Master of Formalities

Do you like those Star Trek episodes where they have to go along with weird alien traditions for whatever reason? There are no aliens but humanity has spent the couple thousand years since leaving Earth getting weirder and weirder. Each planet has gone its own weird direction and the titular Masters of Formalities strive to keep everyone polite and respectful.

It's ridiculous and awesome.

This is a pretty good book, definitely unlike anything I've read before, but the first half is very dull. Several of the negative reviews I read before picking this up mention that there is no real hero or character to cheer for or identify with. That's a fair criticism, at least for the first half of the book, and adding to the effect is the fact that the book is written in third person omniscient, with the point-of-view changing many times in every scene. So there is not much focus on any one character. But all of the characters become pretty interesting as the story progresses, and Wollard, who is as close to a protagonist as the book has, is very easy to sympathize with.

I was not expecting madcap hilarity because of the reviews, and the book is not really all that funny. There's some humor, but it's mostly more “sensible chuckle” style humor than the absurdity that I love in other sci-fi comedy (Futurama, Hitchhiker's Guide). Although there is some silliness, the tone of the book is not really irreverent; I would say the book takes itself pretty seriously, and all of the characters certainly do, which is never played for comic effect. We're supposed to care about the things that concern them, for the most part, except for the extra-cartoonish villains, rather than thinking their problems are trivial. As a result, sometimes the silliness feels dissonant.

I like the worldbuilding very much. (Sorry for misspellings; I listened to the audiobook and don't own the ebook.) The utilitics and the bulk-fab technology are both good sci-fi concepts; they seem like reasonable future inventions, and they definitely serve a purpose at many points in the book, for humor, plot, and character development. It was hard to suspend my disbelief about Sports, though; it's so ridiculous that it felt out of place in the story. My least favorite thing in the book is Wollard's trip, because it just seems like a thinly veiled extended complaint about real-world air travel.

Hennick is so horrible, in a way that feels very familiar to me, to the extent that aside from the first part of the book being a little boring, I was also having trouble returning to it because I hated him so much and didn't want to spend time listening to him whine. Seriously, he is just a few levels beneath my most hated villain ever, Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine. But I know this is a huge compliment to the author, since I was supposed to hate him. Also, while the book ended the way I thought it would, for most of it, I couldn't predict what would happen next, which I enjoyed a lot.

I've seen negative reviews for this author's other books that mention sexism, but I didn't find sexism to be a problem in this book at all. It passes the Bechdel Test really well - there are several interesting female characters at the center (and others at the edges) of the story. I also really liked the resolution of the sideplot about Shly and Kreet (sorry for spelling). There are no explicitly queer characters, although several could be read that way (Wollard doesn't know the gender of the person Fee communicates with, but thinks that person is Fee's love interest). But there are a few concepts in the book that seemed overly traditional to me for a book set so far in the future, such as ruling families, and (less significantly) modesty playing such an important role in Sports. That isn't really a complaint, though, just an observation.

Overall I liked this and I may read this author again. I was really impressed with Luke Daniels' narration.