A Drop of Corruption
5.0 Stars
9-15-2025

Please don't bully the transhumans, they have sensory issues

"Give it a suck, boy" - Ana Dolabra

More of the same, which is great. We keep the two core characters and their dynamic, and add in a new ensemble of richly drawn allies and villains. As before the allies are extremely lovable, and in this case the book starts by giving the straightman of the story a straightman of his own, a delightful, undersized, sturdy, bowl-cutted, laconic, half-barbaric, swamp-sheriff who leads our MC into the mires of this new mystery. The initial setup is that there has been a locked-room murder near the bio-punk version of the TSMC, a strategically vital location where kaiju bodies are harvested and processed into the basic reagents that fuel the rest of the empire's biopunk advancements. Complicating matters is that, due to the migration patterns and massive size of the ocean going kaiju, the best location for the TSMC is a bay right next to a swampy and barbaric kingdom that the empire has been in the process of annexing for the last few decades. Various political, religious, cultural, and bureaucratic complications ensue.

In terms of story this is a perfectly solid and well constructed mystery, where I never felt either lost or bored with the unfolding of the various strands of the mystery. The villain is great, the gradually recognized patterning of the crimes is great, the action scenes are great. It reminded me of the puzzles of the original Legend of Grimrock, neither too easy nor too difficult, but just right for me. If there is one small criticism I would make of the plotting, it is that the supposedly genius insight that finally resolves things is one that readers have probably seen coming from a good distance away. The setting is also solid and delightful, ranging from jungle canals and smoky barbaric castles, to the spreadsheets and bank vaults and logistics of fueling an empire, to the endlessly complex processors and clean rooms where one alien biology is grappled with, broken down, and refined into another and slightly less alien biology.

All that aside, what I'd really like to focus on though is the surprising sci-fi ness of the story. This story didn't need to have ideas in it; ideas aren't really required for a fantasy or for a mystery, and often ideas aren't even in the stories that have the trappings of sci-fi. This book though brings in any number of previous sci-fi ideas, mostly related to the difficulties of designing a better human. It turns out to have any number of pitfalls; it's the same problem that fictional AI creators have, how do you make something that is greater than yourself and exists on an entirely higher mental plane, while still trying to bind it to the meanings and goals that you have? E.g. maybe you make something with vastly improved mental and sensory capabilities, but it is just interested in appreciating and categorizing beetles, since it appreciates beetles at a level about 10,000x your own. Maybe Lovecraft and Ursuppe were right, maybe our minds are really only meant to exist within relatively narrow confines of thought and psychology, and outside of that is just monsters and insanity? So, some examples from the book. You have the Kaiju themselves, who very well might have been begun as humans and, over centuries of modifications, self-assembled into the giant and enormously complex beasts they are today. Maybe they constantly eat not because they are monsters per-se, but because the tasting and digestion grants them a wealth of data and experience far beyond anything we can imagine? Sort of like us going down a wiki-hole or a TV-tropes-hole, but with more gnashing of teeth and stomach juices. Then you have the legendary Kahnum, the founders of the Empire, who went extinct because they preferred self-modification and self-elevation and enjoying higher and higher realms of thought, rather than breeding. Then you have the various lesser augments and sublimes of the Empire, who have some small fraction of the Khanum's abilities, but even that costs them in terms of psychology and years off their life. Then you have the higher sublimes like those that populate the TSMC, who have to carefully regulate their informational and sensory inputs in order to neither starve nor flood their massive information processing engines. This also applies to one of our main investigators, who has to zealously guard the inputs that she allows her mind to feed on in order to fall neither to despair nor fascination. Still it is difficult for her, she solves most mysteries almost out of hand, but is almost inevitably disappointed by how common the motives usually are. Anyway! I'm not sure this book stakes out any truly new sci-fi ideas, but it does a tour of any number of previous sci-fi ideas in a way that I really wasn't expecting.

As before, one small ding for the Garlandism of the book. If anything the post-script notes by the author made me like the story slightly less; the author views the book as a stab against the idea of Kings, but I'm not sure putting an Empire in place of a King as a load-bearing idea is really much of an improvement. His stories have a bit of the same problem as the Culture books in terms of practical political theory, i.e. saying that you can make a just and utopian human society so long as it is led by benevolent AIs/enlightened transhumans doesn't really help much in practical terms, you might as well put a demi-god in there if you're assuming such things.

Despite this quibble I really enjoyed the book and am awarding it the coveted 5 stars. The book isn't genius, and I did not *quite* love it, but it was *extremely* solid in every aspect and is just an all around good listen.