Dust (Elizabeth Bear)


Dust
Elizabeth Bear

Just as fantastic and mind-bending as I was anticipating… full of those ideas that just make me shiver in awe. The first punch of the story is the best, when you get hit with all the world’s concepts at once. There were a few things I recognized – shadow panels show up in Ringworld, the term ‘coffins’ for sleeping quarters in Neuromancer – but the vast majority was new territory. I mean, angel Engineers who have machine-oil blood? Jacob’s Ladder a DNA helix? An entire artificial world that’s just as foreign and unexplored as an organic one?

That last one I really liked – the idea, early on, of fighting through every cabin and corridor to conquer the world. I do wish that it had been taken farther, that everything was inorganic, as we start to actually see those corridors and cabins, that the entire world is made up of relics of ancient technology, so that they journey through strange control rooms and observation decks and information hubs. I understand that the ancients’ technology was advanced enough to take on an organic nature of its own (the symbionts, for instance), but I kind of wanted a Sphere-like encounter with broken, unknown technology.

Another beautiful thing was the effect of the epigrams… since Dust is introduced early on, even before you know much about him you begin to understand how the meaning of the epigram changes as soon as he redefines that word into a proper noun. The first Shakespeare quote, for instance:

The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

–Cymbeline

I love how the entire meaning of the quote shifts, with that little alteration.

After the first big push, the attributes of the world became commonplace, and I settled into the story and characters. Everything flows very seamlessly, yet is dynamic enough to keep us on our toes – shifting rhythms, going from intimate moments with Rien and Mallory to Dust scheming towards his vast, ulterior motives to the desperate race along the radioactive river.

A few curious urges of mine – I would have liked to hear more about who’s in power, where… Rule vs. Engine I got, but not the Conns… My first assumption was that the Conn family was affiliated with Rule, and that Engine was an entirely different group, but it seems to be a lot more complicated than that. Also, I assumed the Engineers were a race with wings, and I’m not sure whether that’s true either… I mean, Percival is supposedly born of two Conns, so where do her wings come from? I guess I’ll have to wait for the next books…

The only thing that really stretched my credulity was the instant rapport between the sisters and Tristen. They also seem to attach quickly to Benedick, but at least there some wariness remains. For Tristen, however, he cleans up his wild-man appearance and suddenly they’re BFFs. Percival, maybe, I could understand, because knights who are abundant in chivalry are usually lacking in imagination – his nobility would exempt him from suspicion. But Rien is still a Mean at heart, and it seems strange that she would instantly trust an older, Exalted male. It felt like I’d blinked and missed a week of book-time, a literary epileptic absence.

I did guess that Gavin was the “common household appliance” which held Cynric. There was also a moment when I wondered if Percival was really the rightful Captain of the ship… because of how Arianrhod looked so much like Percival, and Caitlin was similar in size to Rien, and the way Caitlin kept looking at Rien, and Benedick’s ambiguous statement, “You’re the reason Caitlin won’t talk to me.” The thought crossed my mind that someone might be, as Dust says, stacking the deck. But I guess in the end it didn’t matter.

I could talk about this book for ages; there are new things on every page. So I’ll just give my favorite quote, in closing:

Rien thought uncharitably of Samael and his barbed gifts, and even less charitably of Mallory. How convenient, she thought, how freeing to be able to embrace the role of necromancer, trickster, betrayer. How it must release one from the bounds of common courtesy and right behavior. What a romantic series of excuses.

Maybe she, Rien, should become a sorcerer. Or an angel. Then she could be an asshole, too, and if anybody commented on it, she could shrug and present her union card.

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