I enjoyed Patrick Tylee's 'Wisdom' a year or so back as one of my books by Arizona authors, and he was kind enough to send me a copy of its sequel, 'Rebellion', along with a new book for review. I'll tackle the latter next month but finish off this duology first. At least, I presume it's a duology. It's got potential to continue, venturing into new ground, but it seems to have done what it needs to do for now. The two books do fit very much together, one following the other, but they have very different tones and approaches.

The commonality, beyond the characters and the universe that they inhabit, seems to me to be a look at unintended consequences. In 'Wisdom', the synthetic men of the Manufactured Flesh and SynThinker Union attempt a good deed. A lost Prawl-Tang (read: bad guys) super scoop has made its way into our solar system and prepares to steal all the hydrogen from Jupiter, which would be catastrophic for the Knowers who live in those gas clouds. Therefore they create a new diplomat clone, who takes the name of Jove, to save them. The catch is that he does so at the cost of us on the planet Earth, adopting the mantle of a god, taking our nuclear missiles to wipe out the Prawl-Tang and stealing all our sand in the process.

Fast forward to 'Rebellion' and he's in space court, being held responsible for deaths caused by an improper use of the Obedient Sand he used so much, which is now completely banned. Spurred on by an increasingly psychotic Wisdom, the "para-sentient virtual entity" that lives inside him as an intelligent app, he fights his way out, using deadly force and now even more people are after him. Meanwhile, the "daughter" he created in the first book, again trying to do a good deed, Elmyrah, is being sought too and finds an intriguing alternative way forward.

Again, spurred on by her psychotic Wisdom, she finds a beautiful adult woman whose body she can steal and use to create a rack of clones. She wants out of her child's body, understandably so after a hundred years as a child, and Giselle Deanahan's will do nicely. And it does. Imagine being over a century old but finally in an adult body that you can use sexually? A heartbeat later, she's seduced Ixian and got herself pregnant and the unintended consequences start to multiply, because there is a prophecy within the Union about one of them being born rather than made.

This is a much simpler read than 'Wisdom', though it goes where it will without much adherence to a traditional story structure. Characters join the story and then leave it again, only to rejoin much later. We shift locations on a dime and then dive into the next deeply. In the end, I should add, it's all woven together nicely to wrap up appropriately, prophecy fulfilled but in a very different way to how it's initially viewed. Many shenanigans have ensued and much chaos has resulted, with an impressive body count. While 'Wisdom' upended life on Earth and wiped out the Prawl-Tang, that book didn't have much impact on the Union. This one makes up for that oversight with emphasis.

In many ways, this becomes an interesting twist on the old science fiction trope of what it means to be human. The synthetic clones of the Union aren't human but they act like us and rather want to be more human without losing all the technological superiority they have. After all, having an army of backups, the next of which automatically sparks to life on our death, is redundancy at its very finest. I'd like mine fifteen years ago, please. Also, the Wisdom and Knowledgebase apps are potentially wonderful, as long as they don't corrupt like the Wisdom in Jove and Elmyrah, which is a downside I'd like to avoid, thank you very much. That Wisdom is very controlling.

Just as Tylee follows the path he wants in 'Rebellion', traditional structure be damned, he places the characters he wants in its foreground, even if they're hardly traditional leads. Now, Jove and Elmyrah were primary characters in 'Wisdom' so ought to naturally continue in that vein, but it's not that simple. I wondered at a few points whether we were supposed to see them as the heroes of the story, regardless of how many awful things they do, not always at Wisdom's command. Are they anti-heroes because of that? Or are they villains, even though this corrupted Wisdom is the bigger villain? Their wonderful use of snark, sarcasm and flippancy suggests anti-heroes.

Perhaps because it's simpler, I found this a quicker read than 'Wisdom'. That it features a host of memorable scenes really doesn't hurt either. Some are obviously intended to be setpieces, like a meeting between Trayd-9 and Elmyrah in a brothel on Tolkuchka, Moira's confident seduction of Ixion in a swimming pool, or a particularly gruesome birth sequence; the baby literally clawing his way out of his mother's body. That's a heck of a scene, straight from a controversial horror movie but smack dab in the middle of a science fiction novel.

Others are much more nuanced, like Vail Islands fish being called güdnufs and tha'ldu, phrases like "Jove was relatively safe in his three-story osseous bivouac" or a neatly broken misremembering of history. Lincoln was a king, it seems, and the Shorekeeper's granddad lived on the Mogy Rim in the Arid Zone. Ha! I've been there. Kinda. In between are the scenes on Iactatu, a highly unusual planet, which are reminiscent of Alan Dean Foster in their riotous exploration of xenobiology. An army of giant carnivorous ants is just the beginning to that world.

I enjoyed this second half to the duology, probably more than the first, though its scope is narrow in comparison and its depth... well, there's the question. On one hand, 'Rebellion' feels shallower than its predecessor, focusing on characters flitting around doing what they want rather than the universe behind them. There's not a lot of agonising over tough choices this time around. On the other hand, there's certainly depth to be found here; it's just looser in its implementation, more up to us to seek out. It's easy to enjoy this on the surface as a flippant romp in space. However, if we want to dig deeper, then there's that whole angle of what it means to be synthetic human and that's what's firmly in focus when the book ends.

Next month, a new Patrick Tylee, not that this 2016 novel is particular old. However, 'Mostly Flame Burns' is brand new, because it came out at the end of November 2025. I'll happily tackle that one in February. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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