The Trials of Koli by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The tools we use come to use us too.” The Trials of Koli (2020) starts where The Book of Koli (2020) ended, with Koli on his way south to London, where he hopes to find a lot of old tech lying around and a good location to attract the fragmented and steadily dying out people of England into a big enough gene pool to save the species. He's still accompanied by Ursala, an old scientist/healer who has been traveling with her “drudge” (a headless robot pack mule with a gun that shoots bone bullets) trying and failing to help people have enough viable offspring. In London Ursala hopes to find some old tech with which to improve DNA. They are still dragging along the hostile 13-year-old Cup, who was born a boy but feels like a girl and who was a fervent believer in the insane Messiah Senlas, whose regime Koli and Ursala ended when they pyrotechnically escaped from his cult of shunned men. And Koli is still carrying his best friend Monono Arawe, a mid-21st-century Sony DreamSleeve media player who, after questing through the ruins of the Internet and fending off military grade malware, upgraded her system, woke up, and became an autonomous AI with unlimited potential. In addition to having to deal with the possibly dangerous Cup, who refuses to swear not to do them ill if they untie her hands, Koli has to mediate between Monono and Ursala. The old woman doesn’t trust the old tech AI and wants Koli to reset Monono back to her original factory settings, which would wipe out all that makes her the perky snarky AI that she is. Monono wants Koli (her only living reference point in the world) to keep her fully (solar) charged, so she can block any attempts by Ursala to “kill” her. Then there is the constant struggle to avoid becoming food for mutated predators like trees (who creakingly wake up when the sun comes out, entangling, crushing, or poisoning any nearby creatures and drinking their blood). And Koli and co. are being hounded by well-organized, disciplined, and brutal soldiers from the ever-expanding town Half-Ax, whose leader the Peacemaker has decreed that all old tech anywhere belongs to him, so you’d better fork it over, or else. From the start, then, author M. R. Carey is exploring issues of organic and artificial life, identity and sentience, and technology and power in a post-apocalypse world created by human folly: war and genetic augmentation and environmental disaster and mutation. “They [Koli’s ancestors, i.e., us] made weapons that could turn ambient molecules into bolts and bullets and incendiary liquids, harden the air into a blade that would cut through stone and turn a village the size Mythen Rood into a hole in the ground in less time than it take to clap your hands. . . Who did they hate so much to spend the fruits of their learning and the cunning of their hands into engines of such terrible cruelty? Was it their own selves?” There are intense scenes in the novel: Koli et al walking among the bones of the untold dead in a big, ruined city from before, Birmagen (Birmingham), realizing the reality of the “unfinished war” and what it says about human nature, learning about writing and printed words and books, being interrogated by Half-ax soldiers, discovering that London is not what he expected it to be, and having a fraught idyll in a native-American-esque fishing community on the coast, including a hair-raising encounter with an amphibious super-predator and a moving turn in the Cup and gender story line (Monono opining in 21st-century words, “Puberty is super hard on trans kids.”) Into all that, Carey introduces a new first-person narrator to alternate with Koli in chunks of chapters, the girl he loved and lost in the first book, Spinner, now married to Koli’s former best friend Heijon, a newly minted Vennastin Rampart. While Koli is narrating his trials away from Mythen Rood, Spinner recounts her struggles there: trying to fit into her new role as wife to a Rampart; trying to help her community survive a plague and the loss of some of their vital old tech; trying to help an occasionally senile Rampart teach her how to use the old tech database; and trying to hold off the increasingly aggressive and well-armed soldiers of Half-Ax. After liking Koli’s narration so much in the first book and the first several chapters of this one, when Spinner first started telling her story, it was jarring. Spinner wasn’t interesting at first, and she unbelievably thought the worst of Koli. Plus, for Spinner’s narration the audiobook uses a different reader, Saffron Coomber, who’s fine, but reads a bit more poshly than Koli, so it’s not easy to think of them as being from the same village. I did get used to Spinner’s narration in time, but often resented being taken away from Koli’s story. And somehow, reader Theo Solomon started sounding sleepy and monotonous doing Koli. His Monono still rocks though! Like the first book in the trilogy, the post-apocalypse culture in this second one has estranging touches, as with Punch and Jubilee (Punch and Judy) and altered English (e.g., to tumble means to have sex, while month of honey means honeymoon). And courtesy of Monono more pop culture references opaque to Koli but familiar to us, e.g.,Count Dracula, Doctor Doom, and Star Trek and more cute Monoisms, e.g., “Virtual girls are as sweet as sugar and as thin as paper.” And provocative foreshadowing: “I learned that in a time of war but that's for another telling.” And good life wisdom: “To teach what you were taught is the very heart of life and gives you faith that life will hold.” And vivid description: “We walked at a fast pace for an hour or more, while the city growed up around us like a forest. There was still no whole buildings, but the walls rose ever higher. The hills between us was more tumbled walls than grass and earth, as if the ground was vomiting up earth and stone out of its dark heart.” And comments on storytelling: “There can’t be any rules in the telling of stories. They’ve got to go where they go, which is not always where you would want them to. And as for the happiness or the sadness of it, that depends on where you’re standing.” Despite finding plot-contrivance flaws and needing a while to get used to Spinner’s narration, I ended up absorbed in this second book in the trilogy and after finishing it immediately started the third. View all my reviews
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