The Incandescent, Tesh
4.0 Stars
7-5-2025

The pandering is pretty thick with this prime piece of Hugo-bait. The author is clearly looking to win some awards in the most basic way possible, by combining sharp writing, interesting world building, a variety of well drawn and likable characters, flowing dialog, narrative hairpin turns, occasional action set-pieces, and some light romance. And as despicable as it is, I'm afraid it works, and the resulting fiction is something that is going to be enjoyable and compelling for a huge chunk of speculative fiction readers.

A few general and unrelated notes, mostly positive. The story takes place in a magical boarding school (common), but from the perspective of a teacher/admin (less common). The MC has some of the somewhat annoying traits that you find in academia, and initially I was worried that this book was going to be pandering to post-grads in the same way that the early Cory Doctorow books pandered to IT admins. Fortunately that was not the case; the author is more aware than that and as the story goes on the author gradually prises apart the MC's quirks of communication and how other characters perceive her. Which leads into another quality of the author, a sense of control. This was my first Tesh, and so I was sort of feeling her out, and I think one of her fine qualities is a well founded confidence in the story she wants to tell. She's happy to have her narrative break from common story paths, she has a wealth of practical observations to draw from, and she has a healthy sense of the psychology of her characters that lets them avoid just being common tropes.

For the world building, I couldn't help but notice that she lifted her cosmology directly from WH40K? Rude. So you have a a prime material plane, with England and trams and boarding schools and such, but there's also a plane of magic (the Warp), filled with entities of pure magic/thought. These entities range from the minuscule to the titanic, they all love to feed on/absorb each other, and they gradually accrete more sentience and personality and intelligence as they grow in size and power. When possible these entities love to come to our dimension, since here they A) aren't constantly being hunted by their compatriots and B) can feed on/experience things that are completely absent in their dimension, things such as light, sound, physics, human ideas, human minds, etc. etc. These entities/demons don't have a society of their own, since they are born through thaumogenesis, and since they generally don't have interactions with each other beyond hunting/fleeing in an endless sea of magic, and so they have to learn/be taught all sorts of human concepts. At this point I feel like the author missed out on a few parallels; e.g. the difficulty of learning human communication between both the MC and the demons (ok, this element is in there a little bit, but it's not really leaned on), the sociopathy of both demons and small kids, and the rapacity of the demonic ecosystem vs the unfairness of class/capitalism in England. The author left all of these on the floor however, perhaps feeling that they are too common place. One thing I was worried about briefly in the story is that there's active magical research on demons, since demons are able to perform magic as easily as fish swim through water, and so human researchers want to learn from them. The worry though is that the demons would also learn from the humans, and be able to bring our social structures over to their own world rather than existing in a continual state of predatory anarchy. i.e. demons discover capitalism. Terrifying stuff. Also terrifying, the idea of intelligent possession, and I wish the author had explored how dangerous/horrifying that could be. Really, it's the same issue I have with the WH40K novels and their failure to explore this sort of The Thing/Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. Also, I did have some slight objections to the world building here, as I can't see how you can have both A) normal Western civilization and B) powerful magic talents that are not sharply controlled. E.g in the WH40K universe, psykers are either A) immediately killed/sacrificed or B) brutally conditioned to act as living magical weapons until they grow too unstable and have to be A). As this book notes, talented magicians are in the worst case potential nuclear bombs, so it's not clear how you treat them as half-way normal members of society without losing a city every time one of them has a bad day.

Anyway! Even if I'd quibble a tiny bit with the world building, I'm very much looking forward to checking out Tesh's other books.