#shadow captain

The first problem, I think, is that I’m not convinced that the Congregation itself makes sense. There are apparently 50 million of the worlds orbiting the Sun - this book confirms that they’re what’s left of the Solar System’s original planets. And, uh, from a dynamical point of view, it sounds like a recipe for chaos - worlds should be colliding all the time. There should be dust, meteors and debris everywhere. If the three-body problem has no analytical solution, then what off of Earth are we to do with a fifty million body problem?

The Congregation should have collapsed back into a planet-forming disc by now, particularly given that it’s supposedly 10 million years old. (The novels provide no evidence of any active management of swarmlet orbits, I might add. The people of the 13th Occupation are apparently quite passive with respect to their own habitat.)

Everyone should already be dead.

Then there’s the issue of why anyone would ever need a Congregation in the first place. While it seems to be intended as a sort of Dyson swarm, my usual problem with Dyson swarms emerges - what industrial or economic problem could they possibly solve? A swarmlet is inferior to an actual planet in every respect. It’s less safe. It will have less air. It will have less resources. It’s more vulnerable to disruptive accidents. Why would anyone ever build one?

Then there’s the quoins. Whatever they actually are - and yes, they’re creepy as hell - they still make zero sense as the basis for a currency. They’re even worse than the Gold Standard - at least under the GS, the government still runs the mint and can set interest rates. With quoins, any putative government has zero control over its own money supply. And now we know that the value of quoins isn’t fixed - apparently if you bring too many of them together in one place, they scramble each other. Plus, quoins are apparently fairly bulky and awkward to transport in quantity.

Given all of this inconvenience, I can’t see why someone hasn’t reinvented paper money. Basically the Congregation is using a worse version of the bottlecap from Fallout. Remember the posts on the questionable underpinnings of the bottlecap? Quoins have all of those problems, combined with an apparent capacity to randomly-fluctuate in face-value. There is simply zero utility to the quoin as a means of exchange.

More generally, Shadow Captain raises lots of questions and presents almost no answers. The possibility of “shadow Occupations” - periods of civilisation or semi-civilisation outside of the generally-accepted history - is interesting. But it’s also irritating - where are the ruins, the abandoned swarmlets, the oral tradition amongst the (presumable) survivors? How can Bosa Sennen have become aware of something that had apparently escaped the entire collective intelligence of the 13th Occupation?

In terms of plot and characterisation, Shadow Captain is also a little unsatisfying. The general plot could be summed up as “Arafura and Ardana do stuff, and all of it proves to be a bad idea”. I’m not sure if either of them had a single good idea during the entire book. While they manage to extricate themselves from each individual mess, the extrication-process just sets them up for further problems.

Fura is struggling with the progression of the glowy infection inside her - and, also, refusing to seek treatment. Ardana is trying to deal with what Bosa Sennen did to her, and is vacillating between rejecting Bosa and coverty-accepting her. Neither of them manages to resolve their personal dilemmas by the end of the book. To be honest, there isn’t a very clear sense that either of them is actually trying to. The sense I had was that their mutual distrust merely grew as the book continued.

Ardana and Arafura have agency - their decisions do have consequences - but it seems to be largely in the negative sense. They seem to be very good at making their own lives worse. It is a little painful to watch. Some of it is down to genuine accident, but that said, sometimes they don’t help themselves there either.