The Vindication of Man

Count to the Eschaton Sequence #5

by John C. Wright

Menelaus Montrose, having renewed his enmity with his immortal adversary, Ximen del Azarchel, awaits the return of the posthuman princess Rania, their shared lost love. Rania brings with her the judgment of the Dominions ruling the known cosmos, which will determine the fate of humanity, once and for all. Vindication or destruction? And if it is somehow both, what manner of future awaits them?

Genres: Science Fiction, Space Opera

353 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 22, 2016

About the author

John C. Wright (John Charles Justin Wright, born 1961) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy novels. A Nebula award finalist (for the fantasy novel Orphans of Chaos), he was called "this fledgling century's most important new SF talent" by Publishers Weekly (after publication of his debut novel, The Golden Age).

Reviews

[Kalin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were too many ages in this volume, and so too many introductory descriptions of Montrose getting his bearings; and so I started skipping again. But if you like grand ideas, you'll love it as much as the previous ones, if not more.

My favorite moments:

~ Yaaay! Mickey the Witch is back! :D

~ So! Here's why my Games bookshelf is sagging with weight:

Games alter outlook, introduce intellectual vectors, train the amygdala, and can be used to emulate behaviors, form metaphors, promote loyalties and sportsmanship. It was what my father, the original captain, never imagined. I don’t think even Narcís would have killed a man who had been his spinward goalie in the cargo-bay ball playoffs.

I feel vindicated. :P

~ Hehehe ... Mickey! Mickey! Mickey!

“(...) Do they still have priests, these days? I suppose they must.”
“There is a group that calls itself the Sacerdotal Order, which is under the protection of the Fifth Humans. They say they are the heirs of the Old, Strong religion, and the successors to Saint Peter, but their doctrines have grown confused and corrupt with time. They say Peter holds the Keys to Heaven and Hell. My people taught that Peter lives with the souls of dead children called the Lost Boys, and he never grows old and never completed the journey to the afterlife, but dwells in the great star Canopus, the second-brightest star to the right of Sirius, the Dog Star. The tiny and bright spirit who dwells with him shines her light and rings her bell and calls the lost and wandering ghosts to her. She died, sacrificing her life saving Peter, but is resurrected when the innocent clap their hands, for their faith brings the dead to life again. You can see from where these Sacerdotes derive their ideas and myths: all is but a holdover from the pagan roots of yore.”

~ The future is diverse indeed:

Their worlds were names from song and legend, bitter with nostalgia, and thoughts of homes forever lost: small and frozen Feast of Stephen, happiest of worlds, with its strange twin moons; sweltering, huge Nightspore, whose winds and weathers, temblors and tidal waves even Summer Kings could never tame; Joyous, whose masked and silent peoples spoke no names, carried no weapons, and kept no records; Euphrasy, the only world ever to repel the Myrmidons; slowly turning Aesculapius, a world of gardensmiths and tree sculptors, whose peoples during the flare times of their unstable star went mad and enacted strange crimes; and Aerecura, where the corpse of a god, dead in orbit, still moaned and murmured and disturbed the dreams of the unshielded; piteous and envied Penance, whose peoples walked in hair shirts through valleys clogged with diamond, opal, jacinth, emerald, weeping over their wealth and half-blinded by the ground glare; Dust, whose continents were smothered in a featureless dun powder from which the Aberrant and the Anarchist by thought alone could sculpt whatever things his frenzy or strange fantasy called forth, before the storms of dawn dispersed it; Schattenreich and Rime, twin worlds, one where ghosts outnumbered the living, the other where Reticent lordlings lived alone in lavish self-made museum-mansions, accompanied by scores of splinter personalities, skilled at every art and craft; and Here Be Monsters so aptly named.

~ The following discussion of finite (and, implicitly, infinite) games explains why I prefer cooperation and taking into account every participant's interests:

She showed them a simple game-theory equation, where the final move of any game, being anticipated by the players, would be taken into account in the penultimate move, and that move again be anticipated by the antepenultimate move, and so on for all the moves.
Since the final move of any game put the player beyond the retaliation of any further moves, each was under a strong incentive to be shortsighted and self-serving during that last move. But the move before that, anticipating this shortsightedness, was likewise under an incentive to be shortsighted, and so on. It was this shortsightedness, the mere fact that some crimes would never be punished, some insults never avenged, that permitted such acts to be perfectly rational strategies. In any finite game, all players had a final move.
Hence, all games allowed for at least some noncooperative moves. By analogy, all laws, even those that obtained between distant stars, had to allow for some degree of leniency and mercy, and some debts be forgiven. Some crimes to go unpunished, some relationships be permitted of one-sided exploitation (...).

Then it goes into an interesting direction:

Torment said, “How long will you pursue Rania before you give up hope?”
“What kind of bunghole puss-drippy question is that, lady? Never.”
Torment said, “And if the universe ends before you succeed?”
“I’ll break the damned universe, if it gets in my way.”
“So you see,” said Torment, “you are a player in an infinite game. There is no other end result for you, aside from finding her again. And once you have found her, what then? Does the love that prompted this pursuit cease, once it is no longer needed? No. Love is an infinite game. It admits of no selfishness, no shortsightedness. Anyone who makes a self-interested move in that game breaks the rules.”

~ To those of us vexed by Wright's strong opinions:

58 Eridani—Neodamode
A highly militarized and organized society known for its peaceful, disciplined, and highly industrious populations.

Rho Cancri [a.k.a. 55 Cancri]—Sciritaea
A highly militarized and organized society riven by continual tumults, intrigues, and civil wars.

... Perhaps we should always take them with a pinch of winks? ;)

[Suzannah Rowntree · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this second-last book in the COUNT TO THE ESCHATON series. One of the flaws inherent in the premise of the series, which has covered about 80,000 years into a far future ruled by galaxy-spanning superintelligences, is that most of the series has followed our hero Menelaus Montrose thawing himself from suspended animation and trying to figure out what happened to the cosmos while he was asleep. If you've seen MEMENTO, it's the same kind of jarring scene progression (wait, where am I? how did I get here? who are these people?) only moving forward chronologically rather than back, and no sooner have you managed to grasp what's going on in one timeframe with one set of supporting characters than you're shot X millennia forward into the new timeframe and the new supporting characters.

THE VINDICATION OF MAN, however, only really has two big scene shifts, and for the first time in several books the focus of most of the plot is on all three of the main characters: Montrose, his archenemy Del Azarchel, and his long-lost love Rania, who has returned triumphantly from vindicating man before a far-distant authority, liberating humanity from the Dominion of Hyades, an alien intelligence who had apparently claimed humanity's servitude. But not everything is the way it looks, and Wright has a number of genuinely twisty revelations to make.

He does revelations extremely well, by the way. Wright never just gives his characters (and by extension, the reader) plot-relevant information on a plate. Instead, each piece of information is revealed only after misdirection and battle, which means that everything comes as a plot twist and it's all immensely entertaining to read.

It all wraps up in an epic confrontation, setting up a final book that I can't wait to get my hands on.

THE VINDICATION OF MAN is John C Wright at his staggering, hard-sci-fi space-opera best. However, I don't recommend these books to many people on account of a fair bit of unsavoury content, low in this book but more apparent in others. Proceed with caution.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, a solid contribution to the series. I think Wright puts in too much plot sometimes. With his dense prose (which, however, helps create the complex future he imagines) it can sometimes be a little difficult to follow the story. Having said that, this latest book has a showdown we've all been waiting for, but it doesn't make things any better for Montrose... a symptom of good story-telling technique. And finally, he gives (as always) a captivating vision of the future, one which trumps both utopias and dystopias. If it doesn't quite come up to the level of Lewis' image of Heaven in "The Last Battle", it at least inspires a similar desire. That's probably the real reason I read and enjoy his books so much.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the adventure continues! Over the millennia. . .

I wouldn't try to read this without the earlier ones. For one thing, it's, like many other series, more a novel in several volumes than a series of books. The three sections here cover very different events that move it forward.

But it's hard to review also because it has a swerve after the first third that it's hard to talk about what happens after without spoilers.

I shall merely say that it includes a son's discovering his father's death because his mother bears a coat-of-arms appropriate to a widow; the reappearance of Mickey and a crucial role in negotiations; bees; a discussion of the significance of the Monument; conflict over an inheritance; a message mentioning two daughters, and more.

[Leigh Kimmel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a really interesting structure. If it hadn't been for the first four books being excellent and the sixth book being there waiting for me, there were several points at which I probably would've walled it.

It begins with Montrose being given a pin encoded with a message from Rania, sent from the region of M3, the Authority to which she was appealing to spare humanity. This message details the nightmarish voyage there, the attempt to produce "daughters" that might be able to decrypt the rest of the Monument, with horrific results, and then her arrival at the giant Dyson sphere around the central "brain," where she struggles to find a way to communicate to this alien intelligence that expected intelligent planets, not "talking animals."

Thus prepared, Montrose goes back into coldsleep to awaken a millennium later, as Rania is inbound. He walks across a snow-white Earth that may be in another ice age or covered with some new form of computronium. With his upgraded body he's able to see her ship as she draws closer to Earth -- but she can't wait for the huge lightsailer to make the journey, and she comes to him on a scallop shell in a sequence clearly meant to evoke Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. The happy couple embrace for a long-delayed wedding night and the scallop shell closes to grant them privacy.

Wow -- but wait a minute. How can we get the Happily Ever After we've been waiting for since the end of the first volume, and still have most of the book left?

I turn the page, and we're on a distant planet, with a character named Vigil Starmansson being visited by his mother, who tells him someone has burned out nine segments of his father's brain, and Vigil must now inherit. If it hadn't been for the previous book, in which the last part was from the POV of one of Montrose's many-times-great grand-nephews, the only thing that would've kept me from throwing that book straight at the wall was knowing it was a library book, and I didn't want to damage it.

Instead, I knew that something fishy was going on that would be revealed in due course, and forged on through the ambush and then the confrontation around the Table of Stability, in which it appears that anything the characters do to keep their oaths will also break them. If Vigil does his duty, he will kill the entire world, and everyone will die, guilty and innocent alike -- and in their rigidly stratified society, the vast majority of the dead will have had no say in the transgression.

But then we have a revelation -- the situation is not as it seems. Our old hero and villain cast aside their disguises and reveal that the Rania who arrived was in fact not the real one but a False Rania who brought a false peace of stagnation. A new plan is laid to starfare to Ain, the central brain of the Hyades, with the entire planet as their starship.

The next segment begins as they're approaching the end of the voyage. In order to compel Ain to negotiate with them, they're approaching at ramming speed -- and then Ain does some weird attotechnological maneuver and they are captured. There are some lengthy negotiations in the Monument language, translated for our benefit into English, and a disturbing revelation: Ain did not put the redacted Monument at the Diamond Star, and has no idea who did. But Ain is willing to send Montrose and Blackie on to Praesepe, Ain's liege in the False Rania's ship, in return for the worldship as a bride, and all the people aboard it as serfs.

After some gap in time and then a struggle to communicate with the intelligence at Praesepe, they learn a shocking new revelation: although they had known that the Monument was in fact redacted, which was why Rania struggled to decipher parts of it, they did not know what had been removed. In fact, it was the time factors on the Concubine Vector, showing that if there were no final move in game theory, there was no incentive to sharp dealing and exploitation. The redacted Monument, and others like it, appear to be disinformation, agitprop -- but by whom? But they'll send the ship on to M3 to seek the whereabouts of the true Rania.

And then comes the final shocker. Montrose awakens from coldsleep some time later to discover that the ship is badly off course and not operating properly. He confronts Blackie, and they engage in a bizarre duel in which Blackie sabotages the ship such that Montrose will be trapped forever aboard it as it heads out into deep space, never to be found again. The final pages of this volume are the ship's AI reconfiguring it into a sort of protective coffin around Montrose even as he tries to think of some way to salvage the situation.

Beginning writers are warned against the futile ending, in which the protagonist fails catastrophically at the end, with no way out. And if I didn't know that there was a sixth book, I'd really think that was exactly what this was -- an ending in which the entire point of the book was that the protagonist had just been screwed, and no, there will be no happy ending, just utter nihilistic futility.

However, with the sixth and final volume sitting on my desk, and knowing the author's fondness for Christian imagery, I'm thinking that this scene is intended to echo Good Friday, with the apparent disaster of the Crucifixion: the Messiah that was supposed to bring salvation has instead been executed by the Romans, and has now been shut away in a borrowed tomb.

Which suggests that the sixth volume will probably open with something that will evoke Easter Sunday, the empty tomb... and then where will it go?

[Daniel Cardoso · Rating 2 out of 5]

. . .

[Daniel Bensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to say, I was disappointed in this book, the 5th in the Count to the Eschaton series. That's because book 4 was very, very good, balancing personal and historical stories and keeping its promises in a way that book 5 did not.
Reading the book, I wondered often at it's alarming lack of editing. Someone needed to tell the Wright that certain events of series-defining import had to occur on screen. And there were several obvious typos. It's as if Tor took the rough draft of the manuscript and published it as is.
I think I'll still read the next book though.

[Johan Haneveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

John C. Wright possesses one of the most fertile imaginations in science fiction today. Seemingly effortless he conjures fantastical universes from thin air, providing luscious amounts of sense of wonder, imagery inspired by fairy tales as well as science, dozens of augmented human races, machine intelligences of unimaginable power and gigantic alien structures (dyson swarms and speres galore), give them some inner consistency and a basis in (albeit very speculative) science, add some metaphysical speculation and interesting philosophical questions about the nature of love and what is outside of our universe, and all described in a large vocabulary that only adds to the enchantment. And all serves as story basic as a fairy tale, that appeals to our core story telling instincts, about a love transcending the ages and a rivalry between two men not wiling to compromise. At this point in the series one cannot stop (especially as this book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger), and I'm waiting with baited breath for the final part of the series. Wrights grand scale imaginings have been a large influence on my own SF-stories (e.g. those in Conquistador), but I must admit I cannot reach his complexity and have to bow to his superiority in this. And he makes it look so easy! I'm a bit jealous honestly. My mind is blown again by this book that takes its characters to the edge of human occupied space, and beyond to other star clusters and even galaxies, and at the same time upturns one of the main plot points of the previous novels. Great stuff. If you, like me, have made it this far in the series, I need not convince you of reading on. If you haven't started reading, you'll have to start at the beginning, because jumping in at this point is madness.
Still, I cannot award this five stars. For a couple of reasons. One is that I found with Wrights golden age trilogy that it was mind blowing and fun reading it for the first time, but trying to reread it when the feeling of surprise is lost is harder. Without the sense of discovery a lot of those books turned into infodumps and explanation, and I fear for the same thing here. A lot of the story is brought in dialogues and conversations sometimes spanning centuries, where concepts are exchanged. But I think those are not that fun to reread in the future. The basic emotional content is just that ... too basic to be really that captivating a second time around. The second reason for a slight deduction of my score is that with all the imagination Wright possesses, and the easy with which he conjures up different versions of humanity, and its descendants, and new civilisations, he seems not to be able to imagine that men or women would ever break their biological and cultural programming (and those who want to do that often turn out to be villains). Women here are young, nubile, a bit flighty, and concerned with being obedient to their husbands, and men are rowdy, testosteron fuelled creatures, starting wars and conflicts. When there are important decisions to be made there are no women around, and the main female character Rania is absent, has little agency and serves as the price for the two main male characters. I know the author is a staunch conservative, and thinks these quailities to be some immutable laws. While I acknowledge there are differences between men and women, I do think the similarities between the sexes are greater, and a smaller part of each sex wants to conform to gender norms than the author seems to think. A lot of differences are cultural, and even if some were biological/instinctual - part of being human is transcending instinctual laws. Not acting according to the flesh, not listening to instinct, but using reason and compassion to change the course nature would take. As a christian, I think the author would have been able to see this, or just acknowledge that over 80.000 years strides could have been made in this so that the opportunity would exist for people (men and women) to not conform to societal or biological imperatives, but be more than they are expected to be. Women can be defined by more than their desire for a man. Marie Curie was free to not focus on the size of her breasts but be a scientist. Why is this room non existent in this future society? It irked me. The same way as being a man I want to experience the freedom to be free of the societal expectation to be a macho, to be violent or agressive. I want to be free to be non-virile, to be sensitive, and to be creative. For myself I think it is a failure of the imagination to bind far future characters to these distinctives, and demeaning for women and men both, and their human dignity. Because in the first place they are human and worthy of rescpect as individuals, with individual agency. Their nature as men or women (their gender) is a bit less important than their being human. On that note I'll leave my soap box, and end by saying that this did not mar my enjoyment of this book too much, and if you like to have your mouth on your feet and your mind blown by possibilities beyond your imagination, lovingly described, this series is heartily recommended.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story just keeps going and going, becoming more and more epic in scope as it goes. Our main character and his eternal (literally) nemesis are now dealing with intelligences that span entire solar systems (as in, have collected every particle of matter in a solar system and atomically rebuilt every particle into materials that can be used in conductive neural networks inhabiting fully-built dyson spheres, and the like). Fascinating in scope. I can't say I'm getting the fun, tongue-in-cheek vibe that was so great in books 1-3, but the story is still interesting to follow, and still definitely has surprises, including a whole dramatic storyline shift, which you don't usually get in a book 5 of a series.

[Jason]

Pacing is not one of Wright's strengths.

[Fred Pierre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drawing from the Isaac Asimov Foundation series, this is the middle of a long series about the future, projected out to infinity. Echoes of a future event ripple back. Can mankind remedy the judgment of artificial intelligences billions of times smarter than a human? In the end this is a story of trickery and deception, ending in an old-school duel with pistols, and that's both the success and the downfall of this story. It's obvious that the princess does not need saving, but the two suitors still feel the need to duel over her affections. That feels a bit anachronistic. The book is about anachronisms though, and about humans using their wits to compete in a giant puzzle created by the AI's.

The vocabulary makes this worth a read.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

And the Count to Infinity goes another twenty thousand years into the future, with intricate cultures being spun off without hardly trying.. Things we had thought before are abruptly upset, but our dauntless hero and anti-hero do not let this distract them from their enmity. I await the final volume with extreme impatience.

[Micheal Boudreaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Worthy Read

Wright is a master of strange, delightful, and terrible futures, and the Vindication of Man continues to unveil the compelling love story of Montrose and Rania across eons.

[Brian Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still as dense (and confusing) as ever but this time much better plotting and a huge revelation. Some really memorable dialogue as well!

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5 stars, I think. Whenever Montrose isn't onscreen I find it tough to get through until he returns.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This continues to be one of my favorite sci-fi​ series. It is a little more... elaborate in some of the semi-pseudoscience this literary universe than most series I've read lately. The first half of the second act of this book is kinda slow; the author tends to write in a way that makes such major story transitions jarring. This makes the beginning of the first book a little difficult to get into, and the middle of the second book a bit frustrating to follow. Each book progresses the story, but this one definitely delivers a dramatic climax and a feel for the ultimate conclusion to this story. I'm looking forward to it.

[Sheppard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a tough book to read and review. It started out optimistically and I honestly thought it was the final book of the series. It isn't, no other spoiler alerts. The middle of this book dragged and seemed pointless. The end picked up greatly and lived up to the incredible series thus far. I got a weird sensation with 40 pages to go.I hated the ending. But despite all, it gets 4 stars because the visualization is just the best, and I did laugh a little in the last section. Laughter was frequent in previous books. The author is top notch he will get another shot from me

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been an interesting series. The time and space this new installment spans is truly great. I look forward to the final book in the series.

[Robert Wigard · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a three and half star. While there was a good fight scene in it and the end of this installment lands on a good cliffhanger, book five continues the massive (the most massive I've ever read) info-dump that started in book three. The info-dumps are interesting most of the time in themselves, but you realize after awhile that three quarters of the book is discussion. I hope book six is more action oriented. Is this going to post on Facebook again?