Angelmaker

This novel is a caper and a part of a system of capers, pay attention to it! Several Harkaway-standard larger-than-life characters are off to the races, neck deep in a bizarre espionage adventure with roots in second world war mad science and the pursuit of truth.

Fundamentally, apart from anything else, this is a fun novel, and it's having fun with itself too. It has Guy-Ritchie-movie energy, classic British gangster swagger, and chaotic spy-movie thrills. Everyone in here is an utterly wild caricature of a British archetype. The sect of engineer-monks dedicated to finding the divine in craft is absolutely joyful. There's a lot to love and I had a great time.

I can't help reading echoes of the same themes which eventually became Gnomon. The arch-villain has echoes of the character who becomes Gnomon themself. The themes of legitimate and illegitimate state power & surveillance vs the autonomy of the individual and the capacity to resist. The tension around the implications of comprehensive knowledge, truth, and transparency — how much is too much?

But (mild spoilers for the operating principle of the MacGuffin beyond this point), I'd like to rant about the theory behind the doomsday they're trying to prevent. It's a classic quantum quantum quantum problem, much like the last third of Anathem, which I otherwise quite enjoyed.

Human consciousness is not, I repeat is not, a consequence of quantum effects. Faffing around with quantum stuff does not impact consciousness unless you also create classical real physical phenomena. Humans fundamentally don't have free will except perhaps randomly at the margins. You cannot "freeze" all the randomness out of the world by observing it too hard. All that observation stuff isn't attached to the consciousness of the observer, though sci-com has done a very bad job at explaining this. Quantum superpositions don't collapse because the "observer" is human or conscious. They collapse because a physical phenomenon would have a different outcome depending on which state the system is in*. The "observer" is any physical system; that's what collapses the wave. Human awareness is irrelevant.

Likewise, you cannot collapse the whole universe into static determinism by observing it too hard. You cannot observe that much! The physical realities of the universe limit how much of what can be observed! A machine which did this sort of super-observing would be much larger than the universe, because it would need to mechanically observe every electron and photon, and then every particle making up the machine would need to be observed by another machine, and so on and so on. The best machine that exists for observing/determining the universe is the universe itself, which is already as causally-bound to itself as it can be. Any attempts to pin down uncertainty and randomness in one place allow a commensurate amount of other stuff to be unobserved. The whole thesis of the uncertainty principle is that there exist very real physical limits on what can be observed and known.

None of which makes the silly speculative premise in the middle of a book full of impossible fictions any less fun or reasonable in the context of the novel. There's really nothing wrong with using pseudoscience in science fiction. And this is a fun thought experiment, for sure. I just… these misapprehensions are so common that it's frustrating to see them even in fiction. Because I worry about just reinforcing this misinformation, even though there's no reason to take this bit of fiction more literally than any of the other fictitious elements of the novel. Rant over.

*Though this is an idea which is almost impossible to truly internalize, so, for ethical reasons, I recommend acting as though you have free will and moral responsibility for your own actions, but pushing society to treat destructive behaviors as systems problems rather than personal moral failings.

Oh, man. Man, oh man. Here we go again with this guy Harkaway. This freaking guy. He’s totally brilliant. The long but never exasperating digressions. The improbably likable characters. The burgeoning evidence that he can’t go a book without mentioning pirates, martial arts, and incompetent bureaucrats. The sheer manliness! I don't even usually like that sort of machismo, but this guy does it right. I love this guy. Usually my reviews are middling and run on, but I don't feel qualified enough to critique this book in whole sentences.