The Sword of Agrippa: Antioch by Gregory Lloyd
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
There are some interesting ideas in this book. Although ambitious, this book is only of a novella size. The major issue with this book is that there isn’t any real development. There is a beginning, and a middle but no end. This isn’t simply because it’s a serial piece, but it’s because the two twin story arcs leads nowhere. The story abruptly ends. There’s also some weakness with the writing, as the author opts for truncated sentences without too much explanation. Ursula Le Guin complains about sci fi today that it doesn’t explore any new ideas or seek out new arrangements for society. This book does do some of that, but it also tries to be technical without substance, to argue by analogy rather than analysis. You see the protagonist have tragedy in his life, but it doesn’t seem to mean much. Additionally, he’s a big shot with big ideas but there’s a lack of reasoning behind it. We get that the protagonist is floating on a cloud of investors and so on, but if this is a struggle where is it? If he’s opposing others, who are they? How should we the reader understand them? We only hear his account of the situation, we don’t experience him being interviewed, or facing naysayers, or read any articles about him from his detractors. His “enemies” are anonymous. We only experience his reaction to them, which is far less interesting than a real confrontation… it’s very much like Gregory Lloyd wishes only to present his view on things and nothing else, that he hasn’t taken the time to spell out how these ideas fit in a nest of anything else. For a book focused so much on ideas and exploring them, at least in this first book, there’s nearly no presentation on how these ideas came about, only that they can change the world. There’s no real development in the characters or in how these ideas work, in who is opposing him or what they say about him. We only see that he’s keeping them at a distance, and that’s kind of boring. If Lloyd developed the antagonists, if he presented the protagonist from the point of view, of say, an intern or a young relative who isn’t familiar with these ideas, we might get a sense of how these ideas fit into OUR world as well. Rather, the author is too focused on one vision to the exclusion of all other reason, and as such the ideas in the book are also nebulous, mysterious and lack any extension beyond “Isn’t this cool? This can be our future!” If Lloyd fleshed out the society of this book with its struggles and its alternate views, we may get a sense of what our world is like today and how this book applies. Perhaps Lloyd should have written a speculative article rather than a work of fiction.
Overall, I wish the author had taken some time to critically develop the structure of his book rather than focusing so much on the mystery of his concepts and where they lead to. I suppose though, that this is fiction, and we should allow for some license in presentation, but really, this reads as an incomplete draft more than a polished piece of craft. I didn’t give this book one star though, because I think there’s potential.
