Wesley Chu's Tao trilogy has been receiving a fair amount of critical attention recently, but I had not gotten around to reading the first volume - but when the Hugo voters packet arrived, the submission for Campbell nominee Chu was the second volume in the series. So naturally I had to read the first volume before jumping into the second.
Chu's The Lives of Tao - a combination secret history/spythriller/aliens among us conspiracy tale - is quite an impressive first novel. I was hooked on it from the first chapter - the fast-paced action combined with an intriguing situation and some very good multi-purposed dialogue pulled me into the story, got me interested in the characters and how they came to be where they were, and gave me enough information concerning the series's long and complex backstory so that I didn't feel lost. The material was handled with such confidence that I trusted the author enough to jump in and see where the story was going.
And it is quite a story too. The backstory (much of which we learn in the form of reminiscences and dialogue between characters) starts millions of years ago, with a damaged space ship carrying hundreds of thousands of alien beings - Quasings, whose natural form at Earth-like air pressure is an organic fog - exploded in Earth's atmosphere while trying to make an emergency landing. Many died. Those who survived were scattered around the globe, wherever the fragments of the ship came to ground. Unable to survive in the open, their only option was to merge their bodies with those of the native life forms, using their hosts' nervous systems to maintain their own lives. For millions of years these essentially immortal beings migrated from host to host, only able to change hosts when the current host died. Scattered around the globe, living in bodies without enough brain development to allow them to make plans, they stagnated as a species - until finally some of them migrated into the bodies of some rapidly evolving simians and began a quest to find other survivors of the crash, and then to encourage the smartest of the simians to create a technological civilization capable of building a ship to take them home.
In this universe, the Quasings have shaped human society since its very beginnings. Many of the famous - and pivotal if less well-known - leaders, politicians, warriors, artists and thinkers of human history have been hosts for Quasings. The basic relationship is not one of possession and dominance - Quasings have very limited abilities to directly influence their hosts' thoughts or actions, although they can "take over" when their hosts are asleep. Rather, Quasings propose, advise, negotiate, or use psychological manipulation to influence their hosts. Over time, Quasings have experimented with human societies, trying to find the best way to promote technological progress by persuading their hosts to take various actions. Slowly two broad camps formed - one (the more numerous faction) believing that humans progress the most in conflict situations, and the other holding that humans progress best in co-operative situations (I found myself thinking for a few moments of Babylon 5's Shadows and Vorlons). About 500 years in the past, the disagreements between these two camps became violent, and since then, the two camps, Genjix and Prophus, have been in a state of conflict, each trying to gain control over human society through various means while struggling to destroy the influence of the other group and neutralise its members. One other significant difference between the two groups is that the Genjix see humans as inferior vessels to be used as required, and they control their human hosts and supporters through a rigid cult-like organisational structure. The Prophus see their hosts and associates as partners.
The first novel opens with a mission. Edward Blair and his Prophus symbiote Tao are part of a team infiltrating a Genjix facility to obtain computer files relating to a secret project of the Genjix. The mission is an operational success, but Edward and Tao are trapped behind enemy lines and rather than risk the destruction of both, Edward chooses to suicide so that Tao has a chance to find another host and survive.
With only a few moments to locate a host before Earth's conditions destroy it (Quasings are genderless and do not appear to reproduce, at least not away from their home planet), Tao is forced to select an unwilling, unprepared, and highly unsuitable host, Roen Tan. Thus an immortal being who carries the memories of thousands of the best and brightest of humans, and whose special expertise within the Prophus organisation lies in infiltration and sabotagr, finds himself joined until death with an insecure, overweight, nerdly slacker who has a dead-end IT job in a cube farm. The Lives of Tao tells the story of how Tao and Roen become an effective working unit and Roen.
Chu's writing is strong and confident, the story is intriguing and keeps the reader invested. There are lots of references to science fiction classics and tropes, and to historical people and events, both of which delighted me. The main characters are well-developed and distinctive. Unfortunately, a few of the supporting characters are somewhat derivative (notably the ancient martial arts teacher). My initial impression of the book's gender politics was not wholly favourable. While the few female characters are intelligent and competent women, Roen's romantic interest Jill seemed to have no other independent function within the story, and we see both Jill and the kickass fighter Sonya (host of Tao's old friend Baji) who trains Roen on hand-to-hand combat and weapons, through a pervasive male gaze. At the time, I wondered if this was deliberate, a function of seeing them through Roen's perceptions, because he is the kind of nerdboy who would have that kind of gaze. Reading of the second novel confirmed my thoughts on that score. Overall, The Lives of Tao is an ambitious first novel, well executed.
The second book in the trilogy, The Deaths of Tao, totally avoids the dreaded sophomore slump. In fact, it may be better than the first book. The tone is very different, the story much more complex, and the stakes are higher as we move from a relatively straightforward story about a geek who learns to be a spy to a tale of international intrigue and political machinations on multiple levels, seasoned with intelligence missions, assassinations and eventually, set battle pieces.
In The Deaths of Tao, the story is told from multiple perspectives. Roen and Tao share the focus with a high-ranking Genjix pairing, and with Jill, who is now a Quasing host and plays a pivotal role in the events of the book.
The time is about five years after the end of the first book, and there have been significant changes, both in the lives of Roen and Tao, and in the conflict between Genjix and Prophus. In the hiatus between novels, Roen and Jill have married, had a child, and are now separated. Jill has devoted herself to the Prophus cause, using her (previously referred to but unseen) intellect, negotiating skills and legal prowess in the political branch of Prophus' operations. Roen and Tao have gone rogue, frustrated by what Tao sees as misguided tactics on the part of the Prophus. The third narrative voice is that of Enzo, the product of a breeding and training program designed to create superhuman hosts for the Genji, and the new host of a highly ranked Genjix named Zoras.
The Genjix are winning the battle for control of humanity, and because we the readers have the benefit of a Genjix POV, we know what the Prophus do not - that the Genjix are no longer focused on going home, but rather on Quasiforming Earth, thus creating conditions under which they can live outside hosts and reproduce. The Prophus have been attempting to block Genjix research through manipulation of international trade - we watch as Jill, now an aide to a powerful US Senator, negotiates backroom deals on trade legislation - but their efforts are hampered by lack of intel on what the Genjix really want and how they are routing supplies through world trade channels. Roen and Tao, acting on their own, have come closer to an understanding of what the Genjix are planning, but isolated and lacking the ability to do anything about it.
Then a Prophus mission gone sour pulls Roen and Tao back into the Prophus fold, and into a dangerous mission that could prove what Roen and Tao have suspected for some time about Genjix objectives.
The darker tone and broader scope of this novel provides room to form a more critical opinion of both sides of the Quasing conflict. The tone of the first book, the fact that the viewpoint characters are a naive young man and a member of the Prophus, and the conventions of the apprentice spy novel (i.e. +, that there are good guys and bad guys, and the hero always ends up with the good guys), tended to mask the ambiguity of the Prophus and accentuate the differences between the two camps. Now, even though one camp is clearly intending to take the earth away from humans, leaving them nothing, and the other camp still hopes to go home and leave humans to their own destiny, the similarities between them and the weight of a long history of manipulation by all Quasings are clearer. After all, the division is a relatively recent one, and regardless of differences in how the Quasings view and treat their hosts and humans in general, the naked truth is that for millennia, the Quasings have been manipulating humans and depriving them of their chance to develop "naturally." At one point, in one of Tao's accounts of earlier hosts and their achievements, Chu weaves into that account the final phrase from the iconic death speech of Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner. Which caused me to think about parallels between replicants in the film - shaped, limited, used and then set aside by their human creators -and humans in this series - also in many ways shaped, limited, used and set aside by the Quasings a trend that continues even among the Prophus. What are we to think of the fact that in The Deaths of Tao, the two key protagonists on the Prophus side - Roen and Jill - had no choice in becoming hosts, and that both became hosts because humans were sacrificed to save the Quasing inhabiting them, whereas the obnoxious and arrogant Enzo, host to the Genjix Quasing Zoras, chose to be a host, and went willingly to the joining (granted, he had been conditioned from childhood to want it, but he was nonetheless a willing participant). Such skillfully developed undertones prepare us for the unexpected and game-changing climax of the novel.
I was delighted to see that my suspicions about the source of male gaze in the first novel appear to have been correct. The women in this novel - even the minor characters - are all integral to the plot and have their own character arcs. And the novel passes the Bechdel test with flying colours. In fact, at certain points Chu demonstrates a sophistication in the portrayal of gender in this novel that is reminiscent of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch novels and Andrea Hairston's Mindscape, highlighting the fact that as readers we tend to make assumptions of gender based on cultural defaults.
I'm looking forward to devouring the final book of the trilogy; and I thank the gods and goddesses that it's already in print so I don't have to wait.
Obviously, I am very much impressed by these two novels. Chu easily passes my standard as a worthy candidate for the Campbell.