"Ra" by qntm - Book Review

I enjoyed this book. It had immediate personal relevance, kicking off in my old-university city of Nottingham! In the 90s, a little while before the time I was there studying physics. With its central female protagonist called Laura (weirdly also the name of a girlfriend I had there), its brief summary of her mundanely relatable romance spoke truth to me, too. Anyway... 

"Ra" initially presents as a kind of alternate history, where magic exists as a new kind of science. Only recently taught to undergraduates, in either applied or theoretical courses. Described as esoteric and remote, for the majority of the population. Much like quantum physics in the real world. In both cases, they've been quietly revolutionary for civilisation. 

Our protagonist makes the exception to this, with ostentatious, hyper-competent implementation of its possibilities. Magic is cast by speaking a kind of programmer pseudo-code, with an ancient Samarian (or some such) flavour. While simultaneously holding complex concepts in mind.

It's no coincidence there's an echo of "The Laundry Files" mathematical demonology, here; qntm has clearly been strongly influenced by several of my favourite sci-fi authors, including Charles Stross, who's tweet put me onto them in the first place.

In this work, qntm feels especially like Stross's protégé. Where qntm's first novel, "There is No Anti-memetics Department", which I also enjoyed, had a more haunted feel, thematically reminiscent of one aspect of Alastair Reynold's "Redemption Ark". Both have very high concept plots, focused on narrative development.

It iterates further in a similar direction to Stross, with a hard sci-fi feel that discretely sets aside a little more physical realism to enable slicker exploration of slightly more extreme concepts. Sometimes assuming (correctly here) that the reader is already familiar with ultra-future-tech concepts. Which are thrown in, at some points, without slowing down for detailed explanation.

The relative weaknesses of Stross's writing are also further exemplified. With qntm fielding barely adequate characterisations and dialogue that is occasionally strained slightly beyond their writing competence. At points of rapid narrative inflection, particularly. But, with near-aphantasia, I'm no fan of lengthy descriptions, and so can forgive these weaknesses.

The action scenes helped maintain my attention, too. One felt especially anime and fun, as the scope of the world expands and power use escalates rapidly. But I was a little disappointed that no scenes after that quite matched it, for me.

The pacing did feel bogged down in the mid-section, where I struggled a little. It felt like there may have been some bloat that a good editor could have cut away. It's a long book, twice the size of their first work. Perhaps that's why there was an increasing repetition of bits and pieces (a pet peeve of mine), to remind the reader what had happened earlier?

Maybe it should have been cut into two books. Certainly, the narrative takes a big twist in perspective, half way through, pretty much hopping sci-fi genres. Possibly making it hard to market, without enormous spoilers.

Our initial protagonist's twin sister, Natalie, takes a much more central role later on. The reserved, cautious scientist, to Laura's wizz-bang practitioning. There's a definite contrasting of the scientist verses engineer/inventor approach to problem solving. Which I also appreciated, have studied systems engineering, after physics, so noticed the more gung-ho, try it and see, attitude.

I couldn't help but feel the sisters represented different aspects of the author's own cognition and personality. Specifically, Laura fits more with ADHD (impatient, impulsive, dynamic, emotional) vs the Natalie's more typical ASD (socially distant, masking, abstract core values, over-planning, etc). Both high functioning, high IQ, of course. Perhaps this is me projecting, but I think the shoe may fit us both.

Overall, I definitely recommend this book. And I'm now moving onto qntm's next work, "Fine Structure Constant".

Super-mega-SPOILER specific criticisms: The 'nonlocality' hyper-technology, that ultimately enables the lesser magic we first see, is basically space magic itself. But I take this as an acceptable axiom.

What's less believable is that all of humanity apparently chose to remain constrained to live within this solar system, on myriad identical Earths, for thousands of years. Until the conflagration. It's a tritely neat story setting, which I'd more expect from a blockbuster movie. But again: axiom.

This setting and history is laid out with somewhat threadbare exposition. Literally saying it was much more complex than that, but hand-waving that away without the writing flair to leave a whiff of hidden depth.

This is presented in an encounter with a future/historical woman who turns out to be our protagonists' mother. But there's no emotional, physical or characteristic connection between her and the mother they knew growing up. Maybe because both have such shallow portrayals. Arguably, this may also reflect Natalie's non-neurotypical perspective, in particular.

The narrative explicitly grapples with the difficulty of telling a tale of solar-system transforming technology, much like Stross's Accelerando. Contriving to follow base human characters, who are relatable for readers. But who would have outliers; an outsider perspective, compared to the majority of conscious persons, entities, i.e. inside the mega-computer's simulated environments. (Except they may be inside, too.)

Speaking of which, it glossed over the destruction and use of planets other than Earth, for the Matryoshka brain. A kind of Earth-first equivalent of American movie domestic setting myopia. I guess, *if* humans are only on the Earths, then those are the targets to be eliminated with most prejudice. To avoid fightback.

But it all felt like stick-figure diagrams, compared to events in Rajeneimi's more flavourful, imaginative, detailed and technically impressive Quantum Thief trilogy. Who's plot doesn't technically reach as high an energy budget as here, on the Kardashev scale.

The recursion that's written into the story arc is kinda cute. Such that it's canonical that (some of) the protagonists are explicitly aware that they can't tell if they are in the first (real) iteration of events, or a simulated repetition that would naturally follow. A good old bit of mind-fuckery.

It felt wrong (impossible) that the victorious 200 meat-space humans were able to rebuild the entire solar system to an 10'000 year earlier state. Even with this non-locality space-magic. That supposedly didn't break physical laws, like the speed of light. I feel like it would have broken laws of entropy, though I guess they could have just taken mass-energy from the sun, unnoticed.

Rebuilding an entire 1970s Earth full of billions of individual humans, from algorithms, is surely anathema to their entire cause, of real humanity...? Having the whole edifice supposedly being indefinitely resistant to any scientific scrutiny, despite being littered with nano-probes that read human thought, to translate it into magical actions... Hmm. It's all a bit of space opera fun, I guess. Not being so rigid with the "hard" aspect of the sci-fi to stifle nimble exploration of super-normal intellectual stimuli, for geeks like myself.