Steven Erikson's "Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart" is like if "Watchmen" was written by a bitter education worker.

2019-12-11-1

Steven Erikson's "Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart" is like if "Watchmen" was written by a bitter education worker. They'll save Earth from $disaster by force! It is a pure wish fullfillment story about a godlike intelligence suddenly coming to earth and forcing everyone to play nice, even, especially, with other animals. It plays on the common trope of scifi authors that is having the main character be a scifi author. This leads to no end of not so subtle 4th wall references that break suspension of disbelief. It explicitly says it's not hard scifi through one of these 4th wall nested comments about the outer reading frame. And this is very, very true. Throughout the book the times when it even tangentially approaches physics it uses the terms in ways that are not even wrong. But that lampshade was well hung so lets move beyond that. The actual story is pretty catchy and the particular blend of authoritarians nanny state paradise isn't by itself attractive. But it is a fun and interesting what-if story about ripping out the basic precepts of human interactions and trying to start anew. And plenty of what it criticises about the current economics of humanity is spot on.

I'm still only about a third in so much could change but it's a fun book. He spends a good chunk of the first part of the book justifying picking a scifi author and his previous effort in scifi "Willful Child" was not so much as story as a roast of common scifi tropes wrapped around educational system criticism. So he's surely aware of the tight rope he's walking here using and mocking the same tropes. It mostly works. If you haven't already read Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" maybe read that first. But if you have and you're looking for more like it then "Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart" is a good pick.