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Ambassador of Progress
Like Earthborne humanity before them, they thought they were the center of the Universe. But there was a significant difference between them and the old-time they were not alone...
- GenresScience FictionFiction
432 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
29 people are currently reading
154 people want to read
About the author
Walter Jon Williams
238 books895 followersWalter Jon Williams has published twenty novels and short fiction collections. Most are science fiction or fantasy -Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, Aristoi, Metropolitan, City on Fire to name just a few - a few are historical adventures, and the most recent, The Rift, is a disaster novel in which "I just basically pound a part of the planet down to bedrock." And that's just the opening chapters. Walter holds a fourth-degree black belt in Kenpo Karate, and also enjoys sailing and scuba diving. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, Kathy Hedges.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 26, 2020
AOP, first published in 1984, is I believe Williams first SFF novel, and it shows. Basically, this is a first contact novel with a twist, in that the first contact comes from another human planet. It seems 1000s of years ago humanity invented a FTL drive and set out to colonize the stars. Unfortunately, after a while the FTL drive did something dire to the cosmos and eventually ripped up space and time. The surviving people on various planets entered a new stone age, but some planets were damaged more than others. One planet recovered/reinvented high tech and starts to send out new starships to explore other human planets; these new starships are not FTL, and the main protagonist, Fiona the ambassador, arrives at the new planet after 600 years in stasis. She (and other ambassadors) find a society-- the Abessas-- mired in a quasi-feudal era, with several city-states along the coast forming a loose alliance. Another group, the Brodaini, arrived in Abessas lands several decades ago after fleeing from a civil war on another continent. The Brodaini have a military caste society and reached an accord with the Abessas; Brodaini have enclaves in the Abessas cities in return for serving as standing armies.
What Fiona and the other ambassadors actually want from the abessas does not become clear until the very end; they state at first that they only want to disseminate new knowledge and ideas as long as they are freely shared around the world. Meanwhile, the bulk of the book concerns various political intrigues among the cities states and the Brodaini. In one coastal city, the Brodaini seize power in a coup and the other cities send armies to put down the rebels. Can the Brodaini be trusted? You get the idea.
Williams seemed to try to make this novel more complicated than it needed to be. Both the Abessas and Brodaini have their own language and vocabulary (handy 'dictionary' in the back of the book) and Williams drops foreign phrases throughout the book. Furthermore, Fiona's character is not developed very well, not enough for me to actually care much about her. With a better editor, this book could have been very good; as it is, it demonstrates Williams promise as an author and he went on to write some very fine SFF. 2.5 stars rounding to 3.
What Fiona and the other ambassadors actually want from the abessas does not become clear until the very end; they state at first that they only want to disseminate new knowledge and ideas as long as they are freely shared around the world. Meanwhile, the bulk of the book concerns various political intrigues among the cities states and the Brodaini. In one coastal city, the Brodaini seize power in a coup and the other cities send armies to put down the rebels. Can the Brodaini be trusted? You get the idea.
Williams seemed to try to make this novel more complicated than it needed to be. Both the Abessas and Brodaini have their own language and vocabulary (handy 'dictionary' in the back of the book) and Williams drops foreign phrases throughout the book. Furthermore, Fiona's character is not developed very well, not enough for me to actually care much about her. With a better editor, this book could have been very good; as it is, it demonstrates Williams promise as an author and he went on to write some very fine SFF. 2.5 stars rounding to 3.
March 6, 2018
I have a complicated relationship with Walter John Williams' complicated books; I don't love them and I don't dislike them. They make me feel unintelligent when I can't follow parts of them; in this one, that wasn't because of the ideas, but because of all the language with specific cultural meanings that gets heaped upon the reader early on. His protagonists aren't straightforwardly admirable, but they're also not straightforwardly despicable.
This one is, I think, part of the group of backlist titles that he's reissuing as self-pub. It shows some signs of needing more revision and more editing, and I wonder if he used the final version of the manuscript (though there are also some errors characteristic of scanning; "and" is rendered as "arid" a couple of times, for example, and "I" as "1"). He sometimes repeats information in almost adjacent paragraphs or the same sentence. He also makes a couple of common homonym errors (discrete/discreet, complimenting/complementing), and there's some dubious punctuation in places, particularly in dialog, where the tag is sometimes treated as a separate sentence. There's a wrong character name (the character Necias "jabbed a blunt finger into Necias' chest"), a character name misspelled (Delilla/Delilah), and other assorted typos. I've reported most of these using the Kindle "report content error" feature, so hopefully they'll get fixed.
The setting is much lower tech than Williams usually uses, and in some ways it reads like a fantasy novel; armies with swords and spears fighting over control of city-states. But the ambassador of the title has come from another human-settled world to raise the technological level of this world for a purpose which, when revealed, is disturbing.
It's, in a sense, post-apocalyptic, in that humans have used a space-warping technology to settle other planets, and it's gone horribly wrong and flung those planets back into the Dark Ages (more or less), killing billions. This is backstory and setup for the situation, though, not the focus of the book. The technologically-advanced world the ambassador comes from has discovered the hard way that you can't just give people technology and bring them up to speed; it leads to cultural collapse.
That was the part of the book I felt was a bit thin, and even thinner was the justification for not sharing medical knowledge or knowledge of sanitation: because disease was the only thing preventing disastrous overpopulation. That's really not how population works, though perhaps that wasn't widely known when this book was originally written.
The heart of the plot is that refugee members of a warrior society, with a powerful system of honour that their merchant hosts and employers find incomprehensible, are manoeuvring for political advantage, and there's a three-way culture clash between warriors, merchants, and aliens in which everyone gets manipulated, everyone gets screwed over, and nobody ends up happy, even though they all get things they want. Not my preferred type of plot, to be honest. Yes, it has nuance and depth, and the people are like real people in that they're a mixture of principle and weakness, but... I just prefer something more idealistic, myself. It's a taste thing.
I went back and forth over whether this was a three-star or four-star book. It's good enough and engaging enough that I nearly gave it four stars, despite some editing issues, a failure of suspension of disbelief over the population thing, and my personal lack of enthusiasm for the grimness of the plot, but in the end decided on three.
This one is, I think, part of the group of backlist titles that he's reissuing as self-pub. It shows some signs of needing more revision and more editing, and I wonder if he used the final version of the manuscript (though there are also some errors characteristic of scanning; "and" is rendered as "arid" a couple of times, for example, and "I" as "1"). He sometimes repeats information in almost adjacent paragraphs or the same sentence. He also makes a couple of common homonym errors (discrete/discreet, complimenting/complementing), and there's some dubious punctuation in places, particularly in dialog, where the tag is sometimes treated as a separate sentence. There's a wrong character name (the character Necias "jabbed a blunt finger into Necias' chest"), a character name misspelled (Delilla/Delilah), and other assorted typos. I've reported most of these using the Kindle "report content error" feature, so hopefully they'll get fixed.
The setting is much lower tech than Williams usually uses, and in some ways it reads like a fantasy novel; armies with swords and spears fighting over control of city-states. But the ambassador of the title has come from another human-settled world to raise the technological level of this world for a purpose which, when revealed, is disturbing.
It's, in a sense, post-apocalyptic, in that humans have used a space-warping technology to settle other planets, and it's gone horribly wrong and flung those planets back into the Dark Ages (more or less), killing billions. This is backstory and setup for the situation, though, not the focus of the book. The technologically-advanced world the ambassador comes from has discovered the hard way that you can't just give people technology and bring them up to speed; it leads to cultural collapse.
That was the part of the book I felt was a bit thin, and even thinner was the justification for not sharing medical knowledge or knowledge of sanitation: because disease was the only thing preventing disastrous overpopulation. That's really not how population works, though perhaps that wasn't widely known when this book was originally written.
The heart of the plot is that refugee members of a warrior society, with a powerful system of honour that their merchant hosts and employers find incomprehensible, are manoeuvring for political advantage, and there's a three-way culture clash between warriors, merchants, and aliens in which everyone gets manipulated, everyone gets screwed over, and nobody ends up happy, even though they all get things they want. Not my preferred type of plot, to be honest. Yes, it has nuance and depth, and the people are like real people in that they're a mixture of principle and weakness, but... I just prefer something more idealistic, myself. It's a taste thing.
I went back and forth over whether this was a three-star or four-star book. It's good enough and engaging enough that I nearly gave it four stars, despite some editing issues, a failure of suspension of disbelief over the population thing, and my personal lack of enthusiasm for the grimness of the plot, but in the end decided on three.
August 4, 2018
Reads like a missing sci-fi novel from an older era, but in a good way; the trope of a starfaring traveller going to a planet at a medieval level of society and finding themselves in the middle of events was an oft-used one, and this novella does a good job of telling a story in that mode with the same nuances and philosophical complications that the best of those stories had—and the ending may even be better than the author seems to understand it to be.
September 24, 2012
Good SF with a nice twist at the end.
You can always count on Walter Jon Williams to deliver a good story.
You can always count on Walter Jon Williams to deliver a good story.
October 18, 2019
First novels, aside from the flukes like Neuromancer, are generally journeyman works--the author has yet to fully grasp not only his writing style, but the demands that 300 pages require of an SF plot. Though Ambassador of Progress isn't Williams first novel, it his his first SF novel and the problems stem from working within that genre. Williams has little trouble with style, but his plot is too thin for 300 pages, much less the 420 that the book actually ends up being.
Ambassador of Progress bears a striking resemblance to some of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels. The protagonist is an off-world female who wishes to open trade between her advanced culture and the backworlds natives. Along the way, she shows her self-sufficiency as a woman and her inefficiency as an ambassador. Thendara House all over, right?
The redeeming quality of Ambassador of Progress is Williams' divergence from his Bradleyesque theme with a trick ending. Bradley wouldn't dare to use this trick because she wants to leave herself open to write another head-banging feminist tract, but Williams' object is to end his story, plot, and theme in one book. The concept is a bit naive--primarily the idea that war can be waged over interstellar distances--but Williams' point is well-taken, and should be summed for those who wish (rightly) to skip this over-long novel: Culture which are technologically advance are not always culturally advanced. (Take, for example, the United States.)
Ambassador of Progress bears a striking resemblance to some of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels. The protagonist is an off-world female who wishes to open trade between her advanced culture and the backworlds natives. Along the way, she shows her self-sufficiency as a woman and her inefficiency as an ambassador. Thendara House all over, right?
The redeeming quality of Ambassador of Progress is Williams' divergence from his Bradleyesque theme with a trick ending. Bradley wouldn't dare to use this trick because she wants to leave herself open to write another head-banging feminist tract, but Williams' object is to end his story, plot, and theme in one book. The concept is a bit naive--primarily the idea that war can be waged over interstellar distances--but Williams' point is well-taken, and should be summed for those who wish (rightly) to skip this over-long novel: Culture which are technologically advance are not always culturally advanced. (Take, for example, the United States.)
December 15, 2012
I really enjoy this book, and I always forget that it's written by WJW -- it has the feel of a Melissa Scott novel to me. It's about the different values that shape different cultures, what happens when those cultures come into contact, and how individuals and cultures do or do not compromise or stretch those values when necessity seems to require it.
I particularly like the use of language in this book. The fundamental value-terms in the two cultures -- one a warrior culture, the other a merchant culture -- are left untranslated, so the reader as well as the initial viewpoint character, the ambassador from the stars, gets to gradually figure out the meaning by context. (There's a glossary in the back of the book, which is where it belongs. :) )
I particularly like the use of language in this book. The fundamental value-terms in the two cultures -- one a warrior culture, the other a merchant culture -- are left untranslated, so the reader as well as the initial viewpoint character, the ambassador from the stars, gets to gradually figure out the meaning by context. (There's a glossary in the back of the book, which is where it belongs. :) )
June 26, 2018
I'm a HUGE fan of WJW but this one disappointed me a little. The main character seemed easily manipulated for such an advanced person and the "bad guy" is never really seen.
May 28, 2025
3⭐️ A Good Book/Unexceptional
It's an enjoyable book about one group helping another achieve great things. It focuses less on science fiction elements. It began with a captivating unknown world and a daring mystery mission, then transitioned to a medieval-style fantasy with political power struggles and war.
Favorite Quote: "Our triumphs are insignificant; our knowledge pointless. It's all been done before." -Campas, Ambassador of Progress
It's an enjoyable book about one group helping another achieve great things. It focuses less on science fiction elements. It began with a captivating unknown world and a daring mystery mission, then transitioned to a medieval-style fantasy with political power struggles and war.
Favorite Quote: "Our triumphs are insignificant; our knowledge pointless. It's all been done before." -Campas, Ambassador of Progress
December 28, 2023
A very clever combination of two different types of story; one has ambassadors from an advanced civilisation coming to a technically primitive one, and the other (more interesting one) is a complicated story about feudal obligations and warrior honour. And yet the two work together in a convincing way, resulting in a book that is gripping and very well-written.
July 15, 2019
First book I fully read from this author, great from beginning to end.
June 7, 2012
I'm not familiar with Walter John Williams, though I've heard him referenced as a cyberpunk author. Ambassador of Progress isn't that genre, though some cyberpunk elements are present. Instead, Ambassador seems to be Williams trying his hand at a first-contact SF.
The plot might be cynically described as answering the question: "What if Molly Millions took an ambassadorship in Feudal Space China?" Setting and plot are established in the opening pages by dallying in the inner monologue of an ambassador from planet Igralla, of a re-assembling network of human worlds, to another human-inhabited planet, one which has lost spaceflight and regained many of the medieval conceits of its ancient Earthling ancestors. The ambassador Fiona arrives in the Elva, the height of cultural, political and economic sophistication on the planet. Infiltrating a cosmopolitan city ruled by a forward-thinking minister whose inner world we will also be privy to, Fiona takes part in a planet-wide coordinated greeting which disillusions the natives of their solitude in the universe. No Prime Directive—the people of Igralla are all to keen to advance other (human) cultures.
This is a novel of encounters with alien cultures, and as a foil both for the spacefaring Igralla and the ruling culture, we have the Brodaini, a caste-bound warrior society, displaced from overseas. The Brodaini clang with brazen similarity to a stereotyped feudal Japan, albeit with more gender equality. They exhibit fierce clan loyalty, disdain for life and complicated concepts of honor, which prove hard to convey outside their language. It is in their conflict with the surrounding culture that Fiona is drawn into. From them we also draw another major character, Tegestu, an aging warlord fretting at the future of his landless people.
The presence of an alien ambassador predictably excites superstitious responses, common to the genre (like CJ Cherryh's Foreigner/Invader/Inheritor trilogy), including the rise of a cult promising transportation to an offworld nirvana, but these are handled briefly and I'm tempted to view them as perfunctory performance of the cliches of this subgenre, included only so they won't be conspicuous by their absence. Likewise absent is much of the meat I'd hoped for in a novel with so anthropological a premise. The alien cultures (all three) are not very deeply etched. The Brodaini give Fiona contrasts to remark upon, but for many things, art and poetry for instance, we are told of rather than shown. Differences in language and translation difficulties are likewise mentioned, but rarely relevant.
The climax involves carnage and treachery, which Williams shows himself to be a fair hand at, and some revelations which clear up nagging questions (such as why an ambassador from an advanced alien culture is so lethally equipped), and here Williams has no problem maintaining interest. But even here the writing doesn't have the piezo-electric crackle of Bester or Sturgeon. Altogether, Ambassador of Progress is serviceable: slow to build, but certainly not painful (unlike certain icons from my youth, like The Sword of Shannara. If I'd read this book at the age of fifteen instead of twenty-eight, I'd probably remember it more fondly.
The plot might be cynically described as answering the question: "What if Molly Millions took an ambassadorship in Feudal Space China?" Setting and plot are established in the opening pages by dallying in the inner monologue of an ambassador from planet Igralla, of a re-assembling network of human worlds, to another human-inhabited planet, one which has lost spaceflight and regained many of the medieval conceits of its ancient Earthling ancestors. The ambassador Fiona arrives in the Elva, the height of cultural, political and economic sophistication on the planet. Infiltrating a cosmopolitan city ruled by a forward-thinking minister whose inner world we will also be privy to, Fiona takes part in a planet-wide coordinated greeting which disillusions the natives of their solitude in the universe. No Prime Directive—the people of Igralla are all to keen to advance other (human) cultures.
This is a novel of encounters with alien cultures, and as a foil both for the spacefaring Igralla and the ruling culture, we have the Brodaini, a caste-bound warrior society, displaced from overseas. The Brodaini clang with brazen similarity to a stereotyped feudal Japan, albeit with more gender equality. They exhibit fierce clan loyalty, disdain for life and complicated concepts of honor, which prove hard to convey outside their language. It is in their conflict with the surrounding culture that Fiona is drawn into. From them we also draw another major character, Tegestu, an aging warlord fretting at the future of his landless people.
The presence of an alien ambassador predictably excites superstitious responses, common to the genre (like CJ Cherryh's Foreigner/Invader/Inheritor trilogy), including the rise of a cult promising transportation to an offworld nirvana, but these are handled briefly and I'm tempted to view them as perfunctory performance of the cliches of this subgenre, included only so they won't be conspicuous by their absence. Likewise absent is much of the meat I'd hoped for in a novel with so anthropological a premise. The alien cultures (all three) are not very deeply etched. The Brodaini give Fiona contrasts to remark upon, but for many things, art and poetry for instance, we are told of rather than shown. Differences in language and translation difficulties are likewise mentioned, but rarely relevant.
The climax involves carnage and treachery, which Williams shows himself to be a fair hand at, and some revelations which clear up nagging questions (such as why an ambassador from an advanced alien culture is so lethally equipped), and here Williams has no problem maintaining interest. But even here the writing doesn't have the piezo-electric crackle of Bester or Sturgeon. Altogether, Ambassador of Progress is serviceable: slow to build, but certainly not painful (unlike certain icons from my youth, like The Sword of Shannara. If I'd read this book at the age of fifteen instead of twenty-eight, I'd probably remember it more fondly.
June 15, 2022
Walter Jon Williams's first SF novel already shows his skill in drawing characters, his thoughtfulness about the realities of medieval-era warfare, and his careful plotting. I can imagine he would do some things differently now, but the novel holds up really well almost 40 years later.
January 26, 2018
No, no, no. Far too much telling and not enough showing. Typical rookie errors: new names, titles, world details, piled up indiscriminately causing information overload. (My own error in early drafts of "Mindbenders"! Can understand my readers' reactions now.) Ground to a halt at 6%!
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews