And one of the scariest bits in there was that the Aztecs didn’t see things (people, animals, trees, what have you) as set and knowable objects, like the Western Platonic concept of an ideal form, but rather as processes of transformation. (New book shelves in the library are so cool!) I’m not going to try and reconstruct the three main strands in it from memory, but though the author did their best to present it in a golden “so much better than the West” light, it was scary. I ended up picking up a book on it at one point. It’s not.Īztec philosophy, in particular, is chillingly fitting to a world that’s apparently gone through massive use and abuse of genetic engineering.

This seems like a throwaway “build it on something exotic and foreign” line. There’s a bit where Enoch is asking about the Pensanden (technopaths in a big way), and Rictus tells him they were based in, among other things, Mayan and Aztec mysticism. Not so much the details of the shattered technical base, the genetic manipulation, the monsters and human responses to same. A lot of that has to do with worldbuilding. Outside of that, the book holds together very well. Given Enoch has been presented as being “bad at emotions”, then the reader has a reasonable expectation that we should get to see him struggling with them – especially when he’s deciding to turn his back on someone who’s apparently been helping him, to help someone who might be lying to him. But we never get to see him make that decision. Granted, he’s leaving the side of some pretty bad guys, and he has seen some of the horrible things they do. But there’s a critical point in the story in which the major character, Enoch, has fallen in with one side, and then a few pages later switches to the other.

It has interesting settings, characters, and good characterization… most of the time. Etherwalker, by Cameron Dayton Etherwalker on Amazon

Etherwalker by Cameron Dayton