The Tainted Cup
5.0 Stars
8-25-2025

Could have worms - You Apoths always think it's worms - That's because so many people have so many worms

A Hugo winner, and you can see why. Reading this reminded me a bit of Teshs' Incandescent, in that it is just the full package of writing/plotting/world building/action/description/character. It also reminded me a bit of Korean Starcraft players. Unlike their American counter-parts, who are self-trained and tended to be wildly uneven in their various qualities, the Korean players would congregate together in temples with professional coaches and mentors to help manage their 14 hours a day of training, and these temples would reliably turn out players who were, at a minimum, a solid 8 in every relevant aspect of the game. It might be that as a global culture we now simply have enough readers and writers with the needed time and education and experience that we can maintain a cadre of absolutely solid authors, people who can create one high quality work of fiction after another. Great news if you are a reader, but kind of terrifying if you ever wanted to write any fiction of your own. Anyway! Onwards to a few various comments on the book:

Despite some superficial Roman theming, this story takes place in more of a Cyberpunk setting, though with biology in place of computing technology. E.g. there are plenty of normal people, but there are also people who have biological grafts and infusions which variously grant them improved size and strength, or vastly improved senses, or super-human ability with logic/numbers/spatial configurations, or in the case of the MC, Engraving, the ability to perfectly memorize and recall their sense impressions for a time. The MC is part of an investigative team, with their perfect memory acting as court admissible evidence, and they participate in crime scene investigations and witness interviews. The other half of the investigative team has their own, more shadowy improvements, which allow them to navigate the strands of evidence, logic, and lies with a feline grace and precision. People who are more into mystery books say that they form a Nero Wolf/Archie Goodwin pairing, with the MC being the more active and adventuresome part of the team, and his boss being the one who collates and analyses the evidence from their bed and then convenes a dinner party to reveal who the murderer is. I liked this! I liked that the main investigator prefers thinking in terms of physical evidence rather than in terms of psychological theory; I both agree with her and it is kind of a bug-a-boo of mine these mystery stories that try to navigate through the murks of human psychology and self reporting rather than pinning things down with timelines and hard evidence. Another thing I liked about this book is that I liked the characters. I know, I know, insightful. Really though that is 97% of writing a good book, make me like the characters and like spending time with them, and after that the author is basically home free. The MC is pleasantly earnest and untried and serious, with an understated but formidable wit and bravery and morality. His partner is pleasantly insane, and the other main characters we interact with cover a range from charmingly idealistic to paternally/maternally gruff to appropriately villainous. One advantage of having likable characters is that, if you like character A and you like character B, it makes perfect sense when A and B like each other and start a romance. All too often these romances feel shoe horned into the story, rather than arising as something organic and natural to the events. And then on the opposite side of the likable characters, the Corpos feel appropriately threatening and formidable and psychotically brittle, e.g. when the MC needs to interview a half dozen or so Corpos, with their cold shark eyes and all juiced to the gills with various top of the line mental and physical enhancements, you really feel for the MC and the disadvantage he is at.

Oh! And I really enjoyed the way that one killer reveals themself, which I cannot talk about due to spoilers, but which was quite fun/clever. There's also a ton of other stuff here, like the extensive biopunk worldbuilding, or like the extra-wide Kaiju that threaten the Empire, and that may have once been human, or the High Lords of the Empire, who themselves grow to monstrous sizes and ages through their enhancements. There's also plenty of Cyberpunk themes of the cost of these enhancements, as they tend to break/warp/rapidly wear out the human bodies and minds which were not meant to function at this level. E.g. the Engravers ability to not forget is both blessing and curse; their brains gradually fill up with the bloody evidence of case after case, they get lost in perfect and indelible memories, they gradually start to have bleed through from their vast library of stored experience into their current day stream of thought. Or the weirdness of when two Engravers transmit memories to each other, like two human sized USB sticks.

And now a few tiny, tiny criticisms; the MacGuffin that much of the book rotates around is not actually a MacGuffin, at best it would be a piece of a supporting evidence rather than the pure and conclusive proof that the book treats it as. Also I didn't like the Merrick Garlandism of the book, that we just need to trust the process, as while this is probably appealing to many Hugo voters it doesn't seem all that accurate to life. Anyway, I would recommend this to anyone who A) likes a good mystery and B) is open to a having a few gallons of sci-fi world building in their stories.