I finally finished Burning Paradise last week (my reading at work has taken a huge hit as my boss loves to talk 3 feet away from me and to combat against that I’m watching arrow at work - now I’ve gotten sucked into arrow at work and We got this podcasts on the bus. anyway…) Thinking about the book and the world it created.
The concept is a something rather intriguing, It creates a world that hasn’t known a large scale war in a century, The Great War ended in a Armistice which is now celebrated as a Thanksgiving celebration (Armistice Day). Technology has grown at a slower pace but the world appears to be a more stable place. It turns out that there’s an alien entity, not so much an intelligence but a parasitical consciousness called the Hypercolony living in one of the atmospheric layer dubbed the radiosphere that propagates telecommunications. But the insidious part is in order to keep spreading itself it needs that stable environment so it alters signals, loses orders, changes broadcasts, all with a subtlle and deft touch. It also has agents on earth and some research is diverted or goes nowhere. But the thing isn’t sentient, it knows how to manipulate without having a feeling about things one way or another, it’s a means to end.
We have three or so POV characters, survivors of a massacre 7 years prior, members and children of members of the Correspondence Society, a secret society the way the Masons are ‘secret’ that know and have guessed a lot about the radiosphere. The kicker is that there’s a new parasitical entity feeding off the dying Hypercolony, and wants certain people’s help so that the Hypercolony doesn’t die yet, help propagate itself instead and maybe it the process wean off humankind slowly off the Hypercolony because when it dies off, it’s influence will vanish.
Part of the book suffers the same problem as any altverse or scifi novels is the travelogue, and it gets a bit repetitive at times. I was much more interested in the concept of the Hypercolony and the parasitical player rather than the human cast. The final few chapters however, come down to the concept of free will, is there any or can it all be calculated and manipulated.
It’s only 300 pages so it’s (normally) a quick read. The world really is painted in broad strokes and never comes out as fully fleshed out, it’s meant to be not too different than our own but with a newly minted sense of paranoia for a few. A good dose of Invasion of the Body Snatchers coarses through this book.
There is as sense of inevitability in this book, characters locked into pedefined roles that I’m still not sure if it works or not.
