Liviu's Reviews > Archipelago

An excellent sf book of ideas and world-building; if one expects action or nuanced characters this is not for them as the book reads like an old-fashioned contest of ideas within a fairly inventive ecological world-building. Not the fastest or energetic read to start with, it took me a while to get into it but then it became fascinating and I started turning the pages to see where it goes and what else comes up.

The setup is fairly simple - in a future universe of human expansion to the stars, a few polities dominate - the Core from which our main character POV, Ren Markov is a diplomat and special operative, is a sort of more evolved version of our (western) civilization of today, the Hanseatic League is a corporate polity of worlds (could be seen as another trajectory of our civilization today where the corporations took completely over) and the Old Worlds seems to be a more ideological future version dominated by religion and a strict moral code - it is the least presented of the three main player civilizations so really hard to compare but the names there seem to be Russian based...

Travel (both planetary and interstellar) is done by (manufactured) gateways which allow for instantaneous travel and there are fairly powerful ai's that seem not to be sentient though. Some decades before the start of the action, the Archipelago (Arc), a smallish colony-polity of a few worlds, in an out-of-the-way place with few gateways started developing a distinct socio-economic structure that was anti-corporate (earning the ire of the Hanseatic league which was one of the main investors there) and anti-"democratic" for the value of democratic that means politics and elections, so as usual the Core and Hanseatic agents helped along a "regime change" to a more congenial government - but the ideologues of the Arc expected that and prepared well, embedding their people in the new structure, so one day they mounted a surprise coup and destroyed all the gateways to the rest of human space except one that they closed. Lots of people, including Ren's parents who were from the Arc, got stranded wherever they were in the rest of the human space, though Ren, born on an insignificant Core agricultural planet where his (now deceased) parents settled, met and married, a planet which Ren left for the center of core space at the first opportunity, has very little knowledge of as his parents rarely talked about the Arc.

Now, 50 years later (and probably not coincidentally the time needed for sublight military expeditions from the powerful polities to arrive secretly in the Arc and prepare to "take it back"), the Arc wants to talk and reestablish relations, so they invite a delegation from the powers above. Ren is selected by his powerful boss Astrid the long-serving leader of foreign relations of the Core to go as the leader of the delegation and see what's up; Astrid knows that the Core hasn't prepared for a secret attack on the Arc, but suspects that the Hanseatic League and/or the old Worlds did so, hence Ren has a dual mandate - the official one to see what the Arc is about, if it's really a perverted totalitarian state oppressing their citizens or if it can mesh with the Core at least on some points etc and a secret one to look out for signs of an invasion, monitor his colleagues from the other polities for signs of preparing and abetting such and warning the Arc leaders if Ren feels the Arc is a reasonable polity and of course has a chance of resisting the invasion.

And so it goes and we slowly go through the Arc's reality and secrets with Ren whose main contact, Oso-Rae an Arc mid-level Central Control operative with her own doubts about the Arc's ideology of "ecological humanism", turns out to be a distant cousin...

With a very good and appropriate ending that leaves room for more in the fascinating universe of this novel, I highly recommend it and I would definitely be interested in more in this universe.