Book Note: Michael P. Kube-McDowell, Enigma

This is book 2 of the "Trigon Disunity" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Somehow I missed that this was book two in a series, although it says so on the cover. Nothing I've read so far gives me the slightest hint it's a series book, though, and I'm about 2/3 through. These appear to be his earliest novels.

I'm liking this quite a lot. The main character is an adolescent twit, it seems to me, even though he's too old to justify it right now. But not too intolerably idiotic. And he may even be growing up. The quotes from his future books are a "clue" that he's going to be important, anyway.

I do like the general society a lot—not in the sense of wanting to visit, you understand. The future earth, under a world government, heading carefully and intentionally into stagnation, while the space arm starts exploring the stars is a somehow gripping vision of a future for me.

I have fond memories of The Quiet Pools, and he's a useful and interesting presence on rec.arts.sf.written.

Okay, finished it. Yes, the main character is certainly a twit. Earnest, selfish, undirected, generally an idiot. I still don't know if he wins through to something important by luck, or by mysticism, and that bothers me too (being as you may know rather unfond of mysticism). He reminds me of the idiot in the Feintuch books that everybody hates so much, actually.

The section where he intuits the existence and location of the D'shanna, obsessively goes after them (while the people around him clearly recognize that he's behaving obessively and illogically, but don't take the effort to stop him), finds the D'shanna, and learns that they've been with him all the time and he was actually heading for the thing he most shouldn't head for—that's just amazingly annoying.

The way he uses and abandons people is also highly obnoxious. The more I think about this guy, the less I like him.

Now, the book is another matter. I still like the book pretty well, even though I have limited tolerance for twit protagonists.