Lady of Mazes

How can humans make meaning, when their every need is catered to by benevolent super-ai, technology has reached its end-point, and every style of art has been tried? Rather than the Culture's answer (parties, sex, and drugs), Schroeder posits that what humans need are *limits* on technology, to allow cultures to explore paths impossible under super-tech. Very clever premise and interesting characters navigating their world.

Lady of Mazes is an ambitious book--dense, challenging, and packed with ideas. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the storytelling is inadequate to cope with the richness and complexity of the ideas.

In the far future, on a ringworld named Teven Coronal, a young woman named Livia Kodaly--one of two survivors of an inexplicable apocalypse--learns about an insidious conspiracy to subvert the cultures of her isolated world and of the larger Archipelago of human societies. Gradually, she makes her way to the Archipelago and into the confusing push and pull of the powers-that-be. There, she discovers the secret that can save her people--and possibly destroy them too.

That's the capsule review. You'll notice that it's fairly content-free. That's show more because, sadly, I had tremendous difficulty following the story. Through the second half of the book, I honestly had little idea what was going on. I enjoyed the characters, I cared about their struggle, and I was very impressed with the universe Schroeder had created. But I was simply unable to sort out the narrative.

This is unfortunate, because Lady of Mazes is filled with important ideas about the cultural role of technology and of institutions. The inhabitants of Teven Coronal have chosen to live in heavily mediated virtual realities, each with its own culture, and yet occupying the same physical space while the inhabitants remain invisible to each other. Each reality ("manifold" in the book's usage) is governed by a narrative, and many have placed strict limits on admissible technologies so as to prevent disruption of the narrative. People can move freely from one manifold to another, but many choose not to. The disruption that Livia must deal with involves the breakdown of the barriers between manifolds, which results in the destruction of these unique cultures.

This contrasts with the Archipelago, which has a more-or-less unified culture but an entirely ad-hoc system of governance. When groups of humans organize themselves for a task, an AI spontaneously coalesces to coordinate their actions and to represent their interests to other groups. The open-source rules that govern the development of these entities and the interactions in society are constantly being tinkered with and refined--and one attempt at formulating new rules may be responsible for the breakdown of Teven's worlds.

These are deep and fascinating ideas. I greatly appreciated being made to think about how society organizes itself around particular values and narratives, and how future technologies might alter this process. But, in the end, that's not enough to make a good novel. You also need a coherent and compelling story. And, I'm sorry to say, Schroeder seemed unable to guide me through the narrative in such a way that I could keep track of everything. By the end of the book, I understood little of what was happening, and less about why it was happening.

I badly wanted to like this book, and I was disappointed. It gets three stars from me for the beauty and strength of its ideas and speculation. But as a story, it simply didn't work. show less

From Jo Walton's list of books that made her excited about scifi. I suppose I see why LoM ended on her list -- the exploration of the end stage of augmented reality/VR is good. For example, Schroeder has the wonderful concept of the 'cliff test'. You take people and change their subjective reality so it seems they are falling off a cliff. If you've been raised in customized VR, you assume it's an illusion. A normal human freaks out and has an adrenaline response. LoM envisages a society where, essentially, everyone would fail the cliff test. But despite much, much ingeniousness of similar quality, the basic story elements and characterization didn't grab me. As it became clear that it was trending towards a post-human deity vs. show more post-human deity slugfest I lost interest. show less

Schroeder is a fairly recent discovery for me. (Why is it that I tend to love Canadian SF authors? Do I have some sort of deep-seated genetic affinity?) I haven't read everything by him yet, but I've liked everything I've read so far. 'Lady of Mazes; is admittedly not my favorite selection by him so far, but I still quite liked it. It reminded me of Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder books - but better.

It took a while for me to get into it. The multi-layered virtual reality these characters live in is challenging to understand - and the reader gets dumped right in.However, once the spray from the splashdown settles, the plot picks up - and there are plenty of plots. Unravelling the various motivations and mysteries, as this virtual world show more unravels, is a lot of fun. show less

Hoo-boy, did I enjoy this book. I'll be buying a copy. It's not cyberpunk, but it's all about implanted cyberpresence and constantly mediated reality. It was practically homework, for my current course in HCI, and my Information Behaviour classes more generally. I wrote several huge paragraphs about it, which follow:

You guys, you guys, I read this cool science-fiction novel!

So I was feeling a little exhausted on Monday after staying up late and turning in lots of homework the night before, so I stayed offline the entire day and finished two library books. The second one turned out to be fascinatingly relevant to IB, so I figured I'd talk about the tech and ideas involved here.

ISBN: 0765312190,Lady of Mazes [no, I've only a slight idea show more about the title's meaning, sorry],
by Karl Schroeder

Disclaimer:
Hard-SF, so the macguffin is a technologically spawned philosophical idea, with perhaps a very slight resonance with space opera. (Despite being hard-SF, and perhaps arguably epic in spatial scope (though not in time, it all takes place within maybe a six-month period, excluding flashbacks), I didn't hate this book. It did not make me impatient, like many others. Probably because I loved the transhumanist, cyborg, jacked-in tech.)

Technology:
Everyone wears cybernetic/computer implants and is online all the time (except in the case of catastrophic hardware failure or minority extremism). Take some time to get used to that sentence, because that's actually not the cool or creative bit about this novel. What you should be getting used to there: immersive 3-D thought controlled interface indistinguishable from reality, rewinding all your conversations when necessary as if with TiVo (digital video recorder), while an 'agent' sim of yourself keeps up with the real-time component of the conversation. Having several conversations in several places using those agents. Stepping out of a conversation at a party and leaving a sim-agent behind to continue it for you. Asking your personalized customizable search agents to go find you things online and bring them back. Turning on and off your 'society' (buddy-list) if you are bored or want to be alone. Oh, and everyone has nanotech 'angel'shields so you can't accidentally hurt yourself much. Also none of this is cyberpunk, because the online things are portrayed as *normal*. Also of course, because the concept of offline doesn't really exist anymore, to contrast.
Excerpt:
Livia didn't want to talk to any of the real inhabitants of the estate right now, so she excluded them from her sensorium.
...
Conversations bubbled around her as she scowled at the mirror. Some dialogues were happening now in the manor, but most were the peers, laughing and chattering in diverse places back home. Some voices were real people's; some were imitations performed by AIs. They were filtered for relevance by Livia's agents so that she only got the gist of what was happening today...


The actually cool philosophical bit:
The protagonist comes from a world where separate countries / utopian-societies / philosophies co-exist. None of them can see each other (due to, if you like, cyber-filters), though for practical reasons their territories rarely overlap in space. They've got it set up, though, so that nobody can harmfully visit another society. Think of the Star Trek Prime Directive, here. Each one is a state of mind, so the way to visit from one to another is to shift perceptions, thoughts, and values. Once you've done that, you're "there". The girl from the city has to start consciously noticing all the trees, and hearing the animals in the forest, and eventually she's walking into the pseudo"Indian" village. Lots of people stay in their birth societies because they find that switch too difficult.

Later in the novel, she visits a more libertarian world, where they don't have these cyber-filters between societies. Indeed, they have no consensus society views of the world at all. Every single person *there* has their very own cyberview of the world and can swap to their friends' views at a moment's whim.

Excerpt:
Livia reached out with her senses and will, determined not to notice anything of Westerhaven: no buildings, no contrails. Her change of attitude and attention was noted by her neural implants and the mechology known as the *tech-locks*; where there had been impenetrable underbrush, a pathway appeared leading into the woods.


The big philosophical question:
Whether it's better to have that anarchic freedom to modify one's own environment, or whether it's better to keep some form on things to spur creativity. show less

(Alistair) After Ventus - which, alas, I read before I started booklogging, so I cannot give you a reference, here - I had pretty much decided to myself that whatever books Karl Schroeder wrote were probably worth reading, and so I would proceed on that assumption.

Lady of Mazes (in the same universe as Ventus, but with little overlap) does not disappoint me, in this respect.

On the one hand, considered solely as plot and character, the story of our three (primary and secondaries) protagonists caught up in the invasion of their home by an unseen, incomprehensible enemy and their attempt to save it, the book is merely excellent. But, rather, it is as a novel of ideas that it particularly shines.

Mr. Schroeder is unafraid to play with the show more big ideas: all-pervasive augmented reality - "inscape" - in various forms, including forms capable of such personalization as to effectively be self-reinforcing solipsism; posthuman entities; memetically-encoded intelligence. And some really fascinating ideas, in my opinion, about potential trans- and post-human political institutions that are themselves worth the cover price of the book (although I shall not give more details here, to avoid spoilering). As I would have said post-Ventus, I greatly admire his ability to build a coherent world and a believable future.

SPOILERS AT WEB SITE -- READ FIRST.

Exorbitantly recommended to transhumanists, SF readers, and the philosophically inclined.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2008/12/lady_of_mazes_karl_schroede... )

[Amy] I've been mulling over what I might say about this book ever since I was about halfway though it. See, it's a remarkably excellent book about very interesting people who live in a universe whose rules make me crazy. The author appears to hold some beliefs about the nature of technology and its effects on people that I find both implausible and offensive, but which I cannot really discuss without being spoileriffic.

I believe my review will be limited to this: This is the most astonishingly technophobic bunch of essentially-transhumans I have ever encountered.
[http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2009/03/lady_of_mazes_karl_schroeder.html] show less

Schroeder is my new favorite sf author. This was MUCH better than Ventus, which was pretty good. Seldom have I seen a sf book that was so well plotted. All the mysteries are neatly explained by the end, in a very satisfying way. The only thing he could’ve improved was the wimpy title. I ran right out—er, logged right on to the library site—and reserved his new one, Sun of Suns.