RANTS AND RAMBLES
WARNING: It should go without saying that this review is my personal opinion, an opinion which I strive to support adequately, but please do not assign it undue importance (i.e. if I hate a book and you like it, don’t feel the need to change your opinion). Please also note that while I regularly rant about mere irritants in a novel, something must be remarkably good to garner the same level of comment. This means my rants and rambles tend to skew more negative than I often intend my review to be. With that in mind, please refer to my overall star rating for my unified opinion on this book.

• If the blurb on the back of the book is correct, it has been six hundred years since technology took a nose-dive, so I’m not sure how so much stuff has survived for so long. Plastic bottles are still used for carrying water even though they would have degraded to the point of uselessly long ago. Additionally, there is clothing, solar panels, satellites, computer parts, books, a magazines which still exist in operational configurations, supposedly hundreds of years after their manufacture date. Some of this is explained away by a futuristic metal (titanium-erzats) which magically resists the wear and tear of time, but other items just make no logical sense to still exist.
• I liked the idea of a “knowledge protectorate” whose job it is to seek out, categorize, and protect knowledge. It may seem unrealistic that humanity would put this power in the hands of a few, but in the story, there is proof of some dissent among the population, clans who have coveted books which the protectorate has to negotiate for or take by force. A full exploration of this social construct and its knock-on effects would have been a great angle to take the story. Alas, that was not to happen.
• BARELY A SPOILER: The “love story” in this book is awful. The two people involved are quite predictable: Eodain, because he is the main character and Elysa, because she is the only female character of note. Then there is the fact that nothing in this budding “relationship” makes sense. Eodain is mean to Elysar, their people hate each other, they have no chemistry and no reason to fall in love; however, she periodically pecks him on the cheek, lips, etc. to demonstrate their deepening affection. The right situation, actions, and conversations might have salvaged this disaster, but there is basically nothing in the novel to support even a friendship much less a romantic entanglement, and without anything to undergird the supposed growth of their relationship, the whole thing falls apart. This means that Eodain’s unspoken declaration of love near the end of the story, which should have had an emotional impact, falls as flat as a pancake.
• MINOR SPOILERS: Disability and injury is used as a vehicle to add character to the cast and to up the stakes in certain scenes. The problem is that this injury is forgotten as quickly as it is mentioned, and it doesn’t affect the plot in any way. For example, it is clear that Eodain has a gimpy hand, but it took several chapters for me to realize that he is missing his finger! Not that you would know it, because he operates just like a person with all ten fingers, and no one even mentions the disfigurement. Then there is the time that the pirate king breaks Eodain’s fingers (I think he breaks them; it is not entirely clear), but this injury is immediately forgotten about, especially in the final fight when he is able to nimbly wield his sword despite the debilitating injury. Injury is a great way to make action dangerous and humanize the characters, but a failure to integrate it into the story in a meaningful way makes it feel cheap and superfluous. Ultimately, this is probably worse than having no injury at all.
• SPOILER: The most unique setting in the entire story is a pirate settlement built atop several old cruise ships sitting in a desert. Putting aside for a moment that 1) the metal of these ships would probably have degraded over the hundreds of years, and 2) they wouldn’t stand up with their decks level, this setting is pretty cool. There is a lot of opportunity to use this unique location to show class disparities with richer people living higher up, host thrilling action sequences as people leap or swing from ship to ship, and creative settlement layout due to the corridor-ized nature of ships. Unfortunately, none of this is explored and the setting bascially functions like any other location in the story. The single exception is when Eodain is escaping captivity. He sets his room on fire (how it is possible to set a room inside a metal ship on fire to the extent depicted in the book is unclear) in order to create a distraction. Afterward, he uses a home-made rope to escape through a window. His rope is not long enough, and he must fall for quite some distance. What should have been a harrowing escape from this unique prison is hampered by two things. First, a tower escape isn’t a particularly unique situation, certainly not one only possible on a settlement built atop ships. Second, the injury, or potential injury, from the fall is brushed off immediately, making the whole things very by-the-numbers.
• SPOILERS: There are way too many things going on in this book. The setting and book title make it clear that the main theme is about humanity’s relationship to technology and information, but it is sidetracked by questions of morality, explorations of what a person would do to accomplish their goals, themes of loyalty and mercy, the idea of being the bad guy without realizing it, and perseverance. This is set against an ever-changing backdrop of land-dwelling pirates, conversations about WMDs, and no fewer than six plot twists in the final 10% of the book. Overall, the book is a convoluted, mostly incoherent mess. There is a good core here which can be enjoyed to a certain extent, but it is often swamped out by the static which surrounds it.
• MAJOR SPOILERS: Many things appear to make sense until the reader discovers more information. For example, Eodain is distraught to find his talisman (a USB storage device) is empty save for a gibberish file titled GROUND STATION. While the reader knows, if they have any acuity in computer matters, that this gibberish file is probably encrypted or some sort of program to be run at the NASA ground station Eodain is trying to reach, it makes sense that Eodain does not have such knowledge of computers and therefore draws the conclusion that either the Grand Protector made a mistake of the device has become corrupted. But later, he, with prompting, proposes that the file might be a program and is astonished by the implications. His previous despair and befuddlement only make sense if he has only a rudimentary understanding of computers, so when we discover he is well-versed in encryption and programs, the previous sequences make no sense.
• MAJOR SPOILERS: I genuinely cannot tell whether the people in this story world are supposed to be dumber than we are today or if their stupidity is simply a case of inconsistency. There are a ton of things the populace does not seem to know and so look for answers from information left by the ancients (the ancients in this case are the humans alive today). If the goal is to show how people tend to reply on the unknown, thinking it has answers to questions they themselves are very capable of discovering, it would be a smart critique made possible by the setting of the story; however, there are parts of the book which make me think the people really are supposed to be stupid. For example, Eodain discovers a long-lost method of construction which revolutionizes the house building industry. That revolutionary method? Filling plastic bottles with dirt and stacking them on top of each other. Creating bricks of dirt, whether by baking mud or by putting soil in vessels, is one of the most basic methods of construction, so the idea that in six hundred years no one has “reinvented” this construction method is truly unbelievable. On the other hand, people in this story also figured out how to get computers working after hundreds of years, so I would assume they aren’t meant to be stupid. It seems most likely that the instances of extreme ineptitude are simply massive inconsistencies in the book.
• MAJOR SPOILERS: For the majority of the book, Eodain believes his mission is to make it to the NASA ground station and upload the knowledge on his talisman to the cloud so that internet servers can disperse it to the general populace. The only problem is there is no reason why Eodain should believe this plan will work. First, why does he assume there are internet servers around the world which still work. He doesn’t even know where they might be, if they have electricity, or if they are even in an operational configuration. Even if they are, providing him a theoretical way to widely disperse knowledge, how does he think people will access the information? It’s not like computers, especially with internet access, are common. In fact, they are practically non-existent. Furthermore, he is not ignorant of the way computers work as evidenced by his ability to fix them, so his belief that this plan is in any way possible is mind boggling and thoroughly destroys the suspension of disbelief.
• MAJOR SPOILERS: The concept of being on the morally wrong side of a war and not realizing it because you grew up in a stew of indoctrination is a great idea which could have carried the story. As with many other things in this book, the problem is in the execution. This concept is never explored, whether in the culpability or innocence of those who are mislead, the somewhat grey area of right and wrong in the case of a large-scale conflict, challenging strongly-held beliefs, and tons of other ideas.
• MAJOR SPOILERS: Put simply, the bad guy’s plan is really stupid. He literally kidnaps Eodain, the son of the king and queen, repels their attempts to rescue the child for sixteen years, brainwashes the kid, concocts a lie to send Eodain on a mission to the NASA ground station, and sabotages his talisman so that it will drop “nukes” on the king and queen. I understand unrequited love can make people do drastic things (the bad guy was in love with the queen), but this is asinine. If he wanted to nuke everything, why not do it himself sixteen years prior? He was in such good standing with the king and queen that they put him in charge of the knowledge protectorate. Why did it matter so much that Eodain drop the nukes, especially since the king and queen would never know who had done it anyway? If he wanted Eodain to make it to the ground station, why did he not tell him about the secret tunnel? Why risk him being detained at the city gate? The whole thing is dumb from beginning to end and seems like it is just a way to rope the teenaged main character into the story.