Review: The Incrementalists

Despite being a long-time Steven Brust fan, I had somehow missed his collaboration with Skyler White, The Incrementalists. I’ve now rectified that, and I’m glad I did. I found it entertaining; and on the intellectual level I found it fascinating both for what it is and for what it isn’t.

The “Incrementalists” of the title are a group of around two-hundred extremely long-lived men and women who are dedicated to the art of “meddling”: manipulating others by means of “switches”: emotional and sensory cues they collect for the people they wish to meddle with. The purpose of meddling is to make things better, a little at a time. Another skill of the Incrementalists is the preservation of memory and personality. Incrementalists can save memories in such a way that other Incrementalists can retrieve them; and in fact they have such long lives by body-stealing: by passing their memories along to new hosts when their old bodies die.

It’s all rather grisly, but generally voluntary; when an Incrementalist dies, a friend interviews potential “seconds” and fills them on the Incrementalist’s mission and powers. The candidate is informed that she might retain her own personality along with the new memories, or that the old personality might be dominant, replacing hers.

And this is, in fact, the reason the Incrementalists try to make things better: pure self-interest. No Incrementalist knows who he will be in his next life; so it’s in his best interests to use his vast experience to improve things for everyone.

The story concerns an Incrementalist named Phil, who has retained the same personality for almost 2000 years, and a young lady named Ren that he selects to receive the “stub” of his old lover Celeste…and things get messy indeed. What happens when a meddler meddles with the meddlers?

The story takes place in Las Vegas, and the whole setup unavoidably feels like something by Tim Powers. (This didn’t escape the authors; at one point early on in the novel, Phil kills some time reading poems by “Ashbless“.)

I said above that I found the book fascinating both for what it was and what it wasn’t. It’s got interesting characters and an interesting conceit, and the plot hinges on the implications of memory and meddling and all of the mechanisms of the Incrementalists when turned back on themselves. It’s tricky, and very well done.

But on the other hand, even after tens of thousands of years of experience the Incrementalists seem to have no very clear philosophy of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. In improving things they seem to be working in the dark, just as we mostly seem to. They have learned to meddle exceedingly well, but they seem not to have learned from any of the great minds of history. There’s a shallowness that strikes me as odd, as if the best they can do is repeat modern leftist pieties. (It’s not blatant, but the Incrementalists clearly worked for gay marriage, and are pretty sure they should have prevented Bush from stealing the election in Florida.) They argue about it some, but it’s pretty clear none of them know what they are doing, or what classic ethics really dictates. At best, there’s a sense from some of them that manipulation and body stealing aren’t quite the thing. I contrast this with a short story by Tim Powers from his collection Strange Itineraries about a somewhat similar group of body-stealing immortals in which the moral issues are much more sharply drawn.

Still, it’s an entertaining, thought-provoking book, and worth your time.