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Purgatory Mount
An interstellar craft is decelerating after its century-long voyage. Its destination is V538 Aurigae ?, a now-empty planet dominated by one gigantic megastructure, a conical mountain of such height that its summit is high above the atmosphere. The ship's crew of five hope to discover how the long-departed builders made such a colossal thing, and why: a space elevator? a temple? a work of art? Its resemblance to the mountain of purgatory lead the crew to call this world Dante.
In our near future, the United States is falling apart. A neurotoxin has interfered with the memory function of many of the population, leaving them reliant on their phones as makeshift memory prostheses. But life goes on. For Ottoline Barragão, a regular kid juggling school and her friends and her beehives in the back garden, things are about to get very dangerous, chased across the north-east by competing groups, each willing to do whatever it takes to get inside Ottoline's private network and recover the secret inside.
Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts's first SF novel for three years, combines wry space opera and a fast-paced thriller in equal measure. It is a novel about memory and atonement, about exploration and passion, and like all of Roberts's novels it's not quite like anything else.
In our near future, the United States is falling apart. A neurotoxin has interfered with the memory function of many of the population, leaving them reliant on their phones as makeshift memory prostheses. But life goes on. For Ottoline Barragão, a regular kid juggling school and her friends and her beehives in the back garden, things are about to get very dangerous, chased across the north-east by competing groups, each willing to do whatever it takes to get inside Ottoline's private network and recover the secret inside.
Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts's first SF novel for three years, combines wry space opera and a fast-paced thriller in equal measure. It is a novel about memory and atonement, about exploration and passion, and like all of Roberts's novels it's not quite like anything else.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 4, 2021
53 people are currently reading
1468 people want to read
About the author
Adam Roberts
258 books559 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Adam Roberts (born 1965) is an academic, critic and novelist. He also writes parodies under the pseudonyms of A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts and Don Brine. He also blogs at The Valve, a group blog devoted to literature and cultural studies.
He has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Adam Roberts has been nominated twice for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001, for his debut novel, Salt, and in 2007, for Gradisil.
Adam Roberts (born 1965) is an academic, critic and novelist. He also writes parodies under the pseudonyms of A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts and Don Brine. He also blogs at The Valve, a group blog devoted to literature and cultural studies.
He has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Adam Roberts has been nominated twice for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001, for his debut novel, Salt, and in 2007, for Gradisil.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
February 13, 2021
I have mixed feelings about it, and I feel cheated somehow. I will explain.
It started a bit like Clarke's "2001: A space odyssey" reloaded, meaning we have a megastructure on a faraway planet, and we also have hal. A crew of five enhanced humans are on the way to research this mountain, which doesn't seem to be natural. Up until 20% my interest gradually grew, and I couldn't wait to see what is it with that structure. I've built up scenarios, waiting to see which one will materialize.
Then suddenly, the story shifts 180 degrees and we find ourselves in a raging civil war which devastes the United States. We follow a 16 years old geek girl and her friends, which are hunted by two different suspicious agencies for something which apparently can change the course of war.
Then in the last 20% we are back in space, on that faraway planet and its misterious mountain.
Two entirely different stories, which at some point do have a minor connection to bind the space story to the dystopian one in the middle, but not the other way around. And it was not enough to relate the two to a satisfying conclusion.
I can't give more details without spoiling the ending, all I can say is that the climax was not there for me; the journey was not enough this time.
However, the premise of the first story was great; too bad . The middle story was better from this pov, and I got really surprised by the twist which I did not see coming. I especially appreciated the mocking of smartphone addicts; it's bitter and funny at the same time. I think it could have been much better as a story on its own, because it has nothing to do with the other.
But this is Adam Roberts we are talking about, and his works are never what appear to be. As much as I love his articles and reviews, I just can't not feeling dissapointed by this book. The philosophic musings, the references to religion, Dante's works mixed with Middle Earth's hints were hard to process. It's a social and philosophical allegory disguised as a sf story, and for readers which like philosophy more than science, it could be a more appealing read than it was for me.
>>> ARC received thanks to Orion Publishing Group / Gollancz via NetGalley <<<
It started a bit like Clarke's "2001: A space odyssey" reloaded, meaning we have a megastructure on a faraway planet, and we also have hal. A crew of five enhanced humans are on the way to research this mountain, which doesn't seem to be natural. Up until 20% my interest gradually grew, and I couldn't wait to see what is it with that structure. I've built up scenarios, waiting to see which one will materialize.
Then suddenly, the story shifts 180 degrees and we find ourselves in a raging civil war which devastes the United States. We follow a 16 years old geek girl and her friends, which are hunted by two different suspicious agencies for something which apparently can change the course of war.
Then in the last 20% we are back in space, on that faraway planet and its misterious mountain.
Two entirely different stories, which at some point do have a minor connection to bind the space story to the dystopian one in the middle, but not the other way around. And it was not enough to relate the two to a satisfying conclusion.
I can't give more details without spoiling the ending, all I can say is that the climax was not there for me; the journey was not enough this time.
However, the premise of the first story was great; too bad . The middle story was better from this pov, and I got really surprised by the twist which I did not see coming. I especially appreciated the mocking of smartphone addicts; it's bitter and funny at the same time. I think it could have been much better as a story on its own, because it has nothing to do with the other.
But this is Adam Roberts we are talking about, and his works are never what appear to be. As much as I love his articles and reviews, I just can't not feeling dissapointed by this book. The philosophic musings, the references to religion, Dante's works mixed with Middle Earth's hints were hard to process. It's a social and philosophical allegory disguised as a sf story, and for readers which like philosophy more than science, it could be a more appealing read than it was for me.
>>> ARC received thanks to Orion Publishing Group / Gollancz via NetGalley <<<
February 5, 2021
Do you like Dante's Inferno? Would you like to read reflective criticism of Inferno disguised as high concept science fiction? If you do, then boy do I have approximately one tenth of a book for you.
Purgatory Mount is a rather strange novel that mashes together the themes of three of Roberts' earlier novels into a lopsided treatise on sin and redemption that's never quite as good as the sum of its parts.
It begins with a riff on avant garde transhuman in the vein of STONE, as a crew of five more or less immortal humans-turned-demi-gods explore an alien megastructure found in the far reaches of space.
Shortly after we're introduced to the character B, a member of a tribe of pygmies or baseline humans that exist as part of the ship's ecosystem and as an occasional snacks for the "gods." This kind of primitive man interprets advanced technology as magic narrative is very similar to the Roberts' excellent and divisive ON.
Finally it dips into New Model Army territory with the story of Otty and Gomery, two teens fleeing competing government agencies during the onset of a second American civil war. This narrative makes up the bulk of the novel, and is easily the most fleshed out of the three. Roberts charts the decline of the US into anarchy and slaughter with a an eye for detail and a wry sense of humour.
Unfortunately the remaining storyline feel perfunctory, despite their massive increase in scope. If you're hoping to find out exactly what the megastructure is or how B comes to terms with the gods he worships being his distant cousins, you'll come away disappointed. Serving as both the intro and coda of the novel, these narratives feel more like short stories tacked onto a more traditional story, and while they do an admirable job of conveying the thematic climax of the story, they do so at the expense of bringing it to a satisfying conclusion.
Ultimately, Purgatory Mount is a little more introspective than Roberts' usual razor sharp Sci fi work, but it still retains the pessimism and wry irony that makes his work standout. Just don't expect to come away from this one entirely satisfied.
Purgatory Mount is a rather strange novel that mashes together the themes of three of Roberts' earlier novels into a lopsided treatise on sin and redemption that's never quite as good as the sum of its parts.
It begins with a riff on avant garde transhuman in the vein of STONE, as a crew of five more or less immortal humans-turned-demi-gods explore an alien megastructure found in the far reaches of space.
Shortly after we're introduced to the character B, a member of a tribe of pygmies or baseline humans that exist as part of the ship's ecosystem and as an occasional snacks for the "gods." This kind of primitive man interprets advanced technology as magic narrative is very similar to the Roberts' excellent and divisive ON.
Finally it dips into New Model Army territory with the story of Otty and Gomery, two teens fleeing competing government agencies during the onset of a second American civil war. This narrative makes up the bulk of the novel, and is easily the most fleshed out of the three. Roberts charts the decline of the US into anarchy and slaughter with a an eye for detail and a wry sense of humour.
Unfortunately the remaining storyline feel perfunctory, despite their massive increase in scope. If you're hoping to find out exactly what the megastructure is or how B comes to terms with the gods he worships being his distant cousins, you'll come away disappointed. Serving as both the intro and coda of the novel, these narratives feel more like short stories tacked onto a more traditional story, and while they do an admirable job of conveying the thematic climax of the story, they do so at the expense of bringing it to a satisfying conclusion.
Ultimately, Purgatory Mount is a little more introspective than Roberts' usual razor sharp Sci fi work, but it still retains the pessimism and wry irony that makes his work standout. Just don't expect to come away from this one entirely satisfied.
June 2, 2022
Absolutely fascinated by plot structure, writing style and the philosophical topic of atonement.
May 10, 2022
This is a strange SF novel by British writer Adam Roberts. I read it as a part of monthly reading for May 2022 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group. This book is nominated for the British SF Association Award in 2022, the author has already won the award three times, but the last two – in 2016 and 2021 for his non-fiction related to SFF genre.
The story starts as an ordinary far-future hard SF (e.g. no faster-than-light travel) and depicts a space-ship Forward and its ‘team’, five meta-humans named after Greek gods. Here readers meet with ‘breaking a fourth wall’ – in order for us, readers to understand the team we are given Greek gods’ names: their fellow crew members called them Pan. To be clear (and at the risk of mere pedantry), the name ‘Pan’ was not the one they actually used. The name they actually used referenced a figure from a different culture-text altogether, one whose mere composition is hundreds of years in the future as I write this. Pan is an approximation, although a reasonable one. They were a figure gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word) and given responsibility over beasts, birds and plants, but who pursued that responsibility with a zeal that tipped them over into, as the others saw it, eccentricity.
So, it not only references Greek gods for our understanding but also assumes that we are SF readers – the reference to Arthur C. Clarke’s law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Forward has 5 persons as its crew, but also an AI called hal (reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL-9000 I guess) and a varied biome, including pygs, which are part of crew’s diet, even despite they aren’t pig but pygmies. The ship travels to investigate a strange artifact – a mountain-like pillar on a conical base, rising 142 km above the surface of the planet, far above the atmosphere and into space. Presumably, therefore, the artifact represented an alien space elevator, or at least the remnants of one, the tech so high that even these future humans cannot replicate it. Because the structure is reminiscent of Dante’s the mountain of Purgatory, hence the name.
Then our story shifts from the crew of gods to pygs, more precisely a man/pyg named B and his life on the ship, his veneration of gods, his daily living and problems. Moreover, not only pygs are sentient enough to talk, but cows and even chickens, even if the later while talkative and very stupid. So it seems we, the readers, get ourself another generation ship story, not a new rope, after all, Robert A. Heinlein published Orphans in the Sky in 1963…
Wrong! The story’s setting shifts again, this time much more dramatically – there is a near future (the 2030s) in The United States of Amnesia, where the US is on the brink of civil war and there is a group of five teenagers, who have an own version of internet with something extremely important hidden there. So, we follow the story of one of the teens, a girl Ottoline Barragão, who is from a Christian family, keeps bees and salvages copper wire for their internet. As a person, who can access to the thing hidden inside, she is captured by one of the factions, formally of the federal government. As an additional important issue in this world there are a lot of people damaged by memory-destroying neonicotinoids, initially used as pesticides and later as bio-weapon. if unassisted such people are like patients with Alzheimer’s, but these one have at least a partial solution – they are (brain?) linked to their iPhones, which work like an external memory.
This is a very unusual story, with the ‘space’ part in line with classic SF and the US of Amnesia part closer to techno-thriller like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. The mix is partially explained at the end, but it isn’t supplied on a platter, one has to think it over. And it is great when fiction makes one think! Recommended.
The story starts as an ordinary far-future hard SF (e.g. no faster-than-light travel) and depicts a space-ship Forward and its ‘team’, five meta-humans named after Greek gods. Here readers meet with ‘breaking a fourth wall’ – in order for us, readers to understand the team we are given Greek gods’ names: their fellow crew members called them Pan. To be clear (and at the risk of mere pedantry), the name ‘Pan’ was not the one they actually used. The name they actually used referenced a figure from a different culture-text altogether, one whose mere composition is hundreds of years in the future as I write this. Pan is an approximation, although a reasonable one. They were a figure gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word) and given responsibility over beasts, birds and plants, but who pursued that responsibility with a zeal that tipped them over into, as the others saw it, eccentricity.
So, it not only references Greek gods for our understanding but also assumes that we are SF readers – the reference to Arthur C. Clarke’s law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Forward has 5 persons as its crew, but also an AI called hal (reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL-9000 I guess) and a varied biome, including pygs, which are part of crew’s diet, even despite they aren’t pig but pygmies. The ship travels to investigate a strange artifact – a mountain-like pillar on a conical base, rising 142 km above the surface of the planet, far above the atmosphere and into space. Presumably, therefore, the artifact represented an alien space elevator, or at least the remnants of one, the tech so high that even these future humans cannot replicate it. Because the structure is reminiscent of Dante’s the mountain of Purgatory, hence the name.
Then our story shifts from the crew of gods to pygs, more precisely a man/pyg named B and his life on the ship, his veneration of gods, his daily living and problems. Moreover, not only pygs are sentient enough to talk, but cows and even chickens, even if the later while talkative and very stupid. So it seems we, the readers, get ourself another generation ship story, not a new rope, after all, Robert A. Heinlein published Orphans in the Sky in 1963…
Wrong! The story’s setting shifts again, this time much more dramatically – there is a near future (the 2030s) in The United States of Amnesia, where the US is on the brink of civil war and there is a group of five teenagers, who have an own version of internet with something extremely important hidden there. So, we follow the story of one of the teens, a girl Ottoline Barragão, who is from a Christian family, keeps bees and salvages copper wire for their internet. As a person, who can access to the thing hidden inside, she is captured by one of the factions, formally of the federal government. As an additional important issue in this world there are a lot of people damaged by memory-destroying neonicotinoids, initially used as pesticides and later as bio-weapon. if unassisted such people are like patients with Alzheimer’s, but these one have at least a partial solution – they are (brain?) linked to their iPhones, which work like an external memory.
This is a very unusual story, with the ‘space’ part in line with classic SF and the US of Amnesia part closer to techno-thriller like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. The mix is partially explained at the end, but it isn’t supplied on a platter, one has to think it over. And it is great when fiction makes one think! Recommended.
February 4, 2021
Purgatory Mount is a complex and philosophical science fiction novel one would expect from a professor of English literature. It’s also a terrifying image of near future USA and an imaginative vision of far future of the humanity.
This is not a simple read. It presupposes a working knowledge of Dante, medieval Christianity and modern Catholicism—particularly the ideas of original sin and purgatory—the pantheon of ancient Greece, and the Lord of the Rings. It’s not an easy concoction and it doesn’t always work. This could be, as the author tells in the afterword, because the elements from the Middle Earth had to be replaced with the Greek pantheon for legal reasons, but I don’t think it would’ve made a great difference for the reader. What we have is non-Christian entities philosophising about Christianity, which doesn’t make for an easy first chapter.
The story is told in three parts that, according to Roberts, reflect Dante’s vision of afterlife: hell, purgatory and heaven. Of the three, hell and heaven exist outside time, and the purgatory in the temporal world, i.e. is subject to change. This isn’t immediately obvious to the reader—or even after reading the afterword—but time does play a role in the story.
The first and last parts take place in far future on a generation ship orbiting a dying planet that features an enormous tower. It has lured five entities forty lightyears from earth to study and profit from it. They call themselves human, but they have a lifespan of tens of thousands of years, bodies that are more machine than organic, and the ability to bend time to their will. Consequently, they consider themselves gods. They are named after Greek gods Zeus, Apollo, Dionysius, Hades and Pan, although the omniscient narrator of their chapters is quick to point out that the names are only for the reader’s benefit. However, apart from Pan, the names don’t really reflect their characters—they don’t really have any personality—and it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had been named after the wizards of Middle Earth as was the author’s original intention, or with numbers even.
Living on the ship are people who also think of themselves as humans. They have short lifespans of maybe forty years, and they’ve been living on the ship for generations. They have a complex culture and religious life that revolves around the gods running their ship, and no true understanding of why they are on the ship—or what is a ship—and what their purpose is. For the gods, they are food. The gods call them pygmies, and the few descriptions of them gave me a notion that they might be some sort of evolutionary form of pigs. Their entire existence becomes under threat when they are told that they have reached the journey’s end. Is it the end of the world? From among them rises B who is the only one curious enough to find out what is going on—for what good it does to him.
The middle part, which is about twice as long as the other two, takes place in the near future USA. It has descended into a civil war between various states, government agencies and private militias, with no-bars-held warfare. It’s technologically far more advanced society than one would suppose of 2030s. There are some interesting innovations, like a system for uploading operational memory into iPhones, which is mostly used for helping people suffering from a grave memory loss due to chemical warfare. And the country is riddled with enormous towers, eSpires, that no one knows what they are for.
A group of teenagers, fed up with the government surveillance, have developed their own private net. But their system holds a secret, which all the warring factions want and will do anything to get. We follow Ottoline who is captured by a nameless government agency and plunged into a journey of survival through prisons and warzones. The secret Otty and her friends are trying to keep took me by surprise, and not necessary in a good way; a bit more information would’ve gone a long way to understanding how a sixteen-year-old would be able to withstand everything that was thrown at her. Once the secret is out, it takes over and the world as Otty knows it basically comes to an end.
I read the entire book trying to figure out how the two stories connected, and failing. According to the afterword, the book is about memory and atonement, which … I really don’t see. The loss of memory plays some role in the middle part, but mostly on the background, and it doesn’t guide the actions of the characters in any way. The pygmies have their collective memory, which has corrupted over the long journey, but it doesn’t really play any role either. And the gods remember everything.
Atonement is even more difficult concept to accept, because as far as I can see, nothing is atoned. The purgatory itself is a system of atonement, but for all the talk about Dante and afterlife, none of the characters really go through the purgatory; Otty hasn’t even done anything that would require atonement when she goes through her ordeal. Pan has a crisis of conscience when it comes to the gods’ treatment of the pygmies, but they don’t really atone either; they abandon the pygmies to their fate.
Instead of atonement, there is revenge: Otty’s collective revenge on humanity for harming her friends and Pan’s revenge on the other gods for disrespecting them. Otty uses an AI as her instrument of revenge, Pan uses the pygmies. If either of them atone their actions, it happens outside the narrative.
What really connects the two stories is the tower. Not as an idea that has travelled lightyears to inspire Dante, as Pan suggests, but a different biblical concept entirely: the tower of Babel, (human) hubris and inevitable downfall.
The towers, eSpires and the Purgatory Mount, don’t have an active role and we never really learn anything about them, but they are why the events of the stories take place. On earth, the fear that the towers spy on them causes the teenagers to build their own network, which eventually leads to an apocalypse of sorts. On planet Dante, the tower is the reason why the ship is there and the cause of the strife between the gods that leads to Pan’s revenge. And it may well have been the downfall of the people who built it too, leading to the planet dying.
Purgatory Mount is a complicated book, but it’s not difficult to read. It’s perfectly possible to enjoy the two stories for what they are without trying to find connections between them. They’re slightly uneven in scope, but both are interesting and good. I liked Otty and B the pygmy who is caught in Pan’s revenge, and if the gods were pompous and not very approachable, their end was satisfying. And for those readers who like to challenge themselves, this is a perfect read.
I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This is not a simple read. It presupposes a working knowledge of Dante, medieval Christianity and modern Catholicism—particularly the ideas of original sin and purgatory—the pantheon of ancient Greece, and the Lord of the Rings. It’s not an easy concoction and it doesn’t always work. This could be, as the author tells in the afterword, because the elements from the Middle Earth had to be replaced with the Greek pantheon for legal reasons, but I don’t think it would’ve made a great difference for the reader. What we have is non-Christian entities philosophising about Christianity, which doesn’t make for an easy first chapter.
The story is told in three parts that, according to Roberts, reflect Dante’s vision of afterlife: hell, purgatory and heaven. Of the three, hell and heaven exist outside time, and the purgatory in the temporal world, i.e. is subject to change. This isn’t immediately obvious to the reader—or even after reading the afterword—but time does play a role in the story.
The first and last parts take place in far future on a generation ship orbiting a dying planet that features an enormous tower. It has lured five entities forty lightyears from earth to study and profit from it. They call themselves human, but they have a lifespan of tens of thousands of years, bodies that are more machine than organic, and the ability to bend time to their will. Consequently, they consider themselves gods. They are named after Greek gods Zeus, Apollo, Dionysius, Hades and Pan, although the omniscient narrator of their chapters is quick to point out that the names are only for the reader’s benefit. However, apart from Pan, the names don’t really reflect their characters—they don’t really have any personality—and it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had been named after the wizards of Middle Earth as was the author’s original intention, or with numbers even.
Living on the ship are people who also think of themselves as humans. They have short lifespans of maybe forty years, and they’ve been living on the ship for generations. They have a complex culture and religious life that revolves around the gods running their ship, and no true understanding of why they are on the ship—or what is a ship—and what their purpose is. For the gods, they are food. The gods call them pygmies, and the few descriptions of them gave me a notion that they might be some sort of evolutionary form of pigs. Their entire existence becomes under threat when they are told that they have reached the journey’s end. Is it the end of the world? From among them rises B who is the only one curious enough to find out what is going on—for what good it does to him.
The middle part, which is about twice as long as the other two, takes place in the near future USA. It has descended into a civil war between various states, government agencies and private militias, with no-bars-held warfare. It’s technologically far more advanced society than one would suppose of 2030s. There are some interesting innovations, like a system for uploading operational memory into iPhones, which is mostly used for helping people suffering from a grave memory loss due to chemical warfare. And the country is riddled with enormous towers, eSpires, that no one knows what they are for.
A group of teenagers, fed up with the government surveillance, have developed their own private net. But their system holds a secret, which all the warring factions want and will do anything to get. We follow Ottoline who is captured by a nameless government agency and plunged into a journey of survival through prisons and warzones. The secret Otty and her friends are trying to keep took me by surprise, and not necessary in a good way; a bit more information would’ve gone a long way to understanding how a sixteen-year-old would be able to withstand everything that was thrown at her. Once the secret is out, it takes over and the world as Otty knows it basically comes to an end.
I read the entire book trying to figure out how the two stories connected, and failing. According to the afterword, the book is about memory and atonement, which … I really don’t see. The loss of memory plays some role in the middle part, but mostly on the background, and it doesn’t guide the actions of the characters in any way. The pygmies have their collective memory, which has corrupted over the long journey, but it doesn’t really play any role either. And the gods remember everything.
Atonement is even more difficult concept to accept, because as far as I can see, nothing is atoned. The purgatory itself is a system of atonement, but for all the talk about Dante and afterlife, none of the characters really go through the purgatory; Otty hasn’t even done anything that would require atonement when she goes through her ordeal. Pan has a crisis of conscience when it comes to the gods’ treatment of the pygmies, but they don’t really atone either; they abandon the pygmies to their fate.
Instead of atonement, there is revenge: Otty’s collective revenge on humanity for harming her friends and Pan’s revenge on the other gods for disrespecting them. Otty uses an AI as her instrument of revenge, Pan uses the pygmies. If either of them atone their actions, it happens outside the narrative.
What really connects the two stories is the tower. Not as an idea that has travelled lightyears to inspire Dante, as Pan suggests, but a different biblical concept entirely: the tower of Babel, (human) hubris and inevitable downfall.
The towers, eSpires and the Purgatory Mount, don’t have an active role and we never really learn anything about them, but they are why the events of the stories take place. On earth, the fear that the towers spy on them causes the teenagers to build their own network, which eventually leads to an apocalypse of sorts. On planet Dante, the tower is the reason why the ship is there and the cause of the strife between the gods that leads to Pan’s revenge. And it may well have been the downfall of the people who built it too, leading to the planet dying.
Purgatory Mount is a complicated book, but it’s not difficult to read. It’s perfectly possible to enjoy the two stories for what they are without trying to find connections between them. They’re slightly uneven in scope, but both are interesting and good. I liked Otty and B the pygmy who is caught in Pan’s revenge, and if the gods were pompous and not very approachable, their end was satisfying. And for those readers who like to challenge themselves, this is a perfect read.
I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
February 27, 2022
Purgatory Mount has a fairly traditional structure for a sci-fi novel. There are two story threads: one near future and one far future. The reader is of course waiting for the connection between the two to manifest. Both are evocative, involving, and full of interesting details. The near future gets more space in the narrative and is convincingly grim. Otty's journey through the prison system of a collapsing US has a privatised-Kafka disorientation to it. I foresaw one plot twist in this near future thread, but found the far future one more tricksy.
Adam Roberts novels always play with really interesting concepts in original ways. I don't think the execution was as powerful here as in some of his other work, although Purgatory Mount is still a compulsive read. It deals with moral questions and time, yet at the end it feels like there's still much to be examined.
Adam Roberts novels always play with really interesting concepts in original ways. I don't think the execution was as powerful here as in some of his other work, although Purgatory Mount is still a compulsive read. It deals with moral questions and time, yet at the end it feels like there's still much to be examined.
February 19, 2021
Adam Roberts’ work often has a big concept upfront: Snow (what the snow just keeps falling); By Light Alone (what if people could photosynthesise through their hair); Gradisil (what would orbital habitats be like if they organised as a country). So...this opens on a generation starship. Fantastic, Roberts’ take on this trope. Then they arrive at their destination pretty damn quickly, and there’s a Big Dumb Object waiting. Great, Roberts’ take on the inscrutable alien BDO. Hold that coffee. We’re winding back from the far future to around ten years from now.
The story-within-a-story takes place in a US where the worst 2020 predictions of the death of democracy, informal warfare, and gun-nuttery have progressed ten-fold. Which is in many ways a shame as the elements of Roberts’ post-Trump apocalypse feel less original than the first far future section of this novel. Weaponised neonicotinoids, iphones plugging directly into people, artificial intelligence, shadowy and paranoid government agencies, malware, VPNs…it’s a convincing mix of horrors, but not quite on the level of On (idea: what if gravity operated at 90 degrees).
This is not to say that the central section of Purgatory Mount is not a satisfying read. It is. The protagonists, chiefly 16-year old Ottie, are a likeable bunch and their struggles to survive as the US falls into civil war are told with an urgency that will have you racing through this book. It’s just that teenager-in-a-dystopia is a well-mined vein of fiction right now, and Roberts’ story is well-told without being as original as some of his other work mentioned earlier.
We return at the end to the far-future in the final section of the book - where he does connect his two stories - and Roberts’ concerns with revenge, guilt and atonement surface more explicitly. There are references to many belief systems including the Greek gods, medieval Catholicism, cargo cults,the singularity, and post-humanism. The abrupt gear-changes continue as the final resolution is more to do with arriving at a philosophic position than resolving or explaining the plot. Lots to enjoy, and even an postscript explaining some of his thinking, without this novel cohering into an entirely satisfactory whole.
The story-within-a-story takes place in a US where the worst 2020 predictions of the death of democracy, informal warfare, and gun-nuttery have progressed ten-fold. Which is in many ways a shame as the elements of Roberts’ post-Trump apocalypse feel less original than the first far future section of this novel. Weaponised neonicotinoids, iphones plugging directly into people, artificial intelligence, shadowy and paranoid government agencies, malware, VPNs…it’s a convincing mix of horrors, but not quite on the level of On (idea: what if gravity operated at 90 degrees).
This is not to say that the central section of Purgatory Mount is not a satisfying read. It is. The protagonists, chiefly 16-year old Ottie, are a likeable bunch and their struggles to survive as the US falls into civil war are told with an urgency that will have you racing through this book. It’s just that teenager-in-a-dystopia is a well-mined vein of fiction right now, and Roberts’ story is well-told without being as original as some of his other work mentioned earlier.
We return at the end to the far-future in the final section of the book - where he does connect his two stories - and Roberts’ concerns with revenge, guilt and atonement surface more explicitly. There are references to many belief systems including the Greek gods, medieval Catholicism, cargo cults,the singularity, and post-humanism. The abrupt gear-changes continue as the final resolution is more to do with arriving at a philosophic position than resolving or explaining the plot. Lots to enjoy, and even an postscript explaining some of his thinking, without this novel cohering into an entirely satisfactory whole.
July 6, 2022
It's not entirely surprising that Dante's Divine Comedy should provide the inspiration for fantasy or SF - this was already the case with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1976 fantasy novel Inferno, which I remember reading in an all-night session shortly after it came out. (It was a weird night, as the hamster from my next door-but-one neighbour at university had escaped and kept appearing on the floor of my room despite a closed door, contributing to the feeling of weirdness.) Adam Roberts, as we might expect, takes a more interesting approach than simply re-writing Dante.
The book consists of three sections, apparently corresponding to the three sections of the original featuring hell, purgatory and paradise - though the parallels in the first and last section are not particularly obvious. These outer sections of Purgatory Mount, featuring a strange far future expedition discovering a vast structure that brings to mind a larger scale version of Dante's purgatory, have little real feel of storytelling. Roberts does this deliberately to reflect the lack of time in Dante's hell and paradise - it's a very effective intellectual representation, but it does get a little in the way of the book working as a novel.
The significantly longer middle section is set in a near future America as the country becomes riven with civil war. This is a second book I've read in a row where the protagonists are teenagers, though here, this develops a much stronger sense of 'us and them' between the teens and the warring adults. It's a Kafkaesque disaster story - I've never been a big fan of disaster movies or books, but Roberts makes it both graphically real feeling and gives the storyline some impressive twists. Given the state of US society, this is one of the most scarily believable apocalyptic SF narratives I've ever come across. I might not have enjoyed it too much, and I probably wouldn't read it again, but I was very impressed by it.
What was particularly effective for me is that one of the themes that Roberts addresses, apart from a wider one of atonement and sin, is the nature of mind. Having just read Philip Ball's The Book of Minds, this was particularly apposite. As is sometimes the case with Roberts' books, there's a danger of it being so clever that the cleverness gets in the way of it being a fully formed novel - it didn't seem to have the completeness of, say, The Thing Itself. But you can't complain about Purgatory Mount on its ideas or mental challenge - it does the job you expect from great science fiction faultlessly.
One final point - many people shy away from a section with the word 'acknowledgements' in the title, but I would strongly recommend reading the closing 'Afterword and Acknowledgements' pages.
The book consists of three sections, apparently corresponding to the three sections of the original featuring hell, purgatory and paradise - though the parallels in the first and last section are not particularly obvious. These outer sections of Purgatory Mount, featuring a strange far future expedition discovering a vast structure that brings to mind a larger scale version of Dante's purgatory, have little real feel of storytelling. Roberts does this deliberately to reflect the lack of time in Dante's hell and paradise - it's a very effective intellectual representation, but it does get a little in the way of the book working as a novel.
The significantly longer middle section is set in a near future America as the country becomes riven with civil war. This is a second book I've read in a row where the protagonists are teenagers, though here, this develops a much stronger sense of 'us and them' between the teens and the warring adults. It's a Kafkaesque disaster story - I've never been a big fan of disaster movies or books, but Roberts makes it both graphically real feeling and gives the storyline some impressive twists. Given the state of US society, this is one of the most scarily believable apocalyptic SF narratives I've ever come across. I might not have enjoyed it too much, and I probably wouldn't read it again, but I was very impressed by it.
What was particularly effective for me is that one of the themes that Roberts addresses, apart from a wider one of atonement and sin, is the nature of mind. Having just read Philip Ball's The Book of Minds, this was particularly apposite. As is sometimes the case with Roberts' books, there's a danger of it being so clever that the cleverness gets in the way of it being a fully formed novel - it didn't seem to have the completeness of, say, The Thing Itself. But you can't complain about Purgatory Mount on its ideas or mental challenge - it does the job you expect from great science fiction faultlessly.
One final point - many people shy away from a section with the word 'acknowledgements' in the title, but I would strongly recommend reading the closing 'Afterword and Acknowledgements' pages.
February 8, 2021
A story in two parts that is beautifully told, especially the section set in a near future in which chemical warfare has robbed many people of their memories and the world is on the edge of collapse. Otty, a 16-year-old girl, is our main character and she is a wonderful creation. Adam Roberts' science fiction always works on multiple levels, several of which you can bet I won't fully get, but his ideas are amazing. My only issue here is that I didn't properly understand how the themes of atonement and memory tie the two stories together or tie together the alien Purgatory Mount with Earth. Nevertheless, the novel worked really well for me on a more mundane pure enjoyable read level! Review to follow shortly on For Winter Nights.
July 4, 2022
That's two memory themed books in a row. Funny how these things work out.
This is a tale in two parts. In the far future, heavily augmented humans travel to a far distant planet to investigate a gigantic structure. The two parts of this story bookend the second part of the book, a story about five friends trying to survive a second US civil war in the near future.
I've been reading Adam Roberts stories since SALT came out, many years ago, and they always leave me with the sense that I'm not quite clever enough or well read enough to understand what's going on. Nevertheless, I keep coming back, because the stories are great.
This is a tale in two parts. In the far future, heavily augmented humans travel to a far distant planet to investigate a gigantic structure. The two parts of this story bookend the second part of the book, a story about five friends trying to survive a second US civil war in the near future.
I've been reading Adam Roberts stories since SALT came out, many years ago, and they always leave me with the sense that I'm not quite clever enough or well read enough to understand what's going on. Nevertheless, I keep coming back, because the stories are great.
February 6, 2021
I was kindly given an ARC of this book by NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
IRobot vibes! 3.5***
This book was an enjoyable and easy read. I found myself flying through the pages and enjoyed the writing style.
There are two stories in this book.
The first story features technologically advanced humans, that are godlike, lording over other species (and talking cows)! They go on a quest in a giant spaceship to investigate an alien structure. I really liked the names and personalities of these characters but found myself wanting to know more. It was such a short part of the book overall but I felt it was the most interesting part. I wanted to know about their lives on Earth, their ideals, life on the ship etc.
In the second story there's not too many characters which keeps things nice and simple. The characters are believable and the world itself was set in reality. This is a Dystopian world set in a not too distant future where technology has taken over even more of our lives. There's relatable references to covid, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift which grounds you as a reader, giving you something to relate to.
In this story a group of teenagers have created something the government wants. It features millions of people, who are essentially walking vegetables, who if not literally connected to an iPhone cannot function as a human being. Poisoning of the brain has become weaponsied and the new warfare.
The story was interesting but at times the immaturity of the teenagers was a little frustrating as an adult reader (just listen to the people not killing you?!) I wanted to know more about Wesson and the aftermath of their creation. It would have been especially good to hear how story two's world become story 1. I'd have loved to know how that happened as it felt that the 2 stories were just a bit too distant for me.
All in all an enjoyable read.
I scrapbook all of my 5 star reads on my Instagran - green_wonderland_home:
IRobot vibes! 3.5***
This book was an enjoyable and easy read. I found myself flying through the pages and enjoyed the writing style.
There are two stories in this book.
The first story features technologically advanced humans, that are godlike, lording over other species (and talking cows)! They go on a quest in a giant spaceship to investigate an alien structure. I really liked the names and personalities of these characters but found myself wanting to know more. It was such a short part of the book overall but I felt it was the most interesting part. I wanted to know about their lives on Earth, their ideals, life on the ship etc.
In the second story there's not too many characters which keeps things nice and simple. The characters are believable and the world itself was set in reality. This is a Dystopian world set in a not too distant future where technology has taken over even more of our lives. There's relatable references to covid, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift which grounds you as a reader, giving you something to relate to.
In this story a group of teenagers have created something the government wants. It features millions of people, who are essentially walking vegetables, who if not literally connected to an iPhone cannot function as a human being. Poisoning of the brain has become weaponsied and the new warfare.
The story was interesting but at times the immaturity of the teenagers was a little frustrating as an adult reader (just listen to the people not killing you?!) I wanted to know more about Wesson and the aftermath of their creation. It would have been especially good to hear how story two's world become story 1. I'd have loved to know how that happened as it felt that the 2 stories were just a bit too distant for me.
All in all an enjoyable read.
I scrapbook all of my 5 star reads on my Instagran - green_wonderland_home:
June 2, 2021
Kein Roman von Adam Roberts ist wie der andere. So ist auch dieser sehr speziell. Er liest sich sehr flüssig, wird gegen Ende aber ziemlich philosophisch und ist dann sicher nicht jedermanns Sache.
Eigentlich sindes zwei Geschichten, die uns Roberts hier präsentiert. In der (kann man es so nennen?) „Rahmenhandlung“, welche die ersten 30 und letzten 50 Seiten einnimmt, baut Roberts ein phantastisches Space Opera-Setting auf, aus dessen Ideen man alleine zwei Romane hätten machen können.
Im „Mittelteil“ des Buches, der den mit Abstand größeren Umfang einnimmt, erleben wir ein eher konventionelles Near-Future-Dystopie-Setting. Wir begleiten eine 16jährige und ihre Nerd-Freunde, die in einer zukünftigen USA leben. Aufgrund eines illegalen, abgeschirmten lokalen Netzwerkes, welches sie aufbauen, geraten sie in die Mühlen der Justiz, werden als Staatsfeinde verhaftet und entsprechenden Verhörmethoden unterzogen. Da sich diese Justiz aber aufgrund eines ausbrechenden Bürgerkrieges selbst auflöst, bekommt das Ganze zeitweise leicht kafkaeske Züge.
Die beiden Geschichten hängen lose zusammen. Warum das so ist, wird im Abschlussdrittel angerissen. In diesem wird’s dann auch mächtig philosophisch. Wenn die Themen Läuterung und Sühne ausgiebig anhand Dantes „Göttlicher Komödie“ und den dort beschriebenen Jenseits-Reichen Hölle, Fegefeuer und Paradies thematisiert werden, dann hilft mir leider auch heftiges Googeln nicht, um hier nicht abgehängt zu werden.
Das Buch ist auf jeden Fall eine Leseempfehlung, wenn man sich mental drauf vorbereitet, dem Ganzen in den letzten 30 Seiten nicht mehr ganz folgen zu können (und zu wollen).
Eigentlich sindes zwei Geschichten, die uns Roberts hier präsentiert. In der (kann man es so nennen?) „Rahmenhandlung“, welche die ersten 30 und letzten 50 Seiten einnimmt, baut Roberts ein phantastisches Space Opera-Setting auf, aus dessen Ideen man alleine zwei Romane hätten machen können.
Im „Mittelteil“ des Buches, der den mit Abstand größeren Umfang einnimmt, erleben wir ein eher konventionelles Near-Future-Dystopie-Setting. Wir begleiten eine 16jährige und ihre Nerd-Freunde, die in einer zukünftigen USA leben. Aufgrund eines illegalen, abgeschirmten lokalen Netzwerkes, welches sie aufbauen, geraten sie in die Mühlen der Justiz, werden als Staatsfeinde verhaftet und entsprechenden Verhörmethoden unterzogen. Da sich diese Justiz aber aufgrund eines ausbrechenden Bürgerkrieges selbst auflöst, bekommt das Ganze zeitweise leicht kafkaeske Züge.
Die beiden Geschichten hängen lose zusammen. Warum das so ist, wird im Abschlussdrittel angerissen. In diesem wird’s dann auch mächtig philosophisch. Wenn die Themen Läuterung und Sühne ausgiebig anhand Dantes „Göttlicher Komödie“ und den dort beschriebenen Jenseits-Reichen Hölle, Fegefeuer und Paradies thematisiert werden, dann hilft mir leider auch heftiges Googeln nicht, um hier nicht abgehängt zu werden.
Das Buch ist auf jeden Fall eine Leseempfehlung, wenn man sich mental drauf vorbereitet, dem Ganzen in den letzten 30 Seiten nicht mehr ganz folgen zu können (und zu wollen).
May 26, 2022
This book had me a little confused. It starts and ends with the story of space explorers with the names of Greek gods on a distant planet who have found a strange tall structure that was constructed by someone, they believe, for religious purposes. They debate the meaning of the structure, as well as Dante's descriptions of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Also, there are 5 gods who roam the planet and one of the characters, B, talks with God the Grower. It felt like that part of the story was jumbled.
In the middle is the story of 5 teenagers who have made an alternate internet and are arrested so authorities can get inside the network. At the same time, the U.S. is involved in a massive civil war, which is destroying whole towns.
Two of the characters, Otty and Gomery, get away from their captures and travel back home to check on the others in the group. This part of the story is very interesting. The characters are sympathetic and the pacing is good. I really enjoyed following along with their travels.
The author, in the end, explains that the book is about the atonement and memory and he explores where wickedness comes from. This explanation still did not help me understand the parts in space. the narrative of the teenagers was much clearer, though it had a sad ending, and therefore more enjoyable a read.
In the middle is the story of 5 teenagers who have made an alternate internet and are arrested so authorities can get inside the network. At the same time, the U.S. is involved in a massive civil war, which is destroying whole towns.
Two of the characters, Otty and Gomery, get away from their captures and travel back home to check on the others in the group. This part of the story is very interesting. The characters are sympathetic and the pacing is good. I really enjoyed following along with their travels.
The author, in the end, explains that the book is about the atonement and memory and he explores where wickedness comes from. This explanation still did not help me understand the parts in space. the narrative of the teenagers was much clearer, though it had a sad ending, and therefore more enjoyable a read.
March 23, 2025
Lots of big ideas here, but Roberts' high concept twist is to explain by comparison, allusion, and theory without drawing them to the human ends teased by the plot(s). It's especially disappointing because there is a real story in the novel between the bookends - a thriller told with great pace, but a story that is ultimately sacrificed to the author's philosophical "point." is the obvious sign of this sudden shift from character to philosophy, and that's when I really knew this novel had lost me.
March 6, 2021
Purgatory Mount is apparently the first Scifi novel from Adam Roberts in 3 years (Standard calendrical human time) and the first of his books I’ve had the opportunity to read. I found it A strong SF, huge in scope and could only be written by someone who is unafraid of taking risks and is willing to re-write the rulebook. It is split up in 3 distinct parts that had me wondering how the heck it’s all going to connect. Though it’s clear what connects everything on a kind of base level, the bigger picture is multidimensional. There is a lot going on, from the future humans arriving on a distant world, to a group of teenagers living through an America that could be 10 years out and frankly, was frightening as seen through the eyes of a 16 year old kid who just wants to take care of her bees, and hide whatever creation her and friends are makes up a story that was full of tasty little SF tidbits and chunks of sweet and juicy SF imagualizations.
Before I read this, I took time to search through Adam Roberts previous books. He had slipped through my radar successfully until now. I came across info about the upcoming release of Purgatory Mount, and with its awesome cover, I was on the hook. He is Australian and has been recognized constantly over his career for his unique writing, mostly in a scifi and speculative nature, even non fiction work.
A vast panorama of a science fiction story split between three unique parts. In the first, a small group of very advanced humans have reached the end of a long voyage to uncover the mystery of a tower structure on an uninhabited planet, and discovered by a drone that scanned the anomaly and sent the info back to be evaluated.
As the ship nears the destination, we get to be the fly on the walls (with this kind of setting, let’s say it’s an AI controlled, nanotech built fly) to the unique planning and philosophical implications of a structure that punctures the atmospheric boundary of this planet and yet remains steadfast. Those that built it have been long gone, and it remains elusive as to what’s inside, or even what it’s built of, with no weathering over hundreds of thousands of years. These Dvanced humans in charge ofbthe mission have managed the decades long voyage by adjusting their perception of time and are now bringing themselves back to a more natural rhythm in order to get the work done in what they are hoping is 100 years or less.
These advanced humans running the mission hope to gain the technology that was used to construct the tower, and then profit by selling the tech back home.
In Part one, we also get a feel for the less advanced creatures who handle the more menial tasks that an intersteller ship that spends 100+ years conducting a mission. They live in the moment and naturally, without the ability to adjust, or dial up (or down) their experience of time. The differences in reality are vast, and this first part of the book was my favorite. They have families, duties, arguments, love, loss, and culture. Their lives are almost completely separate, and cut off from the bigger reality. This becomes a major point of the book down the road and opens up philosophical and morality questions I found myself thinking about. The first part of the book alone makes for an amazing read.
These simpler type of human, having short lives see the ship as a world. Because the advanced people can manipulate the time experience, they are considered God’s. As they walk the ship passages, they look frozen in time to the simpler ones, even though they are moving, just very, very slowly. The act of reaching down to flip a switch might take multiple lifetimes from the normal perspective.
Unique, intelligent, thoughtful, strange. After reading Purgatory it’s clear that all of those characteristics are overflowing in his writing.
Before I read this, I took time to search through Adam Roberts previous books. He had slipped through my radar successfully until now. I came across info about the upcoming release of Purgatory Mount, and with its awesome cover, I was on the hook. He is Australian and has been recognized constantly over his career for his unique writing, mostly in a scifi and speculative nature, even non fiction work.
A vast panorama of a science fiction story split between three unique parts. In the first, a small group of very advanced humans have reached the end of a long voyage to uncover the mystery of a tower structure on an uninhabited planet, and discovered by a drone that scanned the anomaly and sent the info back to be evaluated.
As the ship nears the destination, we get to be the fly on the walls (with this kind of setting, let’s say it’s an AI controlled, nanotech built fly) to the unique planning and philosophical implications of a structure that punctures the atmospheric boundary of this planet and yet remains steadfast. Those that built it have been long gone, and it remains elusive as to what’s inside, or even what it’s built of, with no weathering over hundreds of thousands of years. These Dvanced humans in charge ofbthe mission have managed the decades long voyage by adjusting their perception of time and are now bringing themselves back to a more natural rhythm in order to get the work done in what they are hoping is 100 years or less.
These advanced humans running the mission hope to gain the technology that was used to construct the tower, and then profit by selling the tech back home.
In Part one, we also get a feel for the less advanced creatures who handle the more menial tasks that an intersteller ship that spends 100+ years conducting a mission. They live in the moment and naturally, without the ability to adjust, or dial up (or down) their experience of time. The differences in reality are vast, and this first part of the book was my favorite. They have families, duties, arguments, love, loss, and culture. Their lives are almost completely separate, and cut off from the bigger reality. This becomes a major point of the book down the road and opens up philosophical and morality questions I found myself thinking about. The first part of the book alone makes for an amazing read.
These simpler type of human, having short lives see the ship as a world. Because the advanced people can manipulate the time experience, they are considered God’s. As they walk the ship passages, they look frozen in time to the simpler ones, even though they are moving, just very, very slowly. The act of reaching down to flip a switch might take multiple lifetimes from the normal perspective.
Unique, intelligent, thoughtful, strange. After reading Purgatory it’s clear that all of those characteristics are overflowing in his writing.
November 6, 2021
Having let this book simmer in my mind for a few weeks after actually finishing it, I think I’ve got my thoughts in order enough to write a review.
I always feel bad with rating a book anything less than 3 stars, but I don’t think I can merit more than 2 for this one. There were a few interesting ideas raised here, but there wasn’t enough room for them to be developed, and it never felt like they were properly utilised within the plot.
The most prevalent example would be the titular Purgatory Mount itself. At the beginning of the book, we follow a group of five individuals aboard a spaceship, presumably in the far future, as they speed towards a distant planet that’s home to an immense alien superstructure. They plan to investigate it, which could have made for an interesting and philosophical science fiction adventure, had anything actually come of it. Instead, after only a small percentage of the book, the story shifts entirely away from this crew, returning only at the end of the book without any real resolution. As a result, the Purgatory Mount section of this book acts as a bookend to what is arguably the more developed section of the plot, which is completely unrelated to what was promised in the title.
The rest of the book focuses on sixteen-year-old Ottoline ‘Otty’, a tech-savvy young woman living in a not-so-distant future American that’s on the very brink of a cataclysmic civil war. A proportion of the population suffers from ‘weaponised memory loss’ and rely on their smartphones to act as their artificial memories. While at first this weaponization sounds interesting, like with the Mount itself, it’s an unfilled promise. It only ever felt like an underdeveloped part of the background worldbuilding, rather than something intrinsic to the plot, and aside from appearing in one minor side character, Otty herself has no encounters with the memory loss or its ramifications.
Perhaps these disappointments could be overlooked if Otty’s story was gripping, but it just isn’t. Fairly early on in her part of the book, she ends up arrested by people who want to use her tech knowledge to avert impending civil war. Otty stubbornly refuses to help, which leads to her being ferried from one prison to another, over and over, without the plot seeming to head in any particular direction, as her captors try to make her disappear into American’s prison system. As with Purgatory Mount, there’s no payoff to her struggles, no point to her imprisonment, no climax to her story even after she’s freed.
And that’s more or less an apt summary for the entire book: pointless, it’s two halves unconnected, all its posed questions unanswered, its more interesting aspects side-lined and forgotten. I’m giving it one star for the enticing and beautiful cover (which was most of the reason why I picked it up in the first place), and the other for the unique ideas it might’ve otherwise played around with.
I always feel bad with rating a book anything less than 3 stars, but I don’t think I can merit more than 2 for this one. There were a few interesting ideas raised here, but there wasn’t enough room for them to be developed, and it never felt like they were properly utilised within the plot.
The most prevalent example would be the titular Purgatory Mount itself. At the beginning of the book, we follow a group of five individuals aboard a spaceship, presumably in the far future, as they speed towards a distant planet that’s home to an immense alien superstructure. They plan to investigate it, which could have made for an interesting and philosophical science fiction adventure, had anything actually come of it. Instead, after only a small percentage of the book, the story shifts entirely away from this crew, returning only at the end of the book without any real resolution. As a result, the Purgatory Mount section of this book acts as a bookend to what is arguably the more developed section of the plot, which is completely unrelated to what was promised in the title.
The rest of the book focuses on sixteen-year-old Ottoline ‘Otty’, a tech-savvy young woman living in a not-so-distant future American that’s on the very brink of a cataclysmic civil war. A proportion of the population suffers from ‘weaponised memory loss’ and rely on their smartphones to act as their artificial memories. While at first this weaponization sounds interesting, like with the Mount itself, it’s an unfilled promise. It only ever felt like an underdeveloped part of the background worldbuilding, rather than something intrinsic to the plot, and aside from appearing in one minor side character, Otty herself has no encounters with the memory loss or its ramifications.
Perhaps these disappointments could be overlooked if Otty’s story was gripping, but it just isn’t. Fairly early on in her part of the book, she ends up arrested by people who want to use her tech knowledge to avert impending civil war. Otty stubbornly refuses to help, which leads to her being ferried from one prison to another, over and over, without the plot seeming to head in any particular direction, as her captors try to make her disappear into American’s prison system. As with Purgatory Mount, there’s no payoff to her struggles, no point to her imprisonment, no climax to her story even after she’s freed.
And that’s more or less an apt summary for the entire book: pointless, it’s two halves unconnected, all its posed questions unanswered, its more interesting aspects side-lined and forgotten. I’m giving it one star for the enticing and beautiful cover (which was most of the reason why I picked it up in the first place), and the other for the unique ideas it might’ve otherwise played around with.
April 13, 2021
4.5 stars. A lot about both the far future framing stories and the near future tale that makes up the bulk of the book is phenomenal. The writing is gorgeous and it's a compulsive read. The middle piece would be a wonderful novel on its own. Whether the two stories' themes and narratives really form a satisfying whole is a little harder to confirm.
February 22, 2021
[So the review posted below has a massive error someone messaged me to note (see below). Namely Adam Roberts, is not Dan Simmons - who wrote Hyperion and whose identity is pretty central to my train of thought in this review. I don't think it changes the substance of what I liked or didn't like about the book, and if you liked Dan Simmons then I think you would like this, and the fact I thought it was should be taken generally as praise. But gosh I feel stupid...]
Adam Roberts, Adam Roberts.... I'm sure I've read some but... Three pages in when the ultra advanced humans with generationally relativistic time awareness in their iceberg spaceship go to visit a giant mountain on a planet which they have whimsically decided to name after Purgatory in Dante's Inferno I remembered. Who else melds classical allusions with diamond hard sci-fi but the writer of Hyperion? I loved Hyperion, but my mileage on the four books definately wavered. Same too with Illium et al. So once I twigged, and very much enjoyed the opening chapter setting up potential tales class warfare between the humans and their sentient livestock (Pygs, which may be short for Pygmies which can be taken a number of ways), I was set to have my mind stretched in the ways he had done previously.
And then suddenly we are on Earth. Near future America. A civil war is brewing between MAGA factions and the liberal cities (California secedes at some point). We are with smart kids in a run down Philadelphia, who have somehow angered the authorities and will be picked up by them. And this is the lions' share of the book. The hard conceptual sci-fi is shelved for this slang ridden first person near future war scenario. I couldn't for the life of me see the connection. But that was OK, because whilst I liked the framing story, I really liked this Philadelphia story. Because it is Roberts, I couldn't help but think about the book as a Trojan horse. Was the trip to Purgatory Mount the trick to grab the kind of sci-fi reader who doesn't want politics in his sci-fi thank you very much, and thrust them fully into a gripping story of governmental abuse, private prisons, torture and refugee displacement? If so, job done. There is a stretch of Purgatory Mount where our protagonist Ottoline is arrested, tortured, left in solitary, moved to an inappropriate prison, released and becomes part of a a group of displaced people shot upon and bombed which was compellingly real. Its odd thinking about the political moment the US is currently in, and how even a month after the attack on the Senate this all feels a little far fetched, and yet that passage - even when pinched by mild absurdist satire - conjures up a parallel empathy for other displaced people. There is a run around with another of the kids which is less successful (showing a successful escape after showing how harrowing it is the be trapped in the system leads to diminishing returns), and then we reach the science fiction point of the body of the novel. In itself a strong idea, but not one that links so well to the far future and Purgatory Mount, which we return to for a literal culmination of the Dante plot.
I am torn on Purgatory Mount, which is usually my response to Roberts. Yet again, when he is good he is very, very good, and the strength here is that empathy in the captivity section. I like the framing device as its own piece but I don't think they link anywhere near as thematically as he does. Minor niggles as well but I can't see any group of American teens, no matter how nerdy, naming themselves after an Enid Blyton book, and that's before we get to the biscuit barrel - cookie jar if you have to have one. Minor issues aside, I'd take this for the novel inside the framing device, and the framing device as an equally interesting short story. And whilst the ambition is still there, like I have thought before with Roberts, stop letting the formalism or the allusions get in the way of telling the human (sentient) story.
[NetGalley ARC]
Adam Roberts, Adam Roberts.... I'm sure I've read some but... Three pages in when the ultra advanced humans with generationally relativistic time awareness in their iceberg spaceship go to visit a giant mountain on a planet which they have whimsically decided to name after Purgatory in Dante's Inferno I remembered. Who else melds classical allusions with diamond hard sci-fi but the writer of Hyperion? I loved Hyperion, but my mileage on the four books definately wavered. Same too with Illium et al. So once I twigged, and very much enjoyed the opening chapter setting up potential tales class warfare between the humans and their sentient livestock (Pygs, which may be short for Pygmies which can be taken a number of ways), I was set to have my mind stretched in the ways he had done previously.
And then suddenly we are on Earth. Near future America. A civil war is brewing between MAGA factions and the liberal cities (California secedes at some point). We are with smart kids in a run down Philadelphia, who have somehow angered the authorities and will be picked up by them. And this is the lions' share of the book. The hard conceptual sci-fi is shelved for this slang ridden first person near future war scenario. I couldn't for the life of me see the connection. But that was OK, because whilst I liked the framing story, I really liked this Philadelphia story. Because it is Roberts, I couldn't help but think about the book as a Trojan horse. Was the trip to Purgatory Mount the trick to grab the kind of sci-fi reader who doesn't want politics in his sci-fi thank you very much, and thrust them fully into a gripping story of governmental abuse, private prisons, torture and refugee displacement? If so, job done. There is a stretch of Purgatory Mount where our protagonist Ottoline is arrested, tortured, left in solitary, moved to an inappropriate prison, released and becomes part of a a group of displaced people shot upon and bombed which was compellingly real. Its odd thinking about the political moment the US is currently in, and how even a month after the attack on the Senate this all feels a little far fetched, and yet that passage - even when pinched by mild absurdist satire - conjures up a parallel empathy for other displaced people. There is a run around with another of the kids which is less successful (showing a successful escape after showing how harrowing it is the be trapped in the system leads to diminishing returns), and then we reach the science fiction point of the body of the novel. In itself a strong idea, but not one that links so well to the far future and Purgatory Mount, which we return to for a literal culmination of the Dante plot.
I am torn on Purgatory Mount, which is usually my response to Roberts. Yet again, when he is good he is very, very good, and the strength here is that empathy in the captivity section. I like the framing device as its own piece but I don't think they link anywhere near as thematically as he does. Minor niggles as well but I can't see any group of American teens, no matter how nerdy, naming themselves after an Enid Blyton book, and that's before we get to the biscuit barrel - cookie jar if you have to have one. Minor issues aside, I'd take this for the novel inside the framing device, and the framing device as an equally interesting short story. And whilst the ambition is still there, like I have thought before with Roberts, stop letting the formalism or the allusions get in the way of telling the human (sentient) story.
[NetGalley ARC]
March 4, 2021
I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Purgatory Mount via NetGalley.
The eagles are coming!
The eagles are here!
Adam Roberts is one author I'll always, always take time to read and I'd been sp looking forward to Purgatory Mount. I thought I knew what it was going to be about, and it was that... but also it wasn't, it turned out to be something much bigger and very different and thoroughly ramified. It does, though, rather defy a neat review. I could just say, buy this, and stop at that but I really want to persuade you, so let's try that.
Opening as a city-sized interstellar exploration ship, the Forward, arrives from Earth at a distant planet, V538 Aurigae - gamma, we seem to be in hard SF territory with a description of the long voyage, the peculiar emptiness of space in the interstellar "Local Bubble", the ice-encrusted ship itself (the ice provides both a shield and fuel), the crew - who are able to alter their perception to live faster or slower, surviving the generations long (for their livestock) voyage - and the mysterious alien artefact that has drawn Earthly attention. No, not an obelisk - an immense spire so high that it soars beyond the planet's atmosphere (indeed, beyond the original, deeper atmosphere long eroded by the local star).
What is the spire made of?
What is it for?
Where did the makers go?
Just as we might think we know what's coming - Roberts will describe the crew's exploration and tease out these mysteries - he knocks the reader sideways by adopting a different genre, the near future thriller, and location, the USA a few years from now. That country is on the edge of civil war ('The problem is - there are plenty of people real keen to shoot their guns and run around in combat gear'). Ottoline (Otty to her friends, who call themselves the Famous Five in a reference which I suspect isn't to be found in the cultural life of the typical American teenager, now or near future) is fleeing from the adults. From government law enforcement. From the gun-toting militias. From a mysterious third faction.
The description of the rending fabric of a modern state is terribly compelling and oh so convincing, particularly in that there isn't an overnight collapse. Otty sees a bureaucracy staggering, still trying to function, but losing its coherence and purpose. Even at the level of the combat, the increasingly dislocated refugees, the writing is terrific (in both senses) and remembering the turmoil on 6 January, I couldn't help compare this vision of a USA that has begun eating itself to that coverage on CNN of the swamping of the Capitol by an army of grotesques.
That conjunction, which couldn't have been foreseen, makes this book seem prescient in detail, seem predictive, to an extent that may distract the reader from what I think is more fundamental, and intended, a sort of moral prescience which becomes clearer towards the end. But still, the idea of incipient civil war, of rage and destruction spraying in all directions, the urgency with which Roberts captures the violence, the unholy beauty he finds - look at the description of a coach being blown up ('Boom, boom, shake the room. Crush, crush, flip the bus') - all of this makes the book absolutely, grabbingly, compulsive.
Roberts pulls out all the cultural stops in characterising this process, from the explosion 'like a colossal door being slammed shut somewhere in Hell' (yes, we know what that would be) to the queue jumping mob ('wearing Old Glory jackets and red MAGA caps') who try to barge onto the bus to the sharp eyed lawyers and journalists who prowl through the ruins trying to make a turn from the chaos. It's a purgatorial landscape for a sixteen year old to find herself traversing and there are no more answers as to why all this is going on than there are to why Otty is being targeted. We see a limited explanation from one character, that it's all about the money (in New Model Army, Roberts posited an almost cheerful, open-source approach to urban warfare, with some idealism driving it, here the mood is a great deal darker, more despairing).
I started reading this near-future section thinking, what's this - when do we get back to the Forward? - then found myself more and more drawn by the hectic story, the scrapes, the sheer guile and courage of a young woman whose life has been upended. We don't know, for most of the story, why Otty is on the run. She's far too canny to reveal that, to us or her interrogators. But her pursuers are clearly bad, tainted in some sense by an association with the chaos and destruction raining down and slowly, surely, they push Otty to a desperate place and to an act with unforeseeable consequences.
We do return to the Forward again, eventually, for a final act in which the connection between the two timelines is made clear. Otty's experiences turn out to be foundational to the existence of the Forward and its crew, but also to the position of others on board - to the creatures known as "Pygs" who worship the Crew as gods. And they drive the actions of both in a moral sense, Roberts invoking the concepts of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory - sidestepping the hard physics question of how that incredible, planet-topping spire was built and how it stands up for the more interesting question of what it means and what that means for those who have travelled so far to see it.
That feels like a place I could stop - Purgatory Mount an utterly compelling book, fiercely intelligent and unconventional SF rife with ideas yet completely approachable and fun to read - but I think I also have to point out a couple of further things. First, Roberts' writing is glorious, subtlely varying to fit its subject - for example look at the down to earth, dryly humorous, opening section, even amidst all that science-y exposition, or the beauty he often evokes ('the sky was starting to blush strawberry and yellow-orange, with bars of luminous cream-coloured horizontal shine layered over the top of it'). It can also be mischievous, or mischievously inventive, as with the word 'sidegoogling' which occurs a few times (I NEED that word!) or references to the Forward's 'hal', its AI. And how about 'her heart was beating in her chest like Animal from the Muppets playing the drums'?
Which reference brings me to the second thing I wanted to mention here (and then I'm done, I promise). This book is drenched with Lord of the Rings references and comparisons. Most broadly, there's the whole device of telling us, as Roberts does in several places, that names or cultural references used to describe the ship or its crew have been translated into terms we can relate to from something utterly strange that we wouldn't get. (In fact the most blatant example of this didn't, as the author tells us in an afterword, survive copyright issues - he wanted to give the five members of the Crew the names of the five wizards from The Lord of the Rings and indeed Pan, the one we meet most, 'a figure gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word) and given responsibility over beats, birds and plants...' would make a fine Radagast). There is also lots of detail, such as tree trunks which 'shuddered and moaned like Ents' at the force of an explosion, way bread, or all those references to eagles - The eagles are coming! The eagles are here! - but also 'Somebody would come to rescue her and she would fly away on the back of a Johannine eagle'. The latter bridges the gap between Tolkienish references and the Christian ones behind Purgatory Mount, with its themes of offence, of sin, redemption and atonement.
In short, this book is a glittering achievement, Adam Roberts in full splendour giving us a novel of ideas, of fun, of beauty. Go and get it.
The eagles are coming!
The eagles are here!
Adam Roberts is one author I'll always, always take time to read and I'd been sp looking forward to Purgatory Mount. I thought I knew what it was going to be about, and it was that... but also it wasn't, it turned out to be something much bigger and very different and thoroughly ramified. It does, though, rather defy a neat review. I could just say, buy this, and stop at that but I really want to persuade you, so let's try that.
Opening as a city-sized interstellar exploration ship, the Forward, arrives from Earth at a distant planet, V538 Aurigae - gamma, we seem to be in hard SF territory with a description of the long voyage, the peculiar emptiness of space in the interstellar "Local Bubble", the ice-encrusted ship itself (the ice provides both a shield and fuel), the crew - who are able to alter their perception to live faster or slower, surviving the generations long (for their livestock) voyage - and the mysterious alien artefact that has drawn Earthly attention. No, not an obelisk - an immense spire so high that it soars beyond the planet's atmosphere (indeed, beyond the original, deeper atmosphere long eroded by the local star).
What is the spire made of?
What is it for?
Where did the makers go?
Just as we might think we know what's coming - Roberts will describe the crew's exploration and tease out these mysteries - he knocks the reader sideways by adopting a different genre, the near future thriller, and location, the USA a few years from now. That country is on the edge of civil war ('The problem is - there are plenty of people real keen to shoot their guns and run around in combat gear'). Ottoline (Otty to her friends, who call themselves the Famous Five in a reference which I suspect isn't to be found in the cultural life of the typical American teenager, now or near future) is fleeing from the adults. From government law enforcement. From the gun-toting militias. From a mysterious third faction.
The description of the rending fabric of a modern state is terribly compelling and oh so convincing, particularly in that there isn't an overnight collapse. Otty sees a bureaucracy staggering, still trying to function, but losing its coherence and purpose. Even at the level of the combat, the increasingly dislocated refugees, the writing is terrific (in both senses) and remembering the turmoil on 6 January, I couldn't help compare this vision of a USA that has begun eating itself to that coverage on CNN of the swamping of the Capitol by an army of grotesques.
That conjunction, which couldn't have been foreseen, makes this book seem prescient in detail, seem predictive, to an extent that may distract the reader from what I think is more fundamental, and intended, a sort of moral prescience which becomes clearer towards the end. But still, the idea of incipient civil war, of rage and destruction spraying in all directions, the urgency with which Roberts captures the violence, the unholy beauty he finds - look at the description of a coach being blown up ('Boom, boom, shake the room. Crush, crush, flip the bus') - all of this makes the book absolutely, grabbingly, compulsive.
Roberts pulls out all the cultural stops in characterising this process, from the explosion 'like a colossal door being slammed shut somewhere in Hell' (yes, we know what that would be) to the queue jumping mob ('wearing Old Glory jackets and red MAGA caps') who try to barge onto the bus to the sharp eyed lawyers and journalists who prowl through the ruins trying to make a turn from the chaos. It's a purgatorial landscape for a sixteen year old to find herself traversing and there are no more answers as to why all this is going on than there are to why Otty is being targeted. We see a limited explanation from one character, that it's all about the money (in New Model Army, Roberts posited an almost cheerful, open-source approach to urban warfare, with some idealism driving it, here the mood is a great deal darker, more despairing).
I started reading this near-future section thinking, what's this - when do we get back to the Forward? - then found myself more and more drawn by the hectic story, the scrapes, the sheer guile and courage of a young woman whose life has been upended. We don't know, for most of the story, why Otty is on the run. She's far too canny to reveal that, to us or her interrogators. But her pursuers are clearly bad, tainted in some sense by an association with the chaos and destruction raining down and slowly, surely, they push Otty to a desperate place and to an act with unforeseeable consequences.
We do return to the Forward again, eventually, for a final act in which the connection between the two timelines is made clear. Otty's experiences turn out to be foundational to the existence of the Forward and its crew, but also to the position of others on board - to the creatures known as "Pygs" who worship the Crew as gods. And they drive the actions of both in a moral sense, Roberts invoking the concepts of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory - sidestepping the hard physics question of how that incredible, planet-topping spire was built and how it stands up for the more interesting question of what it means and what that means for those who have travelled so far to see it.
That feels like a place I could stop - Purgatory Mount an utterly compelling book, fiercely intelligent and unconventional SF rife with ideas yet completely approachable and fun to read - but I think I also have to point out a couple of further things. First, Roberts' writing is glorious, subtlely varying to fit its subject - for example look at the down to earth, dryly humorous, opening section, even amidst all that science-y exposition, or the beauty he often evokes ('the sky was starting to blush strawberry and yellow-orange, with bars of luminous cream-coloured horizontal shine layered over the top of it'). It can also be mischievous, or mischievously inventive, as with the word 'sidegoogling' which occurs a few times (I NEED that word!) or references to the Forward's 'hal', its AI. And how about 'her heart was beating in her chest like Animal from the Muppets playing the drums'?
Which reference brings me to the second thing I wanted to mention here (and then I'm done, I promise). This book is drenched with Lord of the Rings references and comparisons. Most broadly, there's the whole device of telling us, as Roberts does in several places, that names or cultural references used to describe the ship or its crew have been translated into terms we can relate to from something utterly strange that we wouldn't get. (In fact the most blatant example of this didn't, as the author tells us in an afterword, survive copyright issues - he wanted to give the five members of the Crew the names of the five wizards from The Lord of the Rings and indeed Pan, the one we meet most, 'a figure gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word) and given responsibility over beats, birds and plants...' would make a fine Radagast). There is also lots of detail, such as tree trunks which 'shuddered and moaned like Ents' at the force of an explosion, way bread, or all those references to eagles - The eagles are coming! The eagles are here! - but also 'Somebody would come to rescue her and she would fly away on the back of a Johannine eagle'. The latter bridges the gap between Tolkienish references and the Christian ones behind Purgatory Mount, with its themes of offence, of sin, redemption and atonement.
In short, this book is a glittering achievement, Adam Roberts in full splendour giving us a novel of ideas, of fun, of beauty. Go and get it.
January 20, 2022
Why, why, why? Why not just write one novel, then write the other novel, then publish them as two, well, separate and excellent novels. Roberts says in the afterword that he toned down the link between the two different sections, the framing posthuman generation ship and the inset near-future dystopia, and even now he considers it perhaps too explicit and strong – clearly, he was not thinking of the same book I (or many of the other reviewers here) was reading. I understand that he wanted to mimic the Dantean three-part structure, but the connection is simply just not clear, other than for the single explicit and quite tenuous in-universe link. This feeling is aggravated by the fact that both parts of the book are wonderfully written – I was in absolutely no mood to read about a teen caught in the Kafkian legal system of a dystopian near future USA, yet it gripped me so hard, I could not put it down and read it literally in two days. I know it’s his day job, but I really hope that in future books Roberts cuts down on literary theory and philosophy 101 experiments and just gets on with writing good stories.
December 24, 2023
3.5 ⭐️
This is one of those books that are easy to read, and yet, hard to understand. There are three storylines that seem unconnected, but at the end of the book we have some link that connects the stories and characters. Still, I feel like there’s so much more that I’ve been unable to grasp because the end doesn’t explain everything. I guess I’ll have to buddy read it with someone else.
This is one of those books that are easy to read, and yet, hard to understand. There are three storylines that seem unconnected, but at the end of the book we have some link that connects the stories and characters. Still, I feel like there’s so much more that I’ve been unable to grasp because the end doesn’t explain everything. I guess I’ll have to buddy read it with someone else.
April 26, 2022
For me this book didn't quite work.
Adam Roberts likes exploring new ideas in his books, and sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn't. In this case he was interested in Dante's ideas about Purgatory, and while the book is an entertaining read I found it unconvincing. The ideas in the story didn't work together to make a coherent whole.
I did enjoy reading the book and say it's worth your time to read it - it's a fairly short book and won't take you too long to finish. However it isn't his finest work.
Adam Roberts likes exploring new ideas in his books, and sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn't. In this case he was interested in Dante's ideas about Purgatory, and while the book is an entertaining read I found it unconvincing. The ideas in the story didn't work together to make a coherent whole.
I did enjoy reading the book and say it's worth your time to read it - it's a fairly short book and won't take you too long to finish. However it isn't his finest work.
May 13, 2022
This is not a novel. This is two shorter works badly pasted together for little reason. One I liked, the other not so much. Still, I recommend the middle story
May 12, 2024
Oddly enough in the explanation at the end of the book, Roberts talks about how he felt the two stories within the book were too obviously interconnected as to be sort of silly, but everyone who edited and read the novel thought the connection was too esoteric. I came in with the latter crew. Moreover, the inner story was great and the outer layered narrative was dull and overly philosophical.
December 16, 2022
4/4.5 stars. Only sullied by some misspellings and seemingly underworked sections, but what a doozy. Maybe not the most clear, philosophically, but Robert's was biting off some pretty big ideas so it's easy to forgive him. Thoroughly enjoyed the interactions with biblical, ancient, middle age, and contemporary literature.
October 10, 2021
That was... weird. The book started with everything right. The first 20 pages grabbed me so hard that I had to get a cup of coffee and say, 'oh, that will be good.'
Then... then... wtf! After page 29, it changed completely. It was like switching from Ridley Scott's Prometheus to Netflix Stranger Things in a flip of a second. Really. The only explanation I can guess is the original book author died, and somebody else assumed the writing and said, "F* that! I like stranger things!". It wasn't very pleasant. I mean, I didn't buy this book to read stranger future things 4. Anyway. Keep going, I said. The worst part is that the author produces a cliché sick United States government who is evil in its core. That resonates a lot with this new age who wants to destroy one of the best countries in the world, those who view America as a society of competing oppressions. So the book drags a while, and then...
Then… oh… then we are on track again! All this Stranger Things gets better. The explanation of it all… and after page 260, I was on board again. Maybe the author didn't die. He just woke up from a mysterious coma. Perhaps that's what happened, or maybe Mr. Roberts submitted the book to his editor, and his secretary called him back. Here is the supposed dialogue:
- Hello?
- Adam?
- Yeah! Hi Pam, what's up?
- Good, good. Look, Marcus told me to call you...
- Great! So, he read it?
- Yeah. He did...
- So? Let's publish it?
- Well... yeah... I mean, the story is good but you'll need to fill it up a little bit.
- He thought 70 pages wasn't much?
- Yeah... you know Marcus. He wants a novel, so you should put more meat on that.
- Hum... how much?
- Well... let's say 250 pages more...
- Wow! That's a lot! You know I don't have time enough for this, Pam. The University is so demanding...
- Yeah, I know, dear. I know... But, hey, I had an idea. I was writing something about this girl who likes bees, you know... and she has these nerd friends...
- Wait, Pam. What a girl who likes bees has to do with the Purgatory Mountain, and spaceships, gods and all?
- Well... nothing, but you can tie up a little by the end of my text, just insert it in the middle of your writing and make it part of the story, you know? I already wrote around 230 pages given or take...
- Well, Pan... is there another way to publish without these extra pages?
- I'm afraid Marcus won't allow it, babe.
- (Sigh) Ok...
- Great! I'm sending you the girl's story. See you on Monday! Could you send my regards to Rachel?
- Thanks for that, Pam. You always save me. I’ll mention your name in the Acknowledgment session.
- Oh dear, no problem. You know I like to write, and someday I'll publish my story too
- I'm sure of it, Pam. Yeah, you will.
That was what happened with this book. Five stars for Mr. Roberts. One star for poor Pam. Three stars for the band.
Then... then... wtf! After page 29, it changed completely. It was like switching from Ridley Scott's Prometheus to Netflix Stranger Things in a flip of a second. Really. The only explanation I can guess is the original book author died, and somebody else assumed the writing and said, "F* that! I like stranger things!". It wasn't very pleasant. I mean, I didn't buy this book to read stranger future things 4. Anyway. Keep going, I said. The worst part is that the author produces a cliché sick United States government who is evil in its core. That resonates a lot with this new age who wants to destroy one of the best countries in the world, those who view America as a society of competing oppressions. So the book drags a while, and then...
Then… oh… then we are on track again! All this Stranger Things gets better. The explanation of it all… and after page 260, I was on board again. Maybe the author didn't die. He just woke up from a mysterious coma. Perhaps that's what happened, or maybe Mr. Roberts submitted the book to his editor, and his secretary called him back. Here is the supposed dialogue:
- Hello?
- Adam?
- Yeah! Hi Pam, what's up?
- Good, good. Look, Marcus told me to call you...
- Great! So, he read it?
- Yeah. He did...
- So? Let's publish it?
- Well... yeah... I mean, the story is good but you'll need to fill it up a little bit.
- He thought 70 pages wasn't much?
- Yeah... you know Marcus. He wants a novel, so you should put more meat on that.
- Hum... how much?
- Well... let's say 250 pages more...
- Wow! That's a lot! You know I don't have time enough for this, Pam. The University is so demanding...
- Yeah, I know, dear. I know... But, hey, I had an idea. I was writing something about this girl who likes bees, you know... and she has these nerd friends...
- Wait, Pam. What a girl who likes bees has to do with the Purgatory Mountain, and spaceships, gods and all?
- Well... nothing, but you can tie up a little by the end of my text, just insert it in the middle of your writing and make it part of the story, you know? I already wrote around 230 pages given or take...
- Well, Pan... is there another way to publish without these extra pages?
- I'm afraid Marcus won't allow it, babe.
- (Sigh) Ok...
- Great! I'm sending you the girl's story. See you on Monday! Could you send my regards to Rachel?
- Thanks for that, Pam. You always save me. I’ll mention your name in the Acknowledgment session.
- Oh dear, no problem. You know I like to write, and someday I'll publish my story too
- I'm sure of it, Pam. Yeah, you will.
That was what happened with this book. Five stars for Mr. Roberts. One star for poor Pam. Three stars for the band.
October 4, 2023
If you are like me, and are intrigued by the first half of the book summary, i.e. the distant planet and massive structure, then don’t bother reading.
Sadly, if you are intrigued by the second half of the summary, I am not sure you will like this book either.
There are so many unanswered questions left at the end that I can’t stand it. To avoid spoilers, I can say this: of all of the mysteries and questions in the book summary (mega structure, how it was built, why, U.S. falling apart, neurotoxins, private network, secret inside) only one is ever really explained and not that well. The whole concepts of the kids being chased by several secret organizations is a little absurd since we are told upfront these organizations don’t know what’s inside the secret network. Why would they try to kill children to have it? What if it turned out to be bunch of poems?
The book goes on to introduce other mysteries, and then not explain those.
Too many pages spent describing situations and details that ultimately do not impact the story and the story itself was very disappointing.
1 1/2 - 2 stars.
Sadly, if you are intrigued by the second half of the summary, I am not sure you will like this book either.
There are so many unanswered questions left at the end that I can’t stand it. To avoid spoilers, I can say this: of all of the mysteries and questions in the book summary (mega structure, how it was built, why, U.S. falling apart, neurotoxins, private network, secret inside) only one is ever really explained and not that well. The whole concepts of the kids being chased by several secret organizations is a little absurd since we are told upfront these organizations don’t know what’s inside the secret network. Why would they try to kill children to have it? What if it turned out to be bunch of poems?
The book goes on to introduce other mysteries, and then not explain those.
Too many pages spent describing situations and details that ultimately do not impact the story and the story itself was very disappointing.
1 1/2 - 2 stars.
December 19, 2021
DNF, so one star by definition. This book pissed me off from the start, with a cover blurb that is simply misleading (its not really about a spaceship and an alien megastructure; that's just a wrapper for the real story set in the near-future US), and an opening section that was very obviously trying to hard to be literary. And despite that, I was starting to enjoy the tale of Otty in the United States of Amnesia, right up until Which killed my interest dead, because firstly, that's not really what I want to read about, especially where children are involved, and secondly, there's just no honest way to write yourself out of that.
It has made me wonder about portrayals of the near-future USA in recently-published SF, though, and whether the consensus future for them is now basicly fascism and tyranny...
It has made me wonder about portrayals of the near-future USA in recently-published SF, though, and whether the consensus future for them is now basicly fascism and tyranny...
April 15, 2021
Two fantastic books smooshed together to somehow become less than the sum of their parts. The opening and ending far future section is brilliant and tantalising but ultimately goes nowhere. The middle bit, the vast majority of the book, works really well but a) "American War" did the same thing much better and b) personally I have a limited capacity for wanting to read about faceless governments interrogating teenagers, it's not a comfortable read over quite an extended period. I think this could have been a better book if the links between the two stories was developed a bit more or the far future stuff was fleshed out. I've read a lot of books recently that could have been shorter but this could really have done with another 100 pages.
July 31, 2021
This is my first read from this author so I'm not adept to his philosophical style and story. A scifi with a group going to inspect an abandoned alien planet with an unusual structure. And in the near future USA in a civil war with an annoying teen who is more concerned about people cursing than the war and other happenings. Totally a whoosh for me. I didn't understand the purpose of this book, the plot and what the author is aiming for. I stuck with it because I was interested in seeing what happens. I'm just left confused instead.
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