Wednesday, October 2, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Outside by Ada Hoffmann




The Outside is a Science Fiction novel that takes on a lot of ideas over the course of its story, from humanity's governance and restriction by large deadly AIs, treated explicitly as gods, to the existence of Lovecraftian beings from outside, whose existence is feared and kept hidden by those AI gods.  I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot on this topic lately, but Lovecraftian fiction is not really something I have a great interest in in general, but there has been a lot of really good work in this sub-genre lately (frequently using the mythos to present themes in opposition to Lovecraft's own horrible views).  Still, The Outside was a book I kept seeing recommended by writers I enjoy, so I reserved it from the library to see how I'd feel about it.

And yeah, The Outside is pretty impressive and imaginative, with a fascinating world and characters to go along with a plot that twists and turns and uses every bit of its genre trappings - the AI Gods, the lovecraftian Outside - in interesting and well executed ways.  I'm not sure if I'd say it's a book I absolutely loved, but I can see how others would feel that way, and I burned through the book in two days - and probably could've finished in one if I tried, which is a good sign of how well it reads.  Definitely worth a shot for anyone looking for new and different scifi.

Of note, the book features both a protagonist and an antagonist on the autism spectrum, which has fairly big implications for how both characters interact with other people and how they see the world.  I think this is done rather well, but I don't have the background necessary to truly judge this, so I won't be going much further about it in the review.  Other reviewers I've seen who seem to have the background seem to also think this is done well, for what that's worth.  
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Yasira Shien should've felt like she was on the verge of triumph.  She has built the largest totally man-made - with no help from the Gods - reactor in orbit around the planet of Jai, which is about to go online in just a few days.  She has a steady girlfriend in her lover, Tiv, who supports her and is totally understanding about Yasira's  issues dealing with people due to Yasira's autism.  And yet, despite having checked and triple checked the math behind the reactor, she can't help feel that something is wrong with it and that it should not be started....but it's too late to stop now.

But when Yasira is proven right, and the reactor leads to disaster, she finds herself at the mercy of the God known as Nemesis, the god who hunts down and destroys heretics and rebels.  Even worse, one of Nemesis' angels has special plans for Yasira, for Yasira's work is based upon heretical principles first developed by her mentor, Dr. Evianna Talirr, who went mysteriously missing years ago.  The angel wants Yasira to help them track down Dr. Talirr, and to stop Yasira's mentor, for the reactor disaster is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the results of what will come from Dr. Talirr's own plans.

But Yasira knows that the Angels of Nemesis are not telling her everything and can't quite be trusted....but even so, there's no way she can let Dr. Talirr go either, with Dr. Talirr planning to take her own research into the deadly heretical Outside to a scale so big that it will threaten everything Yasira and maybe the universe has ever known....
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The Outside features a world that exists in a distant future from our own, but is written extremely well to explain how that world works rather quickly without relying at all upon info-dumping in any sense of the word.  The closest things to infodumps are the asides that open each chapter, which either are from the writings of Dr. Talirr (the antagonist) or based upon some of the child stories of the Gods, which explain how things essentially work while also showing the mentalities of the relevant characters towards those background elements at the same time, so it's far from straight info-dumping.  This is a world where AIs built from humans emerged to control human space throughout, and where each AI, known explicitly as Gods, harvests the souls of humans after death and controls/limits the scientific achievements of the humans throughout the universe.  You could build a whole book on this premise alone, possibly with a revolt against such Gods by humans trying to reassert their own destinies.  You could also build a whole book based upon the interactions of humans in this system with alien species who don't quite share the system.

But The Outside goes in a different direction (although some elements of those other ideas persist), and the book does not suffer from it, or feel like details of the setting are glossed over in any way.  Instead, the book uses this setting to focus the conflict faced by our main protagonist and main viewpoint character, Yasira, as she struggles to understand what seems to be literally the ununderstandable and to figure out what she wants to do about it.  Yasira is a fascinatingly written character, a scientist on the spectrum who has seemingly lost the enthusiasm she once had for the work, and who isn't comfortable with others but at the same time does care about them, and refuses to ignore the consequences to others of her work.  Despite her social inhibitions and her ability to make cold calculations in the midst of a desperate situation, she's still able to feel torn-apart by guilt from the results of those calculations, a mentality which puts her in conflict with the book's antagonists: Dr. Talirr, and Akavi, her captor and angel of Nemesis.

Akavi is the book's other point of view character, which is an interesting twist because he's an inhuman being - literally as he's a cyborg with most of his human brain burnt out as well as metaphorically - willing to do anything, and to harm anyone, in the pursuit of his goals of gaining more power in the service of his god, Nemesis, and he quite clearly is not up to anything good, but while he's certainly not anyone the reader would root for given his methods, he's always interesting to follow.  He essentially serves as the co-antagonist with Dr. Talirr, whose point of view we only see in snippets of her diary.  Dr. Talirr is a strong contrast to Yasira - like Yasira, Talirr is a scientist on the spectrum who isn't good at dealing with people, but unlike Yasira, Dr. Talirr has lost any thought of the worth of innocent lives and what her work might do to them.  Which is a natural reaction given how The Outside, and the beings that belong there, work, which is all I'll say about that without spoiling.

I should mention the book includes a number of other minor characters who are sketched out fairly well and add some strong depth, to go along with a plot that takes some pretty damn fascinating turns all the way from beginning to a really satisfying ending, which wraps things up but also leaves several strong hooks towards a sequel. The story isn't done here with The Outside, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing where everything goes from here.
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