Lady of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder
Karl Schroeder had been on my radar for a while. I was on a panel with him at Boréal back in 2004 (even though I would like to erase that first appearance at a panel from everyone’s memory; I was sick, underprepared and the panel was in English…) Reading Christian’s review of the book only raised my expectations and Nathalie, who read the book first, mention that I should really like it. Maybe my expectations were too high. Oh, I’m not saying this is a bad book, no. It’s simply not what I had in mind. Maybe I wanted something more ‘classic’, less ‘post-human’…
When I started reading about Livia and the ‘manifolds’ of the Teven coronal, I was really excited. This would be a good book. Then things started to deteriorate for the heroes (not the book!) and I was wondering how the author would pull that one. When the heroes set off in space, I was a bit disappointed. The trip to the Archipelago was strange and I had to wrap my head around many concepts. Maybe the fact that I read Accelerando a few weeks before just got me more Singularity my brain can handle.
Lady of Mazes is the story of Livia, a young woman living in an isolated ring world where augmented reality lets everybody live in specific versions of the world (manifolds), depending on their social and political views or beliefs. Inhabitants of this world simply don’t interact with the people who might have different ideas than themselves. They don’t see them, they don’t see their world, they can’t talk to them. When the barriers between the worlds start to be disrupted, Livia found herself involved with problems of gigantic proportions. She will flee to other manifolds, and beyond, in search of the cause of the disappearing barriers, hoping to save her world.
There are a lot of foreign concepts in this book and I was confused many times about the anecliptics, inscape, etc. Allegiances change a few times and it didn’t help my comprehension. I had hard time following all the groups, their interests, allies and enemies.
So is it a good book? Yes. Should you read it? If you want to read a good singularity book with many concepts and sociological exploration, go for it! If you are looking for a classical tale of science fiction, this is probably not the book you want to pick from the shelves right now. I opened the book looking for something in particular and did not find it. I would probably have enjoyed it a lot more if I didn’t have all those expectations.
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It wasn’t a bad book since I at least finished reading it. But I found it was a hard and laborious read.
It was hard to start to really care of the caracters, which is often what really gets you hooked onto a book.
The concepts for me, not a real fan of hard sci-fi, was hard to grasp. It took me about the quarter of the book just to get a confortable understanding of the world. Cause understanding the world the caracters are in, is really a must to understand the story that goes along.
I was happy to be finished and not to have read it… The story idea was an excellent one, but not really well put together to keep the reader interest high. It took me a while to finish it…