Schroeder, Karl: Ventus

It took an unusually long time (okay, for me) to read Karl Schroeder’s Ventus. I started it last weekend on the train, promptly got extremely motion-sick, and stayed that way whenever I even thought about a train for the rest of the weekend. And school and a couple of web projects (an almost-complete overhaul of my NetHack page for the new version, and helping on something else) have taken up a lot of time this week. Oh, yeah: it’s also 662 pages long in paperback. To sum up this lengthy post: cool ideas, doesn’t quite fully gel, probably because of my reaction to the characters, but a promising effort.

Ventus caught my eye because it had a cover blurb from Vernor Vinge. Since I didn’t recall ever seeing Vinge blurb a novel before, I figured it was worth looking at, the slightly faint-praise tone notwithstanding: “Dramatically effective and a milestone in science fiction about nanotech and fine-grained distributed systems.” Of course, typing that up, I realized it could be read as, “In terms of drama, it was (just) an effective book”—my initial interpretation—or “it was really effective, dramatically so.” My opinion is more in line in with the first interpretation (not that anyone asks me to blurb books, of course).

[The cover itself is otherwise, well, ugly. It shows what at first glance appears to be a woman with tentacles and a board through her head wearing a metal bustier.]

Ventus does have at least one really cool central idea: nanotech in everything, down to the grains of dirt and drops of water, all self-aware and working together to terraform an entire world. It’s the kind of idea that seems simple and obvious, once someone has done it, but is full of potential. (Someone might already have done it; I don’t know, I’m not as up on current hard science fiction as I might be.) The book does some great things with it, such as the terrific images of the Diadem swans or the vagabond moons, and the sense of wonder it evokes later in the book.

Of course, Ventus isn’t perfect: the nanotech, known as the Winds, doesn’t communicate with humans or recognize them as part of Ventus when they arrive. A thousand years later, humanity has learned to work around the Winds and coexist in some places, but they’ve lost all knowledge of galactic civilization; they’re just now inching up on Industrial Revolution levels of life, and may never get any farther, as the Winds take a very, very dim view of pollution. The plot is kicked off when 3340, a rogue god (AI) is destroyed; it had sent part of itself to Ventus, which is now confined in a man’s body and searching for the secret of the Winds so he can resurrect 3340. The people who destroyed 3340 are hunting him to prevent just that. (The back cover copy describing this almost makes Ventus sound like a sequel; it’s not.) And from there, it gets complicated.

As that description might suggest, the book is also concerned with humanity, godhood, different expanses of sentience, and moving from one to another. This is the other big idea of the work, and probably its key underlying theme. Unfortunately, I think I wasn’t sufficiently drawn in by the characters, through which this idea had to express itself, so it—and the book overall—failed to fully work for me.

A few of the characters I just plain didn’t like, including the ones who end up motivating Armiger, the former component of 3340. One of them doesn’t get much screen time, but nevertheless pushes my buttons in all the wrong ways:

On the day she took him in, Megan had taken on a responsibility and a burden greater than any woman should have to bear. For it quickly became evident that Armiger was not really a man. He was a spirit, perhaps a Wind, one of the creators of the world. . . .

Megan had come to understand that Armiger needed his body as an anchor. Without it, his soul would drift away into some abstraction of rage. She had to remind him of it constantly, be his nurse, cook, mother, and concubine. When he rediscovered himself—literally coming to his senses—he displayed tremendous passion and knowledge, uncanny perception and even, yes, sensitivity. He was a wonderful lover, the act never became routine for him. And he was grateful to her for her devotion.

But, oh, the work she had to do to get to that point! It was almost too much to bear.

All I want to say is, as far as I’m concerned, neither love nor religion should look like that. The other important character to Armiger, well, Armiger compares her accomplishments to Mao’s—as a compliment, which is disconcerting on at least two different levels. Me, I had some initial sympathy for her, but was tired of her by the end.

The other main characters? While there’s nothing wrong with “callow youth stops being callow, saves the world,” I didn’t feel the book gave it the necessary spark to lift the character above that. The same for the rest: even when I liked them, I still felt somewhat disconnected. I can’t pin the exact reason down; it could be something subtle about the prose, or the characterization, or just my present state of mind. (This might be another reason why it took me a while to finish this.)

I did enjoy Ventus, even though I didn’t find it entirely satisfying, and I’ll keep an eye out for reviews of Schroeder’s next book. Ventus is no A Deepness in the Sky, but it definitely shows potential.

(Oh yes: people on the “I’d never live in the Culture!” side of the perennial discussion might find some of the attitudes herein congenial. I’d head for the Culture in a second, myself, though I don’t think this affected my overall opinion of the book.)