Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes is one of the best pure SF novels of recent years. I read it in 2005 when it came out and was surprised it got so little attention. It seemed to me to be one of those books everyone would be talking about. I’ve just read it for the second time, and it holds up as well as ever. What a good book!
Livia Kodaly lives in Teven, a coronal (ringworld) where tech locks limit nanotech and inscape (perceptible virtual reality) to various consensual manifolds of reality. You can be right next to someone who sees you as a tree and you don’t see at all, you can duck out of a conversation and replace yourself with an anima who you can later reabsorb to review what you both said, you carry around with you a Society of chosen friends and relations who may or may not be connected to the real people they represent at any given moment. This is complicated and fascinating enough, but Schroeder sets it up only to destroy it and show us how Livia copes with that destruction and with the wider world outside Teven where she travels to understand what has attacked them and find help for her people.
[Read on below the fold…]
Lady of Mazes is rigorous hard SF, but the questions it raises are philosophical rather than technical. The problem with writing about post-humanity and people whose experience is very far from ours is the difficuty of identification—this can sometimes be a problem for me with Egan and Stross. Schroeder avoids the potential pitfalls, in any case for readers who are prepared to pay close attention even at the beginning when everything is unfamiliar. Lady of Mazes has a very high new-cool-stuff-per-page density, but without ever losing sight of the perceptions of its point-of-view characters. It has worldbuilding and ideas casually mentioned that most writers would mine for a trilogy, and it has one of the best descriptions of suffering chagrin I have ever read.
Set in the same universe as Schroeder’s earlier Ventus, Lady of Mazes also explores some of the same themes. Schroeder seems generally interested in what gives life purpose and agency in post-scarcity societies. Schroeder, like John Barnes in The Armies of Memory, seems to think that many people would retreat into unreality. Schroeder appreciates that people tend to become very baroque when given the opportunity. In Lady of Mazes we see new art forms, new ways of living, angst over relationships and other hallmarks of humanity. The illusions they embrace are the illusions of meaning and significance. They are happy and fulfilled within their ultimately meaningless experience.
Schroeder doesn’t have any answers, but he’s great on fascinating questions. Does it matter if what you do matters as long as you think it matters? What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural? And if a Chinese Room started to attack your home, how would you fight against it?
On this re-read I am more impressed than ever with Schroeder’s breadth of vision and clever construction. I also had a great time hanging out again with Livia and her world. The shadow of the post-humans and half-understood technology may hang over them, they may live in very odd worlds, but these characters are recognisably people, and people one can care about.
Whew. I was starting to wonder if I was the only person who had ever read this novel — or if I had just imagined this novel’s existence in the first place.
I actually connect this material somewhat to what Dan Simmons was trying to do in _Illium_ with the Eloi-lite strand of that story, but I thought that Schroeder did a better job of articulating the questions raised by both the existence and the ultimate collapse of post-human technology.
Schroeder appreciates that people tend to become very baroque when given the opportunity.
Makes sense to me. I always thought that Baroque is what people do when they have too much time on their hands. And a post-scarcity environment provides plenty of free time.
In my review of it last year on my personal blog, I liked it too. I think it does best with the sensawunder and what this baroque post-scarcity solar system is like.
(I thought the book had some things in common with John C. Wright’s The Golden Age in this respect)
However, i thought the pacing in the denouement was a bit off for my taste.
Still, it was a highly enjoyable read, and I look forward to reading more by Mr. Schroeder.
Good to bring this one up. :)
Sort of a mind melter, for sure. I was quite impressed.
I’ll confess when I first finished reading Lady of Mazes I was as angry as I’ve ever been on finishing a novel. If 3340 had a local recruiting office I would have marched over and signed up. Over time, and additional readings, it has become a favorite though.
I had much the same thoughts when I reviewed it over at my blog.
I think one of the main points of the book is that “having a meaningful life” == “solving problems” — Livia’s life was jerked out of normalcy by the crash a few years before the book begins — and of course there are few problems to be solved in a post-singularity, post-scarcity world.
Obviously this point is partly true for plot reasons; we like to read about people having adventures and doing things. But I wonder to what extent it’s also true in the real world?
Thanks for a review of a book I might not otherwise have come across.
I’ve found all of Schroeder’s books to be worth reading, but this one is particularly idea-tastic.
Aside from the deeper philosophical issues, I love how he does that old SF trick of making something metaphoric in contemporary society into something objectively real in the future–in this case the idea of people with world-views so different that they can’t communicate with, or even really see each other. The “people in the same place, but experiencing the world entirely differently due (essentially) to ideological differences”, stuff is brilliant.
Actually, I was discussing the relatively likelihood of this kind of highly mediated VR with some skeptical guys at lunch the other day, and I pointed out that there are already harbingers in place if you look in the right spots. A great example is the difference between viewing web sites with IE and viewing them with FF + Flashblock + AdBlock. I normally use the later combination, and whenever I am forced to use someone else’s browser and I see what the web looks like to them, I’m shocked. Yeah, it’s just web sites, but it’s also agent-based mediation of perception, and it works so well already that you REALLY notice it when it’s gone.
Anyway, great book, and an author who deserves a wider audience.
I’ve had this sitting on my shelf since…well, 2005 I suppose. Might be time to actually, you know, read it.
Sounds great, but not yet available on Kindle, so I’ll have to wait. As an aside, any of the connected people on this site want to lay out the pros / cons etc. of adopting electronic formats from the author / editor perspective? I wonder why some of my fave authors are available for the Kindle and some are not.
This is one of my favorite books, and illustrates why Schroeder is one of my favorite authors. Everybody do yourselves a favor and read it.
The first Schroeder work that I read was Ventus as a free download from Tor. I was blown away and have read everything of his since. Lady of Mazes was one of those you hate to put down.
You can still get _Ventus_ from manybooks.net as a free download (and yes, even for the Kindle).
http://manybooks.net/titles/schroederkother07Ventus.html
I have been on a panel with Karl Schroeder, and also been in the audience hearing him on other panels, and he was an impressive guy. So I’ve been eager to begin reading his books.
I brought Lady of Mazes to Denvention. I was surprised, when I got there, to find that Jo Walton also brought a copy, which of course led to this essay.
Haven’t finished the novel yet, but I like it so far. The cracks in Livia’s world are beginning to show, even as the incluing and worldbuilding is still going on.
Jo, I couldn’t agree more.
It blew my mind when Karl sent it to David and I got to read it in manuscript. It’s an absolutely brilliant and original book and deserved to win an award.
Livia is a great character, and what amazing ideas! I can only hope lots of folks will catch up with it and that Karl’s audience will continue to grow.