I finished The Darkness That Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker. I really enjoyed it, and look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.
I’ve seen reviewers comment that William Gibson has a good ear for subcultures’ doctors, which is how his inventions ended up as prominent element of actual hackers’ jargon - they sounded right. Bakker has that kind of ear for names and words in the languages of antique cultures. With very few exceptions, nothing is really blatantly like a real-world source, but things feel like they could be. Names are pronounceable. (There’s a short useful glossary at the back which doesn’t have any spoilers.). This is not easy.
The supernatural elements are nifty. Thre are some very mysterious entities whose motives and nature I expect we’ll learn more about, whom it’s clear are Very Bad.
The human societies feel plausible, complex, with explicit and implicit histories, and wildly varying levels of justice. There isn’t a lot of deliberate cruelty, but there is a lot of callousness. This is fairly grimdark, though it’s not extreme-horror bizarre grotesquerie.
I spent a significant part of the book missing the fact that there are two separate strands of narrative unfolding at two separate times. Oops.
So, to repeat, very good stuff, more in my future.
Now for some criticism. A crucial element of the setting is a faction do people who can assess the thoughts and feelings of others via trained observation, and manipulate others via largely subliminal verbal and physical cues. This is great for fantasy story, but it fails multiple sniff twists for me. Fundamentally, it strikes me as a very 19th century kind of outlook, and I’ll have to take some time to explain what I mean.
There are two distinct questions. Can we understand others that well? And can we influence others deeply but covertly? I don’t th No so, at least not without a lot of heavy footnoting.
Human brains work
broadly the same way. But we vary a lot in details. Our brains allocate more resources to stuff we do more often, for starters, so regional boundaries are not approximations and generalizations. Further, brains do what they can to repair and work around damage. Nerve cells, blood vessels, it’s all negotiable when it needs be. Most importantly, experiences means different things to us.
Are you bothered a lot by physical impurity and irregularity - do you, for instance, have OCD strongly? How far do your standards in beauty and attractiveness vary from advertising norms in your community, and how much do you have to hide them? What are prevailing norms of competitiveness and loyalty among the people you live and work and socialize with?in what ways do you value empathy and it what ways not?
None of this is very radical. I mean, it’s the basis of why polygraph tests are so often not admissible in court - external sign just aren’t that reliable at the individual level.
The same is true on the other hand. Our minds are not built to be reliable truth machines. For the deep dive, see Peter Watts’ appendix to Blindsight, and if you don’t get an existential moment, you didn’t read the notes.
What we perceive doesn’t match what actually happens around us or inside us in countless ways, in both normal and abnormal minds. The very continuity of our sense of self seems to be an illusion thrown up by subconscious parts of our mind, drawing on the ever-renewing illusion that is memory. It’s really, really weird down there, in ways that I think just don’t permit the kind of detached accuracy Bakker’s manipulator require.
The 20th and 21st centuries closed the door to pre-quantum, pre-relativity notions of absolute knowledge in perfect detail. Well, the same is true for an absolute psychology. We can’t know either ourselves or others that well. It’s great for a cool fantasy story, and insistent disbelief for many premises for interesting stories, but who boy it not true.
