Book Report: Crux

Judging entirely by its cover, YHB had very low expectations of Crux. I don’t (as we’ve covered before in this Tohu Bohu) read or enjoy much short fiction, so as far as I can recall I hadn’t come across the name Albert E. Cowdrey. Well, and I also don’t read much military or environmental history, which is the other place I would have come across the author. I didn’t know Mr. Cowdrey was a military historian until I finished the book and read the note on the back leaf. I would have had even lower expectations had I known. Perhaps it’s unfair, but I have a tendency to suspect that “real” historians are trying to display their “real” knowledge at the expense of the story. Harry Turtledove/Turteltraub is an offender there, but scarcely the only one. Heck, Isaac Asimov had a weakness there, himself.

Anyway, this book was surprisingly good. First, its dreadful pulp cover was not witty neo-pulp, or even good authentic pulp, just shoddy and big-gun not-shocking. I figured it to be a lousy stiff space-opera, and of course picked it up to take home from the library. The first bit of the book was more-or-less standard far-future dystopia, with an annoying multiple-viewpoints thing, and some stylistic bits that were simultaneously annoying and funny (for instance, the annoying thing where the there is a developed commonspeak argot in which presumably the book is written (or at least all the thoughts and dialogue) shows up in a small handful of italicized nouns which were actually well-chosen; the word for the fat cat VIPs is fromazhi). The plot was clumsy; the fascist government had way too much power for the rebels to have a chance at succeeding, or at escaping, and the rebels were too dimwitted and callous for me to root for them anyway. The protagonist was likable, though, in a Dick Francis way, and I was really shocked when he died less than a hundred pages in.

It turns out, of course, that he wasn’t the protagonist of the book proper, and that a minor character is actually the protagonist, although we don’t really root for him to win, despite (at least in my case) liking him a lot. Most of the story is actually told from other people’s points of view, people who the main character (Yama) has picked up as tools, or who have been picked up as tools by those tools, or who have put themselves in opposition to Yama somehow. Given that the first such didn’t survive, we don’t expect all of these to survive, and sure enough some of them don’t, but some do, and some do in ways I didn’t expect.

What kept surprising me, though, was the way the initial events transformed themselves, again and again, through the rest of the book. In a time travel book, there are always opportunities for events to read differently the second or third time through; Mr. Cowdrey does an excellent job with this. Not only the initial events but later events ripple through reflections and are interpreted through different lenses. Mostly this is done casually, as a byproduct of our characters trying to achieve various things; a dead body in one bit becomes a murder in another. An act of mercy in one bit becomes a bit of sadism in another. People reveal different aspects of themselves, and different aspects of their goals. Our sympathies are tested.

Ultimately, crappy people overcome the (moderately) good people to achieve something wonderful, and do so out of petty and personal motives. In the end, history is, in fact, changed, but we don’t so much care. One dystopia is destroyed, perhaps two, but they will be replaced, I think it’s fair to infer, with other dystopias. There may be a moral, but I have no idea what it would be. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Whatever it was, it would be subject to interpretation, and as the frame changed, the meaning would change as well.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.