the entirety of fine structure is available for free here.
fine structure by qntm is the first book of the year and in this series of book reviews, thus already answering one of the key questions for the series: yes, it counts as a book even if it’s not on paper.
i do not exclude the possibility that i will review things that are not books. however, i am specifically and particularly interested in going back to reading more capital b books, because i do not appreciate how dumb social media makes me feel and looking at screens is already a big enough part of my job.
this is also connected to the (non-)choice of starting with this book. i say non-choice because, well, i read this book for the first time as i was scrambling to do my final rewrite of my master’s thesis, which was a rather unpleasant experience by way of some circumstances mostly outside of my control. I ended up reading fine structure by way of absolute escapism, my brain at one point fully unable to put to paper anything and screaming at me that what it needed was Different. one evening i picked up there is no antimemetics division again – i’ll write about that one too, one of these days – and then thought huh. let’s try this one.
so fine structure is a book about ultradimensional beings, mostly, i would say.
while the author insists it’s not that great,1 i say it’s pretty good, and it has some extremely bright bright spots. allow me to list [some of] them below for you.
this review will contain mild spoilers. i will try not to discuss main plot points but rather just Vibes and Vibe-adjacent things such as Themes.
1. the first chapter. damn if this book doesn’t start off strong. “unbelievable scenes“, its first chapter, makes for a good sampler for this work – if you are reading this review, please head there first, it’s a short one. get through it and come back.
so, if you find yourself enjoying it, then the rest of the book might be for you. to be clear, the book is not all in that style. a part of me wishes it were, because damn if this language isn’t crunchy. it tickles the brain in just the right way, challenges you to imagine something –
one of my favourite pastimes in highschool was Perspective. i’d close my eyes and zoom out, from where i was, seeing the ground move and then get smaller and smaller in my mind until i was looking at the earth, spinning around, in our beautiful empty void of a universe –
– something, beyond what by definition you are capable of knowing. what is colour in the seventy-ninth dimension? and how could i not love this opening – the music of the spheres, surrounding you the reader, immediately enveloping you into a tale of multidimensional beauty and freedom.
and then it plunges down –
– just to then plummet back in, a vertiginous dive, almost feeling the wind along the way, the heat and the acceleration and the impossible speed, back into where i was. not particularly original, i know, but still a pretty good pastime if you don’t feel like being a cool kid.
– the entirety of this first chapter is a descent – wonderful structure! give space a meaning! align it with your characters! dante falls to hell and so had lucifer before him, and so did man falling from eden – what a rich concept, the fall. I find it interesting because a lot of this book seems to be about god, or at least this is what some say in the comment sections – yes, this book has a comment section, because it’s also a series of blog posts on a website. by the way, this chapter of the book (and a few others) were originally posted as unconnected from the broader story and then revealed to be part of it. not gimmicky at all, because i could not in all honesty imagine a better setup for things to come.
if i have one piece of criticism, it’s that i wish i could float longer in those early paragraphs, see more of that beauty.
It’s like billion-voice music. The cities here are woven from constantly singing superstrings. The trees and rivers are wondrous creations in colours I could recall the words for but choose not to, created from fabrics there are no words for. There are birds, I notice, which seem, like the rest of their world, to be made of sound.
i wish there was more literature that stays suspended in this type of space, describing the unthinkable, imagining the above. scifi, i suppose, in a way, but in the same way that a kandinsky is scifi.
but we cannot enjoy the music of the spheres for long –
I could see it all, given precisely one eternity, but I have a Planck heartbeat.
– there is a war to fight – “time” to go down. we have pain, beyond the era of pain –
Every half-imaginary needle in my mind is jammed firmly at the far end of critical and the alarms are punching right through my filters.
– and we have an enemy –
All it has is black-hot rage and a ferocious desire for survival and more lividly brandished firepower than my entire civilisation combined.
– and we have focus.
A path clears in my mind, ringed with green lights only I can see.
i love this writing. i find it so precise. the trajectory, that dizzying speed, the enveloping of the two ultracorporeal bodies fighting against each other and against a sort of self-directed gravity pulling them down in minor dimensions – an open box, a trap, sucking them both down as if in a vacuum,
that’s one hell of a way to place a protagonist and an antagonist on earth.
2. “the astronomer’s loss”. this is another short, and relatively freestanding, chapter. read it and come back, if you can spare two minutes. i simply don’t want to quote it here in its entirety, and it’s so elegantly efficient that it really needs no trimming. just read it.
it gets better when, at the end of the story, you understand who the astronomer was talking to!
4. “faiilure mode”. another chapter you can mostly read on its own, but really, at this point, why would you?
This discovery was profoundly shocking. Quantum physics often has this effect, even on its close friends. Meaning/medium duality is like physically extracting the moral from what is really just a page of ink. It is like painting a hole in the ground and then diving through it.
We discovered this. And then we built machines to do it for real.
And somebody didn’t like that.
this chapter reads like a short story, a thrilling adventure, a puzzle box, idk, it’s 1am. it is also the first most explicit statement of the thesis of the book, and of how that relates to the various sets of characters we’ve seen, though that won’t become fully clear until the end.
i love it. i love ashmore’s letter. i love how he Knows. for a slow, doomed moment, he just Knows. he sees through the veil; he talks beyond dimensions, bridges our humans to some other interesting entities wandering through the pages of the book, permeating its world, erupting like lava through its crust in varied and somewhat uncontrollable bursts. but, for a moment, he Knows. he talks to them, he sees them, and AGH don’t you just LOVE it when someone manages to stare back at the abyss, and tell him hey, i may be just a man, but i know what you’re up to.
5. “sundown”. this is when the plot goes WOOHOOOOO and the reader just goes WOOOOO BOY.
“What did you see? Did we all just see the same thing?” Murphy.
“I don’t know I just saw! I can’t– I can’t even think about it properly!” Seph.
“What are you?” asks Tom Muoka. Ching turns around and looks up. It looks like a bomb hit the five of them. Muoka is sitting with his back against the dome, feet stretched out in front of him, leaning against the GEWR panels, head lolling as if half-dead, clutching one shoulder, panting, seemingly exhausted. Murphy is on his knees, struggling to get up. Seph is supporting herself on the wall around the edge of the Receiver building’s roof, clutching her immense mane of hair with one hand.
Not five. Four. Ching looks up at the top of the dome and Mitch is not visible. “Where is he?”
just. just read the rest of this book so this makes sense to you i swear.
anyways, i’ll write the rest of this tomorrow.
- I cannot find the specific quote right now, but somewhere on the website qntm goes “if this is the best science fiction you’ve read, you really need to go and read some [insert big authors]”. orrr maybe it’s under the antimemetics division? ↩︎