Age of Unreason Discussion

 Storm on Thursday was kind of a dud, which is good. Also in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla the Ostara Festival event is going on!

I have some Thoughts that are circulating around my head about Zack Snyder and all, but as I have no intention of watching the Snyder Cut (I have no HBO Max so I have no legal way to do it right now anyway), and I don’t think I have enough material for a full Note on that, we’re going to talk about this book series I just finished instead.

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The Age of Unreason Discussion

Some spoilers ahead. I don’t think anyone cares, but thought I’d put that out there.

The Age of Unreason by J. Gregory Keyes is a quartet that runs on this premise: instead of the late 1600’s leading to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Sir Isaac Newton’s forays into alchemy bear fruit and blossoms into an explosion of alchemical science that takes the world by storm. Through alchemy, people are able to send messages across the world, create more efficient firearms, build flying ships, and in the case of Louis XIV, extend one’s natural lifespan. However, the use of aetheric science has grabbed the attention of otherworldly spiritual beings, and most of them don’t seem to like humanity very much! Realizing that the best way to destroy humanity is to get us to do it ourselves, they quickly find ways to turn nations against each other wielding weapons unlike anything seen in the real world.

It’s pretty hardcore sometimes? 

It is one of the weirdest alternate histories I’ve heard of. I picked it up after trying Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson and getting disappointed, because I really like the idea of a story about alchemy in the Enlightenment, and that one was just really boring. This one, on the other hand, dispenses with realism pretty quickly and just throws a bunch of historical figures in as characters. From the get-go, one of the protagonists is a young Benjamin Franklin, who naturally becomes an adept at alchemy and journeys to England to escape an evil warlock.

Also I really like alchemy. Not enough to go too deeply into it, but enough to draw alchemical symbols all over my notebooks.

I imagine that this series would be even more rewarding if I were more of a scholar of the time period, in the same way that Here, There Be Dragons is incredibly delightful to readers well-versed in classical fantasy and science-fiction. Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Charles XII, Peter the Great, James Oglethorpe, Voltaire, Tomochichi, and Louis XIV all appear sooner or later. The second book has Cotton Mather team up with Blackbeard of all people. The author’s clearly having fun throwing these characters together and seeing what happens.

Perhaps one of the interesting things about this series is it’s portrayal of colonialism. Obviously I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t happen anymore, because it definitely does even in this alternate history. But as the story goes on, and the conflict grows bigger and more unavoidable, the barriers of race and nationality start to break down. With resistance, but by the end of the series they’ve reached a point in which all men are more or less viewed as equal (still sexism though!). I thought this was maybe more optimistic than maybe history merited, but then again, maybe it’s not optimism--it takes the coming of the END OF THE WORLD for the people of this time period to realize that slavery and genocide is bad…. Well, that’s a ‘Better Late Than Never’ sticker if I ever saw one.

Mind you, while a couple of Native American characters take center stage, I don’t think any of the leads are black, even when freedmen make up a large portion of the forces fighting against the villains. So points off there.

I very much enjoyed that the nature of the spirit beings in the story is kept kind of vague. There are some answers, and characters do get some progress in classifying them--Isaac Newton decides to start calling them ‘malakim’ after Biblical angels and Adrienne and her students start working from there. But their nature, their relationship to God, if there even is a relationship to God, is all left muddled with theories, half-truths, and confusion. One of the malakim admits she doesn’t remember their origin for sure. Leaving it up in the air for this kind of story was the smart move, on Keyes’s part.

I did think that the story also has some things I really didn’t like. Adrienne, one of the main characters, basically has everything constantly dumped on her all the time, and it’s kind of tiring and exhausting. Which is part of the point, I think, that as a woman scholar in this time period who is suddenly thrust into the spotlight she keeps getting what she actually wants taken from her, but really? She gets raped by the King of France, falls in love with a guard who then dies shortly after they sleep together, and then falls in love with a married man who (predictably) dies before the story’s over. There had to be a way to convey her story other than making the character go through all of that, I think. She is a strong character, and I like where her arc ends, but I’m not sure that it was necessary to go through all of what she did to get there.

The series also ends with all of the alchemical science no longer working. Which is a bummer, I think, because all of that stuff was cool. I didn’t mind too much however, because we see that Ben Franklin and a few others are interested in pursuing what is probably real-world science, and the geo-political landscape of the world has changed so much from our own timeline that the world as presented in the books still feels like a fantastical one. I would be interested to know what happens afterward, though in broad strokes rather than another novel or series; after all, without the magic, I don’t know that there’d be much point to the story.

I liked these books. They were mostly fun, though they weren’t perfect. The author took his premise and ran with it, and had as much fun with it as he could while it lasted. And I think that’s something more authors need to try. Yeah, Peter the Great invading Venice with a fleet of airships is ridiculous, but it’s also one of the coolest things I’ve had the pleasure of typing, and that’s only one of the insanely awesome things that happens in this series. The series begins with the French plotting to nuke London, and it only goes weirder from there.

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