Mar 4

Mar 4 The Adversary by Julian May

~The Quick Review~

I’m not sure even where to begin. I actively disliked The Nonborn King and didn’t expect to read The Adversary. I finally caved because a commenter told me I should give it a go, it was taking up a larger-than-average space on my to-read shelf, and I hoped that finishing the series would help clear out some of its clutter from my head.

At no point did I truly want to read The Adversary, and it came as no surprise that I did not like it.

My review will thus mostly be a non-spoilery discussion of all the reasons I was underwhelmed, followed with a solid little summary of what happens for anyone else who wants to know how it ends without reading 470 pages of nonsense. (That said, I am glad to know how it ends to sate my incessant curiosity.)

There are three big reasons I think The Adversary is awful:

Abusers are, at best, treated as “well-meaning but complicated” and, at worst, excused without second thought.
The scope becomes so large it’s impossible to support.
Facts are artificially withheld from the reader to generate interest.

~The Real Review~

Let’s start with The Adversary’s acceptance of abusers.

In the last book, Aiken Drum is in love with Mercy, though he fears and reviles this love. Eventually, he marries her, and when she betrays him by relaying information to Nodonn, he kills her in cold blood. No, worse than cold blood. That scene had some serious sexual undertones and ends in him subsuming her power/personality, because even in death she must be degraded and used by him.

There’s no ambiguity. He didn’t kill her in self-defense. Nor did he let her crimes filter through the justice system of Pliocene earth—no, he sex-murder-subsumes her. This makes Aiken an abuser and a murderer.

So when the subsumption of Mercy threatens to destroy Aiken, why is he treated like some unfortunate victim? Maybe there are arguments to be made that it’s better to keep him alive/sane/in charge, but he definitely doesn’t deserve sympathy. And not a single character ruminates on Aiken literally murdering his wife. No one has any issues with him at all.

And then there’s Marc. He abuses his children. He killed his wife. He’s murdered countless sentient beings—millions, if I recall correctly—and he spends all of his time looking for an alien race to dominate. We enter The Adversary 100% clear on the fact that Marc is the worst.

Then Julian May spends all 470 pages of The Adversary walking it backwards. Maybe he’s not so bad. He was too stern, of course, but he loves his kids! Sure, his ego is unaccountably large, and he plays at being god, but he’s not trying to be awful, he just has a plan he wants to bring to fruition. See, he helps a baby! A bad guy would never do that.

It just keeps going, pussyfooting Marc closer and closer to a redemption arc. It’s disgusting. And while the book doesn’t entirely absolve Marc, it comes close, and some of his worst ideas—such as dominating an entire alien race under his powers just because he wants to—go unchallenged in their entirety.

I thought I was walking into a showdown between two bad guys. Instead, I was walking into a showdown between two bad guys white-washed to look like good guys.

See also: Tony Wayland, the coward/traitor who abandons his howler wife. Even he gets a redemption arc.

Point 2: the scope becomes too large to possibly support

If ever there was a series that didn’t know when to close a door, it was The Saga of Pliocene Exile. As if unable or unwilling to commit to a single trajectory, potential side-plots are invented and held open with no pay off. Nodonn’s progeny, the twin/Kuhal thing, Felice and Culluket being mentally trapped together somehow—those are but four examples of Big Things that I felt the need to keep in the back of my head because any second they could re-enter the narrative and change everything.

But they don’t. All of those elements could be removed—slimming down the bloated series by a fair number of pages—and leave the ending untouched.

Then there is the sheer number of people introduced. Characters, with first and last names and short biographies, are spun into existence for a line or two, and then are never seen again or show up 200 pages later with the expectation that we’ll somehow remember them from their last brief existence. It got to the point where even characters I’ve known for books became completely undistinguishable. Is that Tanu the dude into Elizabeth, the peace-faction knight, or the complete fucking wanker? No idea. I’ll just keep reading and see if I can tell from context.

This overly-muchness extends even to the, like, technology/magic of the world. Not long ago a steel dagger was the height of contraband. Now outlandish scientific machinery can be rummaged up from any number of secret tech caches. And whereas Marc and Aiken were previously constrained by kinda-sorta “normal” metafunctions, suddenly they can do all sorts of things previously not even considered. And then teach others how to do it.

Between this glut of technology and this surfeit of metafunctions, it feels like literally nothing is impossible.

This makes the writing so bloated, so convoluted, so brimming with ideas that go nowhere, and so capable of spinning off in any direction, that nothing feels like it has weight anymore. When anything is possible, there’s no feeling of a logical step from one scene to the next, which makes everything that happens feel pointless. The ending, to me, didn’t feel like a satisfying conclusion of numerous choices and logical extensions of the plot—it was just another chapter.

I think May knew this was a problem, which is why she leaned into a writing technique that I think did more harm than good:

Point 3: facts are artificially withheld from the reader to generate interest

Imagine a coworker is telling you about some drama that unfurled at work.

“You’ll never believe it,” he says. “Hansen had an idea. I could tell it was the sort of thing that’d rock the company to its very foundation even before he told me what it was.” Your coworker pauses dramatically. “And then Hansen told me.”

Your coworker walks out of the room. That’s all he’s going to say for now.

It feels like a huge middle finger, right? There’s no good reason for him not to tell you, and if he’s not going to tell you, why bring it up at all?

Well, pretty much all of the big ideas of The Adversary are withheld in this way. Information is exchanged between characters with a blanket statement of “he told them what he’d learned” or “she showed them what she’d seen,” but it’ll be hundreds of pages until the reader is brought into the loop. It’s so artificial, so obvious, that I wanted to quit reading out of principle. Either write a book good enough that it warrants reading through to the end without cheap tricks or don’t bother writing it at all.

While these three issues are my biggest problems with The Adversary, I think the combination of them causes other spin-off issues.

For example, these last two problems result in a rather dry, high-level sort of storytelling: we are told that people do things, but we don’t really feel a part of them doing those things. Fiction that reads like a cross between a biography and an encyclopedia isn’t going to hold the attention of the average person, so the storytelling has to find other ways to connect us to the day to day on Pliocene earth.

I find these lacking.

For example, Basil and his bastards are imprisoned, and the prison is infested with more-or-less harmless—but annoying—spiders. Mr. Betsy grows annoyed and starts attacking them. Soon all the bastards are attacking the spiders, and for three-ish pages they yell and stomp and smash.

This stomping and smashing has no nuance, no intrigue, and no payout. Eventually something else happens that interrupts the spider-slaughter, but it’s not connected to their actions at all. It’s just three pages of killing time/trying to make us feel connected to the characters until the next plot point comes along. And that next plot-point, of course, feels less like narrative and more like a biography mixed with an encyclopedia.

Another example is Elizabeth. As one of two people left from The Many-Colored Land, her character is one of the very few that I’m invested in, and May knew this, which is why we spend a lot of time with her. Except Elizabeth is so passive, so waffling with her feelings, so self-indulgent, that her scenes are more annoying than anything. But she can’t be anything more than that—it doesn’t work for the plot.

I wish this were the point where I say “despite these over-arching problems, I did really enjoy [something],” but I can’t. The best thing I can say about The Adversary is that, from a technical-writing perspective, it’s competent in its writing.

So with that absolute smear-job out of the way, up next is a summary of the outcome of The Saga of Pliocene Exile.

MASSIVE SPOILERS BELOW

Marc has a genetic mutation that makes him immortal. His brother—the man who stopped Marc’s rebellion—had a genetic mutation, though it was far stranger. Somehow he either didn’t have a body, or his body literally disappeared, leaving him a brain with massive operant metafunctions. Marc, a sociopath-wanna-be, is jealous of his brother’s lack of a body, because he reckons that not having a body would mean he would no longer be subject to emotions. Thus, he wanted to genetically engineer children that had his immortality, but his brother’s lack of a body.

This is part of what lead to the rebellion, and why he killed his wife. Freaked out by a husband who wanted to create babies and then remove their bodies, she tries to render the issue moot by making him sterile. He retaliates in self-defense. She dies.

Marc’s children have his mutation—they’re effectively immortal. His plan can live on through them, so long as he can find an alien planet to host his crazy scheme. The problem is that he’s never told his children this and they’re sick of his shit anyway and dead set on returning to the Galactic Milleau—a thing they know how to do if they can get the materials necessary to build a return portal.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth is trying to heal a black-torc baby. She’s making progress, but too slowly. It appears the baby will die. Also, one of her Tanu helpers is in love with her, but she’s not into him, at least in part because he’s not operant. Marc, who learns to, essentially, teleport, starts dropping by to visit Elizabeth, and ends up helping her heal the baby. Then, at the last second of the final stretch, he takes control and makes the baby operant.

There’s lots of stupid stuff going on in the background that is of little importance. Basil and his bastards must climb the damn mountain they just stranded the functional airships on. This, of course, is a disaster and ends in a lot of death. It also has no affect on the plot—the airships don’t have any real significance going forward, other than Aiken knowing that he has them, thus making him feel more confident.

The book is more or less a race between Marc trying to corner/kidnap/stop his kids, and his kids, working with Aiken, trying to build the portal and get the hell out. For much of the book it’s made to look like Marc might kill his children, but then the fact that he needs them alive is made known.

The book ends with the portal opened, but Marc gets there first. It looks like he might coerce his kids, or even do something more sinister to collect the germ plasm he needs, but Elizabeth intercedes and shows him something in her mind. He stops dead in his tracks and lets the kids escape. Other humans also leave, and even some Tanu and Firvulag.

The book ends with Marc and Elizabeth, who are apparently in love?, using Marc’s fancy and extreme ability to teleport, to go off to the Tanu/Firvulag homeworld, where they’ll help guide the race to operancy without the limiting dependency on the torcs.

Oh, and Tony Wayland, the rather un-sympathetic human, gets a full redemption arc and a happy ending where he’s reunited with his Howler wife who has been somehow scienced into being beautiful.

The end.