(this first comment is just providing my overall context for why I like this story. Second comment has some more recent thoughts after reading more recent books in the same series)
I read this story during my formative years, so it carried a lot more weight for my high-school mind than reading an equivalent story would now that I’m 30.
It is still a good story. I think Zvi’s description of “should you bother reading this?” before the fold is correct.
Some additional things I got out of this:
The thing I found most useful about this story at the time was a story dwelling in a world whose morality was very different from my own. (Zvi did not have this experience. I think you’ll most have this experience if you were raised by atheists/hippies and have not only acquired their underlying values but some random patchwork beliefs that you haven’t finished re-examining).
The world of Inquisitor is set in a “Medieval Church controls the entire human future.” Morality comes from an extreme, puritanical version of the church (something I’d acquired an aesthetic distaste for), with the caveat that demons are real, so you have to cut them some slack. But just because demons are real doesn’t mean I’m opting into the entire rest of their frame and politico-socio-paradigm.
On the other hand, Chaos is not just “people with the flavor text of political tribes I dislike” – they’re, like, genuine Lovecraftian Horror (moreso than most other attempts to depict lovecraft that I’ve seen).
So, this is not a story where, if it happened in the real world, I’d automatically be rooting for anyone very enthusiastically.
It’s also not a story that attempts to have a clearly defined moral – I think a consequentialist-rationalist and a deontologist-catholic and a vaguely atheist hippie could all read the same story and come away with different takes on who was right or what lessons to learn, and the books mostly just let you have your opinions without telling you otherwise. (This was fairly novel among sci fi or fantasy books I had read at the time)
I didn’t pitch Zvi very hard on the sequel trilogy (it’s good, but didn’t have much more to offer philosophically than the first trilogy). But I recently read the first (and so far only book) of the third trilogyin the Eisenhorn meta-trilogy, and a) that book was good, b) it reminded me of a few neat things about the second trilogy.
1. A major plotpoint at some point is the central Unsong gimmick (there are words of god and you can brute force search for them)
2. The Eisenhorn trilogy is told from the first person. The second trilogy, Ravenor, is told from the POV of an extremely powerful psychic… which means it is also mostly told from first person, but often through the POV of other people which was neat.
(this first comment is just providing my overall context for why I like this story. Second comment has some more recent thoughts after reading more recent books in the same series)
I read this story during my formative years, so it carried a lot more weight for my high-school mind than reading an equivalent story would now that I’m 30.
It is still a good story. I think Zvi’s description of “should you bother reading this?” before the fold is correct.
Some additional things I got out of this:
The thing I found most useful about this story at the time was a story dwelling in a world whose morality was very different from my own. (Zvi did not have this experience. I think you’ll most have this experience if you were raised by atheists/hippies and have not only acquired their underlying values but some random patchwork beliefs that you haven’t finished re-examining).
The world of Inquisitor is set in a “Medieval Church controls the entire human future.” Morality comes from an extreme, puritanical version of the church (something I’d acquired an aesthetic distaste for), with the caveat that demons are real, so you have to cut them some slack. But just because demons are real doesn’t mean I’m opting into the entire rest of their frame and politico-socio-paradigm.
On the other hand, Chaos is not just “people with the flavor text of political tribes I dislike” – they’re, like, genuine Lovecraftian Horror (moreso than most other attempts to depict lovecraft that I’ve seen).
So, this is not a story where, if it happened in the real world, I’d automatically be rooting for anyone very enthusiastically.
It’s also not a story that attempts to have a clearly defined moral – I think a consequentialist-rationalist and a deontologist-catholic and a vaguely atheist hippie could all read the same story and come away with different takes on who was right or what lessons to learn, and the books mostly just let you have your opinions without telling you otherwise. (This was fairly novel among sci fi or fantasy books I had read at the time)
I didn’t pitch Zvi very hard on the sequel trilogy (it’s good, but didn’t have much more to offer philosophically than the first trilogy). But I recently read the first (and so far only book) of the third trilogy in the Eisenhorn meta-trilogy, and a) that book was good, b) it reminded me of a few neat things about the second trilogy.
1. A major plotpoint at some point is the central Unsong gimmick (there are words of god and you can brute force search for them)
2. The Eisenhorn trilogy is told from the first person. The second trilogy, Ravenor, is told from the POV of an extremely powerful psychic… which means it is also mostly told from first person, but often through the POV of other people which was neat.