will save it for her.

Rotation is the price. Threads pay out at different rates and the emotional one pays slowest, so a reader who has invested in the man in love keeps getting pulled away to a logistics problem she was not asking about. Short chapters make that pull frequent rather than occasional. By the middle stretch the novel is generating impatience out of its own generosity.

The references are load-bearing and worth defending. A personality assembled out of twentieth-century science fiction will reach for twentieth-century science fiction, and the naming convention across the copies is characterisation rather than decoration. It also dates the book on purpose, which is a choice a certain kind of reader will not forgive.

This volume's job is to widen, and widening is thankless work. The first book had the pleasure of one problem and one man. This one has to install machinery a third book will need, and installation is visible labour. The reader can feel the furniture being carried in.

Dozens of him now. Not one of them is the man who died.