Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

This one was a Hugo nominee five years ago or so, and a real physical copy has been sitting on my bookshelf forever.

It’s a sci-fi book I’ve opened a few times, and I believe I’ve started it twice, and both times, lost interest before the book got hopping.

This time, I’ve loaded it on my e-reader. That’s right, that actually dramatically improves the likelihood that I’ll read a book, because it has backlighting and I usually have it with me.

And…. yeah, this one’s hard to get through.

It’s a slog.

I don’t like it so much.

The Synopsis (Spoilers!)

Minh, an elderly ecological engineer (with octopus legs) develops a pitch deck for an ecological survey of the Tigris and the Euphrates: except because it’s the Hot New Thing, they want to do the survey using time travel. Time travel is really hot with investors right now.

They’re sliding time travel into the pitch deck like crypto in 2018 or AI in 2024. Kiki, a young human who was raised in the Calgary Hab, helps, with a combination of “hungry, excitable youngster energy” and by actually being pretty good at her job. She wishes that Minh would listen to her. Before they head out, they pick out the last person in their party, Hamid, who’s personality is that he is obsessed with horses.

Eventually, and after about 50% of the book, they win the bid, and go back in time with Fabian, their Time Travel Guy. The rules of time travel are “this is a pocket branch of time that collapses and disappears as soon as we leave it, and nothing we do here matters”, so Fabian is pretty chill about murdering locals.

Minh is pretty shell-shocked by Fabian’s chill local-murdering, hurting the quality of her data analysis.

There’s side-story involving Shulgi, a warrior king from the past, which is becoming more and more clear: some sort of bad disaster befalls Minh, Kiki, Hamid, and Fabian, and he’s trying to sneak into the fray and kill them all.

Kiki threatens Fabian: she’s going to reveal to the world how blasé the time travel company is about casually murdering people who are already causally doomed. As a result, Fabian sabotages the trip, causing a little disaster (the one in Shulgi’s story) and leaving Kiki, Minh and Hamid in the doomed past timeline.

Fabian heads off into the future to gank a Kiki, Minh, and Hamid from the near-past to replace the ones he just causally doomed. Minh finally listens to Kiki’s advice, and sings a song (?) which allows them to briefly be saved from Shulgi, who was about to kill them. The story ends, abruptly, with Kiki, Minh, and Hamid trapped in a doomed timeline. Sequel hook, or just bad ending?

Pastwatch

So, there are a lot of parallels here with a relatively little known Orson Scott Card novel, “Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus”.

It’s a good read, and deeply flawed in that Orson Scott Cardy way that leaves a bad taste in your mouth after the fact.

The name of the book makes it sound like it’s gonna be pretty hardcore Columbus apologia: and by and large, it is. They way this book tells it, Columbus was a rockstar sex god genius, and if we could only have cured him of that troublesome Racism (racism that we have beaten in the modern era, obviously), history itself could have been saved from a lot of unnecessary bloodshed.

you nailed it, Orson, you solved history by taking our modern post-racist ideals and sharing them with a catholic who was otherwise unimpeachably great /s

The futures of Pastwatch and Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach are pretty much identical: massive advances in human technology and literal actual time travel but at-best limited success at re-terraforming Earth.

The key differences between Pastwatch and Gods are in how Time Travel works: in Gods, time travel creates a doomed pocket dimension that the future travellers can modify or plunder at will because it doesn’t matter. (sidenote: this works like those islands in Animal Crossing that appear just so that you can plunder them, creates an expensive-but-infinite supply of high value materials like gold, and also allows for a weird kind of instant cloning because people can just be ganked from the near past.)

Pastwatch’s time travel worked a different way: if they changed even the tiniest detail in the past, the entire future would (and does) immediately collapse and disappear: so if they do agree it’s useful to change things (which they eventually DO) they have to choose one moment with the maximum possible impact, and also sacrifice themselves for the idea of a better future.

As a result, they decide to go back in time, inoculate the North Americans against the European slate of diseases, and slap Christopher Columbus around until he learns that Caribbeans are people who can be converted to Christianity rather than slaves.

The result? Possibly a better future, as most of North America is not, in fact, massacred by Europeans, and instead we get a better society that combines the civilization and enlightened Christianity of Europe, the “not being a racist” of future-Europeans, and the “[FILE PHOTO NOT FOUND]” of the Caribbean people. (sidenote: i don’t think orson could think of anything that the caribbeans could bring to the enlightened europeans aside from “kindness”, a reflection of the already massive amount of colonial apologia in this book)

Should you read Pastwatch? Hell no! If you’re wondering if hyper-conservative Orson Scott Card finds a bunch of ways to make an alt-history super gross, (on top of the gross things I’ve already said) he absolutely does.

I can promise you that a world ruled by the Tlaxcalans or the Mexica – or even the Maya, for that matter – would never have given rise to the democratic and tolerant and scientific values that eventually emerged from European culture... (sidenote: colonial apologia)

In what is perhaps the only cool twist in the book, they discover this by determining that it has already happened once, which would be so cool, if the twist wasn’t that “Columbus’ journey was engineered by an alt-future in which, as a result of a lack of Christopher Columbus’s massacre, the Tlaxcalans conquered Europe and brought a horrifying future of endless human sacrifice with them. (sidenote: colonial apologia) ”

Anyways, the reason I bring it up is just because it’s impossible to read Gods without thinking of Pastwatch, a book with… just so many weird little parallels, and yet totally different directions and vibes. Did Kelly Robson read Pastwatch and think “but what if the same concept but completely different?” I don’t know.

The Good

• This is the author’s first book: it’s pretty good for an author’s first book.
• Setting: look, a lot of sci-fi is powered by a cool setting and cool technology, and Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach has a cool setting and cool technology.
• • Solarpunk future: lots of cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, and far-future sci-fi out there, but the setting of “medium-future transitioning from apocalypse to ecological reclamation” is pretty barren, still, giving this book a strong niche to occupy.
• • Cool prosthetics: Minh, our main character, has octopus legs (cool), fine-grained ability to control and monitor her body and brain’s internal chemistry (cool) and holographic dummies that run a Minh-like AI (and the ability to jump smoothly between her own person and those dummies) to allow her to be in many places at once. Cool.
• • Habs & Hells: When Earth’s atmosphere itself started to collapse, humanity retreated underground, to cramped but technologically advanced hells. Now there are some limited abovegraound habs, the lightly-occupied but still cramped focus of intense ecological engineering.
• • Fat Babies & Plague Babies old folk are really small and skinny, on account of the plagues. Kids are taller, and fatter, because they grew up in more prosperous times. That’s a fun detail.
• Minh Listens to Kiki at the End: that’s the character development that’s supposed to happen for it to be a story.

The Bad

Oh, there are lots of problems.

• Bureaucracy: Most of this book takes place firmly nestled in the process of trying to get funding to go do a project. The story’s character development takes a back seat to what’s really important: the intricacies of putting together a cohesive pitch deck.
  • Imagine Lord of the Rings if the first 6000 pages were spent in the shire, talking about how to convince the elves to let everyone go to Mordor.
  • Not convincing the elves, even - just talking about how to convince them.
  • and then they get to Mordor and unpack all of their stuff and immediately die
• Time Travel: I’m going to say it, unless it’s handled very, very carefully, time travel sucks ass. It sucks ass in this story, too.
  • The story seems like it’s trying to both handwave around the shaky ethics of time travel but also make the shaky ethics of time travel a huge part of the story which is a really weird combination.
  • Creating whole doomed pocket universes every time you time travel is obviously evil, right?
  • Like, if you create a timeline where everybody is going to vanish the minute you leave that timeline, you killed millions of people the moment you time travelled to the past.
  • Once you’ve done that, the blood is already on your hands: killing a few people in person with your bare hands is basically window dressing.
    • So Fabian is right - it doesn’t much matter if he kills a few people.
    • but also wrong - time travel itself is massively immoral and involves untold human sacrifice, nobody should do it.
    • but the main characters are willing to do the time travel - putting them on roughly the same moral ground as Fabian.
    • but they’re not willing to casually murder people in the past, which grosses them out.
    • which makes me think that their moral stance - and the moral stance of this book - is roughly equivalent to being the kind of person who loves eating meat but thinks that hunting is eeeeevil.
    • “killing people is wrong but it’s way MORE wrong if we have to see it”
  • The reason people aren’t talking about this is because the time travel company has a NDA but … like, they take a lot of people on tourist trips to the past, clearly they’ll have to answer these questions again and again and somebody is going to leak these details.
  • These elements are introduced but they’re not really argued or discussed so much. As I mentioned before: the story feels like it handwaves these details away until it suddenly decides that they’re the most important part of the story.
• Story Elements Introduced That Are Interesting But Don’t Develop or Pay Off: oh boy are there a lot of these.
  • Kiki is so dedicated to the project that she has her legs amputated so that she’ll be more likely to fit in the limited cargo window of the time travel device. She spends a little bit of time getting used to her cool leg prosthesis.
  • Minh keeps fussing with her endocrine system even against the advice of her doctors. The story indicates that eventually this is going to become a problem. It is never a problem.
• Ancient Mesopotamia: the worldbuilding in The Fantastic Bureaucracy of Future Calgary is fabulously detailed and exhaustive - on the other hand, Shulgi’s story and Ancient Mesopotamia in general are about as well fleshed out as a rough napkin sketch. Ancient Mesopotamia is cool! Let me learn about it!
• The Ending: Look, this novella clearly intended to have a sequel or even kick off a trilogy. It feels incomplete because it is. You can’t just suddenly end your story by trapping all of the characters in a doomed parallel universe, battered but still alive. That’s why so much of the story feels disjointed and unfinished: because the story literally stops at a point that feels an awful lot like “most of the way through Act 2”. But it’s been six years, and despite being announced a decade ago, we’re not done the sequel yet.

The Ugly

Anyways: my final verdict on this story is that it introduces a lot of cool, heady ideas and then doesn’t do much of interest with them. It’s all set-up and no pay-off. I really want someone to tell a story just set in the Solarpunk Calgary and Bangladesh Hell of this world, and nuts to the time travel.

Bonus points if they do something more exciting than prepare a really good PowerPoint deck.