I don't believe it.

I just realized that I haven't updated my top ten book list in my own mind for almost a decade. I certainly haven't modified my top three in over 25 years.

What I have just read has just supplanted number three. Perhaps even number two.

For the moment, I feel like it might have supplanted number one.

I cried like a baby when I closed the book, and even now I can't believe what I just read. It was lyrical and it unpacked with a density of a rushing locomotive. It was full of heart and soul, and it was smart, smart, smart in its choices.

It is a double tragedy. Raphael Carter, as far as I can tell, never wrote another novel. I will likely be a lifelong devotee to this novel, and I'll be rereading it soon. I'm already missing it and I just finished it.

Maybe it's a triple tragedy, because the book is out of print. I was lucky enough to find it used. As far as I can tell, the novel is the greatest unknown mystery of the world. So few people even know about it. Hell, I need to shout out its praises to the world and not let this beautiful work ever be forgotten. And yet, it is. I only picked it up because Jo Walton praised it from her mountaintop as a work that should not be forgotten, and I can't thank her enough.

What is the novel, you ask? It's the soul of humanity as sung from the soul of the last whale. It's the redemption and utter loss of ghost girls and cyborgs. It's the chains that we bind ourselves with, whether in our heart or our minds or everyone else. It's hope. It's horror.

It's recalling, for me, the most heartbreaking moments of V for Vendetta, a movie I've seen a dozen times so that it brings me to tears. It takes the best traditions of cyberpunk and pushes it through the meat grinder, showing us what despair can lie behind the eyes of telepresence ratings.

It's about same-sex true-love and mind rape.

Too much for a novel of 288 pages? Hell no. The writing carries it all and a lot more, effortlessly. This is what I want to make when I grow up.

And it hurts, almost unbearably, that so few people will ever have the chance to experience this novel. If there is justice in the world, then everyone would have the chance to cry over it.

288 stars out of 5.

( )

3 and a half stars. originally published in 1996, but it feels very 21st century in its writing and its concerns. lots of good ideas here, and a great backstory of a possible dystopian future, where AI Guardians first meddle with the human population, and then the virus of the Army causes localized genocide on the way to redistributing the remainder of the population, so Africa becomes a new Cradle of Civilization - a lot of this resonated scarily with where we've got to now. but it's kind of a maddening text to navigate: though it contains some fine writing, it's repetitive too, and ultimately the whole thing kinda falls apart into an endless series of didactic arguments about personality, cohesion, change, and the nature of love that caused me to keep falling asleep. still, a keeper. ( )

Two centuries from now, after the genocidal reign of the biotech-enhanced Guardians and the huge population displacements generated by the mind-controlling Army that stopped them, the world outside of Africa is heavily regulated against any deviance. Maya, a “camera”—a reporter who lets her viewers share her consciousness as she reports—stumbles into a potentially deadly encounter with a survivor of the Guardians, and her own past, which has been ripped from her by the suppressant chip inside her. There’s an awful lot of worldbuilding whizzing by—I probably could have read a whole book about rich, technologically advanced, free Africa and its three (or maybe four) Kings—but ultimately the book is about compromise, and being compromised, and people working to stop horrors by accepting other horrors. ( )

In "The Fortunate Fall" Raphael Carter attempts to write a science fiction book where you are thrown into the deep end and left to figure out the world without anything being spelled out for you. Authors can use this strategy to fantastic effect, just look at Gene Wolfe's body of work. With Wolfe, though, you always feel like there is more than enough information provided to piece everything together if you think about it seriously enough. Reading Carter it feels more like he has the world in his head but forgets or fails to put it on the page. Instead you get a book that starts out confusing and ends boring, with no memorable moments along the way.

Carter's flaws are numerous: he's terrible at writing characters, with the protagonist being defined only by her job as a futuristic reporter for the first forty pages of the novel. Later, though, an old cyborg revolutionary seems to have a more in-depth understanding of how a news station will respond to a big story than she does, so even the characterization of "reporter" fails to hold. Other characters get equally poor attention- there are only three in the book, and the old revolutionary that Carter paints most vividly is mostly made up of cliches.

Carter is also terrible at building narrative tension. At one point the main character discovers that the old revolutionary has a whale. Then we learn that whales are thought to be extinct and are beloved the world over. Obviously this sequence of events should be reversed, but Carter seems to lack even this basic understanding of drama.

Carter is also lackluster at describing events in such a way as to allow the reader to picture what is going on. At one point the narrator enters grayspace, something akin to Neuromancer's Sprawl but with codes that take the form of animals to eat each other for some reason never satisfactorily explained. In general this segment did not make clear what was going on, why the space was being used, what the stakes of being in this region were (only discussed later) and why anyone should care.

The plot of The Fortunate Fall is also deeply flawed. All of it really rests on the existence of the aforementioned whale, the existence of which is explained away by "a mad scientist wanted one." Not only is the existence of the whale famous enough that the narrator can attract half of the world's population to watch her show, the whale also provides a place where a character could store her brain. Why there? Who knows! The whale is essentially a catch-all narrative device that makes the whole plot seem inorganic. Speaking of inorganic, the entire last quarter of the book is just dialogue, with characters laying out their plans and motivations. The structure of this book is truly awful.

Carter also falls into the common science fiction pitfall of the narrative introducing too many concepts and invented technology without exploring them in any depth. The narrator has nanomachines that need alcohol or else they'll kill her AND people can share each other's senses AND people can upload their consciousness into the net AND programs can brainwash people AND surveillance is universal and homosexuality is illegal AND different pieces of tech can be installed in your head that suppress emotions or enhance abilities AND with technology you can learn things instantly so higher education is arguably obsolete AND people in the high tech bastion of Africa have become almost gods AND learning computer code as your first language allows for rapid societal advancement, etc. Stephenson in Snow Crash spent huge numbers of pages exploring that last idea; Carter mentions it in two paragraphs and moves on.

An example of Carter's writing:
"So," she said dismissively, "would a crusty old plaid thermos out of a lunch box."
Did he not have an editor? It is hard to believe someone else read this and thought the sentence structure worked.

The text is also full of random pop culture references, because of course the world of two hundred years from now will just love spurting out movie and television references from Carter's era. Naturally they'll all know what a Mousketeer is.

Carter is trying to do something new and interesting in The Fortunate Fall, that's why for now I'm giving it two stars instead of one. I might downgrade it later, though, because of how thoroughly incompetent he is at writing a story. The characterization, plot structure, world building, and writing are all well below average. Do yourself a favor and skip this one. ( )

Picked up on the strength of Jo Walton's recommendation in "What Makes This Book So Great," and entirely as great as it was made to sound. I find it incredibly strange that this book was written in 1996, because it hasn't dated at all. ( )