Scan barcode
A review by skycrane
Those Below by Daniel Polansky
5.0
A great sequel. Not quite as cynical a conclusion as I expected from the first book, but certainly grim. I'm really confused by the genre tags this book currently has on Goodreads: Dystopia seems wrong to me, and Mystery is completely ridiculous. This book is not a mystery. It's not organized around a central question. There are lots of unknowns about the setting, but they're all basically irrelevant to the story. A central theme of the story is that the actual facts of the past are unimportant compared to the narratives we construct over them. What exactly are Those Above, and how did they take power? What was humanity's ancient crime that justifies their current subjugation? Those answers don't matter.
As for Dystopia... this setting has slavery, endemic warfare, and elites living off the toil of the starving masses. So basically, not too different from most of human history. The world's material culture seems to be based off the Mediterranean of the Helenistic Era, and that was certainly a time and place with brutal wars, accompanied by ubiquitous rape, pillage, massacre, and enslavement. Also a period of large empires where tiny elites of one culture ruled over large populations of many other cultures, subjects who could never aspire to citizenship. That kind of society was pretty common throughout human history. So if this is a dystopia, then so were most real-world societies, as well as most medieval fantasy.
I think these similarities are one of the most interesting things about this series. In this world, the noble elites actually are better than everyone else. Those Above are physically superior, larger, stronger, faster, and also culturally superior, more knowledgeable, more refined, more honorable, more inventive, more courageous. Every human who sees them, even those who hate them, agree that they are marvelous and wonderful. They're basically what every aristocracy through history has aspired, or pretended, to be. And yet the society they built is terrible. Out of many things this series says, one of them is that this kind of social stratification is always awful no matter the supposed virtues of the rulers.
As for the ending,
As for Dystopia... this setting has slavery, endemic warfare, and elites living off the toil of the starving masses. So basically, not too different from most of human history. The world's material culture seems to be based off the Mediterranean of the Helenistic Era, and that was certainly a time and place with brutal wars, accompanied by ubiquitous rape, pillage, massacre, and enslavement. Also a period of large empires where tiny elites of one culture ruled over large populations of many other cultures, subjects who could never aspire to citizenship. That kind of society was pretty common throughout human history. So if this is a dystopia, then so were most real-world societies, as well as most medieval fantasy.
I think these similarities are one of the most interesting things about this series. In this world, the noble elites actually are better than everyone else. Those Above are physically superior, larger, stronger, faster, and also culturally superior, more knowledgeable, more refined, more honorable, more inventive, more courageous. Every human who sees them, even those who hate them, agree that they are marvelous and wonderful. They're basically what every aristocracy through history has aspired, or pretended, to be. And yet the society they built is terrible. Out of many things this series says, one of them is that this kind of social stratification is always awful no matter the supposed virtues of the rulers.
As for the ending,