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<\/em>, Max Gladstone paints a picture of a fascinating world where gods are a commodity to be bought and sold, where \u201csoulstuff\u201d is the coin of the realm, and where knowledge of the Craft can be a key to immortality\u2026of a sort.<\/p>\nThe city of Alt Coulumb came out of the God Wars with one of its gods intact, Kos the Everburning. In return for the worship of his people, Kos provides heat and steam power to the citizens of Alt Coulumb; he is also the hub of a vast network of power relationships with other gods and god-like beings across the planet. Oh, and he has just died. If he isn\u2019t revived in some form by the turn of the new moon, the city will descend into chaos and the finances of the globe will take a severe hit.<\/p>\n
Tara Abernathy is a Craftwoman, one capable of manipulating the soulstuff that enlivens every person. With a little careful effort she can restore the recently dead to a kind of life; of course, it\u2019s necessary to trim away the fiddly bits of the soul so as to leave energy for basic functions. When she is brought to Alt Coulumb by her mentor she assumes that the job will be to do much the same for Kos, stripping away the damaged identity and higher features of the personality and leaving a kind of spiritual machine that can do the essential work that Kos did. Something similar was done at the end of the God War to Kos\u2019 dead consort Seris, who was responsible for civic order; the result was the cold, blind soul machine called Justice, whose unstoppable Blacksuits police the streets of Alt Coulumb.<\/p>\n
But it seems that Kos the Everburning was forcibly extinguished, and it\u2019s up to Tara to investigate the murder\u2026while preventing her own destruction at the hands of her enemies. In a normal mystery it\u2019s often useful to follow the money; in this case, Kos died because too much of his soulstuff was withdrawn by business partners at just the right moment. How was it engineered? And why was Kos weak enough to be vulnerable?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m always surprised when a fantasy author manages to come up with something I\u2019ve not seen before, but Gladstone has done it. In this case, the nifty conceit is twofold. First, there\u2019s the notion that spirit\u2014soulstuff\u2014can be manipulated technologically just as matter is manipulated. Manipulating soulstuff is how the gods of the nations do their thing, and being incredibly powerful beings of pure soulstuff they are naturally good at it. But some decades prior to the start of the book, human beings began to learn how to manipulate it themselves; this led to the God Wars, as the gods attempted to preserve their monopoly, and in the end to a new world order in which the men and women of the Craft work with soulstuff on a daily basis, and some of them, the Deathless Kings, are nearly divine in stature. Gods linger in some parts of the globe.<\/p>\n
The second piece is the realization that economics still applies. A god derives power\u2014soulstuff\u2014from the worship of his believers. He provides services to them in return, which increases the amount of worship. A successful god is nothing more nor less than a going concern. <\/p>\n
Soulstuff represents value that is transferred between entities, based on agreements. And if agreements are broken, redress needs to be available. And so the whole legal machinery of contracts and accounting are brought to bear: in the new world order, there are judges, and courts, and contracts, and ledgers, and many other familiar terms\u2026but the reality of them is weirdly and frighteningly different than you\u2019d expect.<\/p>\n
This is the first book in a series, the Craft Sequence; I discovered it through Leah Libresco\u2019s interview with Max Gladstone a week or so ago<\/a>. I definitely intend to pick up the second book, Two Serpents Rise<\/a> First, though I enjoyed Tara and the other primary viewpoint character, chain-smoking Novice Technician Abelard whose cigarette flames are an homage to his god, they always seemed a little distant. I didn\u2019t identify with them or care as much about them as I would expect to in a book like this. I\u2019m not sure how to fix it, but I think Gladstone needs to work on that.<\/p>\n Second, it\u2019s not clear whether the book is set in a different world altogether, or on our world in the far future. It would seem to be the former, as we simply don\u2019t have gods like Kos, who provides steam heat to his followers, or Selis, who polices the streets; we never have. Nor are there any place names that settle the question. On the other hand but most of the characters have names that wouldn\u2019t look out of place in the town where I live. I found it a bit jarring.<\/p>\n Third, he\u2019s got Bad Fantasy Church syndrome. Authors of fantasy novels always seem to use the Catholic Church as their template for creating any kind of religion whatever, ignoring the fact that Catholicism really is very unlike anything that came before it, or anything that has emerged subsequently that doesn\u2019t derive from it. So the Church (the word itself is a purely Judaeo-Christian notion) of Kos is led by a Technician Cardinal who has spent much time hearing confessions, so we\u2019re told. Why confessions? There\u2019s no hint of an afterlife in this system; Kos is clearly a being of this world, not the next, and while he wants faithful devotion to him, there\u2019s no obvious reason why he would be concerned in any other way with the morality of his followers. So why use Catholic categories? It\u2019s lazy, is what it is.<\/p>\n But all that said, this is still an interesting tale, fascinating and chilling and surprising by turns, and while it has its flaws Gladstone definitely stuck the dismount. Recommended, if you like this sort of thing.<\/p>\n In Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone paints a picture of a fascinating world where gods are a commodity to be bought and sold, where \u201csoulstuff\u201d is the coin of the realm, and where knowledge of the Craft can be a key to immortality\u2026of a sort. The city of Alt Coulumb came out of the God […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[23,44],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-books","tag-fantasy"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=crwo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00CQY7VMS\")
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