Context

The Nulapeiron Sequence #2

by John Meaney

Nulapeiron: a world isolated for twelve centuries. Its billions of inhabitants occupy subterranean strata, ruled by a logosophically trained aristocracy of Lords and Ladies whose power base is upheld by Oracles. But revolution has touched all of its many cultures - failing in its intent, yet changing everything.

Now Lord Tom Corcorigan - the commoner-turned-noble who renounced his power, the poet, logosopher, and holder of the key to understanding the myriad wonders of mu-space, the legendary one-armed warrior, former revolutionary and would-be peacemaker - lies fatally wounded. His survival is dependant on his meeting with a mysterious Seer whose spacetime-warping talents transcend the merely Oracular. It is a confrontation that will result in bitter tragedy and loss. Can the woman he loves be truly dead, or can quantum mysteries lie beyond the grave?

Turning his back on a society sliding once more into anarchy and chaos, a disillusioned and despairing Tom wanders this strange, stratified world in search of meaning, love and his own salvation. But it seems Nulapeiron is threatened by a vast, insidious and terrifying enemy whose origins may lie beyond their world, beyond their understanding. And now is the time for legends to be reborn...

Sequel to the acclaimed Paradox and the second book in the Nulapeiron Sequence, Context is a thrilling, daring and complex novel that confirms John Meaney as one of British science fiction's most original and exciting practitioners.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera

535 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

John Meaney also writes as Thomas Blackthorne.

Reviews

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

You're a one-armed poet/logosopher who inspired a revolution (which admittedly got a lot of people killed but you won! sort of) and in the process rescued the noble woman who saved your life years ago (but also is the reason you have one arm . . . awkward). You've been a poor person, a servant, a lord, then not-a-lord, now a symbol . . . so with all the dust settling, what's the next step? A vacation? Sure! Oh, but wait, you're mortally wounded? Well, then you're just going to have to compress the itinerary slightly. Maybe skip anything with long lines.

At the end of the last book in this series, "Paradox", we had our hero Tom Corcorgian crash a trial where his ladyfriend was encased in a strange contraption that might remind you of those expanding buckyballs you find hanging in the entryways of museums, only lethal. For some reason at the end of that book it explodes, skewering a whole bunch of people, including Tom. When we meet him here its not long after that incident and he and his security chief Elva are off to the domain of the Seers to get some quick thorough healing before whatever magic nanoparticles in the rod that took him out poison and kill him (this revelation is one of the book's first "wait, what?" moments . . . as if impaling a slew of people as your climax wasn't bad enough, now you have to slowly poison the survivors?). While there, he gets to meet with a Seer, who appears to be slumming from his regular duties in a Moebius graphic novel and during their conversation he gets both good news and bad news. The good news is that his security chief returns his love for her. The bad news is she also immediately dies. The other good news is that he finds out he'll somehow rescue her someday possibly. And while he finds out about some other stuff none of it seems to matter as Tom goes on a singleminded quest to get his love back. Fortunately there's no other problems in the world and he has plenty of free time to pursue this goa-oh wait, everything is going wrong everywhere.

Reading this, I got the sense that Meaney's story had peaked too early and that he didn't have much with Tom beyond the revolution stuff in the first book (you can even argue after he takes out the Oracle the book sort of drifts, coasting on its own momentum, like a fiery car skidding on wet asphalt toward a gas station) even as he was somehow compelled to continue writing about him. And while we are still mercifully denied big excerpts from Tom's bestselling poetry, the general feeling from this is that Tom is a guest star in his own book, only the book doesn't know that and so we keep following background player Tom while other, potentially more important stuff keeps happening in other places.

Its not that Tom doesn't have things happening to him. He does. Its just that its hard to figure out at times if Meaney is heading somewhere particular with this, or just trying out different scenes with whatever strikes his fancy. So we're granted an extraordinarily long and extremely graphic torture sequence, followed by an extremely graphic revenge fantasy sequence (though I guess minus the "fantasy" part) before eventually Tom falls in with the Jogging Monks, who reach enlightenment by running really far all the time (one of Tom's hobbies in the first book was running, so way to get back in the game) and only after we're done with all that does the book start to sort of kinda take the plot seriously and discuss the Blight that has been taking over domains and somehow merging people into a collective, shipping them back with vastly different personalities as if they've been replaced and turning the local governments very, very mean. Can Tom and his old friends stop this? Who cares, as long as he gets Elva back?

Haphazard as the first book could be at times, it at least had a feverish intensity in its better portions to carry you through the parts that weren't as exciting. Here, Meaney tries for that same level of energy but nothing really seems to stick here. Any complexities that the series has so far put forward as almost entirely eliminated here for simplicity's sake, from romance to friendships to background political struggles and what we're left with is a guy trying to save a girl that may not necessarily need to be saved, because he feels they should be together. The problem is, much like the first time around, Tom is not a character destined to set the world on fire even if the world was a nitrate film vault and he was a heavy smoker so centering our emotional sights on whether he gets to kiss Elva again is not quite the epic love story he thinks it is. But the issue of the Dark Fire/the Blight, which takes up most of the back half of the book, feels like it comes out of nowhere and its unclear even as the book climaxes exactly what the nature of the threat even is despite the overall creepiness of the "you will be assimilated" implications.

Those implications never really seem to play out and so it becomes unclear what Meaney is even working toward here. The influence of the Blight seems to make living conditions bad for the people inhabiting the lower levels . . . but it was bad already in the semi-feudal system that already existed so beyond the level of violence going up dramatically you wonder if people would even notice the difference. The Blight's goals seem to be the usual "take over everything" but since we mostly see the effects without really dealing with the cause most of Tom's encounters are like any other foray into occupied territory. The nature of the threat never really comes alive (other than "this is bad") and so if often feels like Meaney is just flinging obstacles at Tom's quest in order to pad out the page count (there's a long quest with two people who were so unmemorable that I forgot who they were while I was reading the book) without any sense of escalation. Things proceed but you feel like they would proceeded much the same without Tom's involvement and most of his conscious decisions are made depending on how much closer it'll get to him being with Elva again (at least the last book gave him a vaguely interesting choice between two different women . . . here, once he and Elva declare True Love its just cartoon hearts floating around everyone's heads). Even his logospheric abilities, so delightfully vaguely defined in the last book, are sort of put to the side to focus on his hand-to-hand combat abilities (Meaney has a black form in a form of karate so the fighting is technically correct though not really pulse-pounding).

Oh, and instead of "Karyn's Story" this time out, our learning modules center around her daughter Dorothy (named "Ro" here), who has the jet black eyes of a Pilot and features in quite a few chapters mostly going to various training schools, lusting after a fellow student and weirdly enough sleeping several nights in her room after her roommate is found murdered in said room (I feel like colleges would move you somewhere else, both for the "active crime scene" aspect and "emotionally traumatizing" aspect) although they had just met so maybe the school assumed she wasn't too attached. Her sections seem like they're going somewhere but are also completely separated from whatever Tom is doing so its like two books occupying the same space, neither of which are that exciting. And its not completely clear what Pilots do.

The book never does anything completely wrong, but it also doesn't go out of its way to justify "why am I reading this?" Instead, it has scenes and those scenes have characters and you add a bunch of them up and put it between two covers and bingo! a book! There's no sense of a driving force or that we're even continuing any overarching story from the first volume (this was apparently a trilogy, although I don’t have the third book . . . one day I might get it but let’s just say its not high on my priority list for acquisitions). Instead, its just whatever feels good in the moment, which is probably best illustrated by an early scene where Tom, undergoing a regrowth of his missing arm, has a vision where he rescues Elva but notices he has only has one arm in said vision and so instead of doing the logical thing and assuming that he loses the new arm somewhere along the line, takes a rather extreme step to ensure the vision remains accurate. Its both forward thinking and yet utterly short-sighted all for the wrong reasons but never for a moment does he waver and think, "Gosh maybe the vision was wrong and I sure could have used two arms here." It’s a brand of confidence you can't necessarily buy at the store, unless the store stocked nothing but solutions to problems that you don't think you have. But that only exists if the word "oops" is erased from everyone's vocabulary, which seems to be the case here.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

So what do you think -- is it possible to adequately analyze a sprawling 1,500-page science-fiction epic in a single thousand-word essay? Because that's exactly what I'll be trying to do today, after recently finishing the massive three-book "Nulapeiron Sequence" from author John Meaney, yet another set of titles from the big box of books I received not too long ago from respected genre publisher Pyr, which I've been slowly making my way through this spring. (And my thanks again to the hardworking publicity staff at Pyr for sending this pile of back-titles in the first place; they were certainly under no obligation to do such a thing for some snotty critic no one's ever heard of, so I very much appreciate it.) And in fact, just like many of these older titles the company ended up sending, Meaney too is a member of the so-called "British New Wave" of SF authors who made such a splash in the early 2000s, and prompted American companies like Pyr to reprint all their books here in the US years later; although the first two books of this sequence (Paradox and Context) were originally published in the UK in 2000 and 2002 respectively, they and the third book (Resolution) didn't come out here until all at once in 2006.

And then here's the other thing to understand right away, that this series is what's known as a "space opera," which many non-fans of the genre mistakenly believe to be the only kind of SF there is -- you know, "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" type stuff, where the whole point is to construct a grand saga that relies much more on plot than character development, and that leans heavily on such genre tropes as sleek spaceships, sexy aliens, intergalactic wars and more. (This is then opposed, to cite a good example, to the last book from Pyr I reviewed, Justina Robson's Silver Screen, a standalone volume where the point is merely to use speculative elements from the real world of modern science to construct the same kind of tight character-based tale as any other contemporary novel. And speaking of that review, by the way, to clear up the matter for good once and for all -- Dear Mister Jeff VanderMeer Who I Actually Do Like And Respect, I do not really believe that you're p-ssed off at me, just like I don't really believe that every single SF author from the early 2000s is literally drinking buddies with every single other SF author from the early 2000s. They were both jokes, albeit badly-written ones that apparently a lot of people didn't get.) And just to avoid further snippy emails from disgruntled fanboys, let me also clarify that there are all kinds of other SF styles than the two already mentioned; there are also 'world-building' stories, for example, where the whole point is to create a believable scientific guide to societies and planets that don't actually exist (see for example my past review of Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness), and then there are so-called "New Weird" stories that artfully blend several different genres into a brand-new hybrid, and even more that I'm not going to bother going into. Whew! Digression over! Now stop sending me angry emails!

Of course, these aren't mutually exclusive categories either; for example, you could argue that the Nulapeiron Sequence (named after the planet where it takes place) is as much a world-building saga as it is a space opera, a look at a "cavern planet" that humans colonized over 1,200 years before the current story takes place (and over 1,500 years from our own times), where a population of over ten billion live in a series of vertical underground quasi-feudal kingdoms, and where a strict caste system determines how near or far away one lives from the surface. (And yes, just like Isaac Asimov's classic The Caves of Steel, this population is terrified of going up to the actual surface of the planet, a detail which figures heavily into the militaristic plotline driving the books themselves.) In fact, this is a big reason why the original Paradox made such an impact to begin with when it first came out, was for the care and attention Meaney paid in creating such a fantastical yet believable world, and especially for all the ingenious ways he mixed technology and biology into this society's details -- from giant hollow bugs that serve as transport vehicles, to "living architecture" which can grow its own doors and hallways, to the so-called "Oracles" who can view possible futures but only by committing acts of horrific sexual violence upon the slaves charged with caring for them.

Why yes, if this is reminding you of another classic SF series, Frank Herbert's "Dune" books, you're not alone -- both are detailed looks at far-future societies that have mostly done away with synthetic technology, within a semi-enlightened population that has gotten rid of its need for religion* but not for elaborate Shakespearean aristocracies. And also just like "Dune," Meaney's story is centered around an unassuming teenage boy who eventually grows into a planet-saving messiah-like figure; in this case, the merchant-son Tom Corcorigan, whose rise is mostly predicated on his natural mastery over the real-life mathematical discipline known as logics, which in the universe of Nulapeiron has become elevated almost to a religion unto itself, and is the main activity from which the rest of their society is curled around. (Confused? Think of yet another SF saga I've covered here before, David Louis Edelman's "Jump 225" series, of the way that free-market capitalism has in their far-future world become the "New Classicism," worshipped in the same unquestioned way that we currently worship the theories of the ancient Greeks.)

Ah, but see, everything I've just described is merely the background for the story itself; because much like the Dune universe's Paul Atreides, our hero Tom is a restless and inquisitive soul, which is what leads him first into trouble and then into understanding and eventually to a seismic shift in how the entire society on Nulapeiron works. Because near the beginning of the entire saga, through a series of mischievous acts, Tom ends up acquiring a sort of five-sense recording device from a mysterious stranger, which turns out to have etched in it the entire history of humans' flight to Nulapeiron back in the 2200s in the first place, how it happened and why it happened and why the information was then suppressed, and why it is that the idea of the current population re-learning the story is such a dangerous one. And so it's these near-future flashback scenes that make up an entire half of the storyline, every other chapter throughout all three books, as we watch humans first discover and then master the bizarre undimensional concept known as "mu-space," which turns out to be the key to traveling between planets at a speed faster than light. And without giving too much away, this is essentially what makes up the overall plotline of the three-book epic; Tom learning more and more about humanity's spacefaring past, Tom realizing more and more that Nulapeiron's caste system needs to be gotten rid of, and then the messy reality that his planet-wide revolt leaves behind after the bloodshed is all over, as well as the new threats their world now faces from outside forces after the revolution is finished.

But unfortunately there's a problem with all this as well, ironically enough the same problem seen in the Dune series; that while the first book in both epics are legitimate marvels that have rightly earned them both cult statuses within the SF community, it's almost as if both authors completely blew their creative wads on them (to use a gross yet apt metaphor), leaving afterwards a strong public outcry for sequels but with not a lot of ideas for what to do in those sequels. And in this you might want to think of a much more well-known example, the so-called "Matrix Trilogy" from the Wachowski Brothers also in the early 2000s; because as anyone who's seen those three movies knows, it's not really a trilogy at all, but rather one brilliant movie that became a surprise success and then two other related ones that were quickly sh-t out afterwards, creating a pretentious and overblown mess that's almost the opposite of what made the original so loved, which tries to retroactively shoehorn the elegant first tale into an overly complicated grand mythology created for the second and third, when in fact it was precisely the lack of this pretentious overblown grand mythology that made the original such a hit to begin with. (And by the way, wanna know why the projects that include such a messy grand mythology from page one are always flops? See The Chronicles of Riddick and get back to me.)

And so too is it the case with Meaney's saga, with a part two and three that hinge on a muddily-conceived concept not even mentioned in part one (a sorta hive-mind baddie called the "Blight" that Meaney compares to a galaxy-sized malignant virus), and that rely on Meaney awkwardly undoing many of the developments that ended part one (for example, re-establishing the aristocracy, after the entire point of part one was to get rid of it), introducing romantic yearnings between existing characters that weren't even hinted at in the original volume, etc etc etc. And that's a shame, because the original Paradox really is a remarkable and highly thought-provoking book; too bad that Meaney seemed to so profoundly run out of narrative steam when it came to the other two volumes of the series. (And yes, by the way, I too agree with the complaint that many other online reviewers have now made, that I got awfully sick and tired of every single character just happening to share the same specific personal interests as the author himself. "Oh, look, another character who's obsessively into martial arts! Oh, gee, another problem solved with a long-distance run and freehold rock climb! What a freaking surprise!")

So in the end, then, I guess I recommend the same thing with this series as I do with the Dune books (and the Matrix movies, and the Star Wars saga for that matter) -- that the first volume is well worth your time, the others not so much, and that ultimately it's up to us as audience members to decide exactly how we wish to enjoy a sprawling SF series, despite that author wishing that we would simply eat up every word with an insatiable hunger. Just because someone wants us to buy into every single detail of a fictional universe doesn't mean we have to; but just because some of it is crappy doesn't mean we should throw it all out either. That I think is the most important lesson to learn from the Nulapeiron Sequence as a whole, and a lesson crucial to understand in order to become a SF fan to begin with. It's something to keep in mind whenever approaching any overblown genre epic, but especially in this case.

*And as a final digression, may I please patiently explain this yet again to all you science-fiction authors out there? If you create a post-religious society for your own fictional universe, you cannot substitute scientific words within your characters' cursing without it coming across as anything else but immature, unintentionally funny horsesh-t. After all, it's the religious aspect of it all that defines cursing in the first place; that when you have a society that mostly believes in God, it becomes a legitimately shocking and offensive thing to damn and belittle that god in front of others. That's the entire point of cursing, and you completely miss the point when using such ridiculous phrases as, "Damn you to scientifically-proven random entropy! CHAOS ALMIGHTY, DAMN YOU TO ENTROPY!" Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.

[Dark-Draco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit to be totally lost at the beginning of the book. The whole thing with Elva - where did that come from? There was no hint in the first book at all, so at first this just seemed disjointed. But it did quickly pick up as Tom is once again caught up in politics and war. The arrival of the Blight was a bit of a surprise - again, no real hints and then all of a sudden the world is in full scale war. I suppose, in reality, that might be how it would feel, but in a novel it felt more as if the author started telling one story, changed his mind and added this big, bad nasty instead. I did enjoy Ro's story, set on Terra, a bit better than Tom's, so looked forward to those interruptions. But felt it had more of a tie in to how Tom finally won the battle. Then you've got the whole scene with the seer's head ...

So, overall I did like this, enjoyed reading it a lot and can't wait to read the final volume. But on more than one occasion I felt like skipping back to make sure I hadn't missed something, as the author likes to suddenly introduce something so out of context that it left you a bit lost.

[Karlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a very engaging and enjoyable read. The world of Nulapeiron is still an interesting amalgam of scifi and medieval tropes (due to cultural stratification between lords and commoners).

Plot-wise, the battle against the Oracles has been completed to partial success. Tom, who succeeds in securing his own revenge, is curiously against the manner in which his cabal has elected to overthrow the remaining Oracles. Leaving them, he is injured and falls literally and metaphorically. He rises again through the cultural strata, and in the background we see the rise of a 'new' foe in the form of the 'Blight'. The Blight seems to be tied to a disease that has overtaken multiple worlds over the course of the last 1200 years. Now it has arrived to Nulapeiron...

There was a little weirdness in the way the romantic elements played out between Tom and his women; the manner in which Elva is identified as his love seemed lacking in groundwork. Meaney's interest in martial arts continues to be evident in Tom's learning, and forms part of my enjoyment of this series. Onwards to the last book...

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just as chaotic and intimidating as book 1, but also very much enjoyable. I think I liked book 1 better, and I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why: I think it felt more like a personal story, with a main character I could empathize with, who was on a noble quest to right the wrongs of the world. This story just seemed to grab me less: it's a man trying to find and rescue his love across the world, intertwined with a confusing and chaotic apocalyptic war. Both seemed less engaging than the story of book 1, which relates to this book only in a couple specific ways. While it is a sequel, it has a very different feel to it.

[Sdluvingit · Rating 4 out of 5]

The journey of Tom Corcorigan continues intertwined with the story of the mysterious Pilots from Earth of 1200 years previous. The relationship between the two stories becomes clearer as this book progresses. The cosmology continues to be fleshed out with more thoughts on multiple universes, the flow of time and quantum entanglement as a new Darkness threatens the world. If you had a problem with the flow of thoughts and conversations in the first book, this book has corrected it; it much easier to read and follow. Sometimes second books lag but this does not suffer that fate.

[Karl Schaeffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second of 3 books. A bit more action than exposition than the first book. The two story lines appear to be drawing inexorably closer; the mu space pilots of mid 22nd century Terra and the 35th century world of Tom Corcorigan and Nulapeiron. Tom lives his life in a series of arcs, ascending to the heights of power then crashing down and living as a drunken derelict... And repeat. The Oracle appear to be defeated, but the menace of the Blight must be fought. Maybe the twin story lines will merge in book #3.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The weakest book of the trilogy, as is often the case with middle volumes. For a full review, see here on Suite101

[Shaheen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book dragged a bit, but was still entertaining. I'm looking forward to the final book. I was a little puzzled by the situation with Elva - their love affair seems very sudden. But they seem quite happy at the end.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmm, more a 3.5 than a 4.

Slightly muddled throughout, however a satisfying conclusion. Still not sure how some things are meant to have happened - more "magic" than science at points. The interwoven story of Ro, et al, was more interesting than Tom's story, imo.