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The Last Legends of Earth, A.A. Attanasio, Bantam:
In my previous entry on this book, I said I didn't understand it even with the author's exegesis right in front of me, but in fact the summary of the last book does make sense, finally. The artificial solar system of Chalco-Doror, artificially populated with reconstituted human brainwaves dredged out of space by DNA antennas, is just as the author says it is, the hero's world. It's pretty much a purpose-built stage for an epic adventure spanning 7,000 years, except that really it's Gai the Rimstalker's purpose-built trap for the flying spiders from In Other Worlds, the Zōtl, complete with intelligent life forms and their fresh, delicious, pain-sap-oozing brains, except that it's made quite clear to Gai early on that if the epic adventure doesn't work out, the war against the Zōtl won't, either.
The main story threads its way through several vignettes illustrating everyday life in the various stages of history, mostly relating to whatever Gai has going at the time to lure in the Zōtl while hunting through time and space for the legendary superweapon that will destroy them. There's a lot of trial-and-error, starting over with humans after the first species, the lizard-like Tryl from a billion years later, turn out to be too sensible to cooperate as Zōtl-bait. Then, while physically imprisoned after an early mishap, Gai wanders the wildly improbable multi-planetary system as a ghost, setting up one human organization after another in an effort to carry out her mission.
I remember getting horribly confused by the notion of the "overworld", the space inside of the hyperspatial "lynks" that connect the worlds to each other and lead off to other, non-artificial star systems, although it's still too far to walk there. Having read in the meantime umpteen books with various versions of this idea (the first one springing to mind being Doris Piserchia's The Dimensioneers) it didn't give me nearly as much trouble this time around. I just imagined that they were wandering through the map view in some computer role-playing game.
There's a fair amount of headache-inducing gibberish science to explain everything, but it's not really important because it's just there to hold up the structure of the story, which is all inspired by the Vedas, as the author finally explains. The actual meat of the story concerns how you live your life when your whole existence is at the convenience of a preposterously powerful being with no interest in your welfare. Gai, coming from a world on the other side of the cosmic event horizon that exists at a much higher energy level, is so overpowered for this universe that even her dreams wind up causing trouble for the humans who are unfortunate enough to be on the same planet at the time. The engines from her space-ship are idled at low power to serve as a star for several inhabited planets. If it weren't for the predestined requirements of the plot, Gai wouldn't care about the fate of the humans on Chalco-Doror at all.
The writing is substantially less wacky, and it turns out that this was a deliberate choice. I am pretty sure that the strange word choices in the previous novels were there in aid of the author's stated plan to place each of them in an aesthetic correspondence with one of the four dimensions of space and time, with time saved for last. It's an interesting idea, but if that's what these peculiarities of diction were in aid of, the execution got off to a rough start.
The "flattening" of space before time comes across pretty well, though. As the millennia pass, people arise from humble circumstances, accomplish great works, and then die like anyone else. About the only sure thing is that if you're mixed up in the saga of neo-Viking Ned O'Tennis and the "Foke" woman Chan-Ti Beppu and their struggle to get back together before the end of the world, not even death is going to relieve you of your assigned duty in making sure the romance plays out on schedule. It's a pretty tricky business, because getting them back together involves immanentizing the very eschaton they're trying to outrun.
When I first read this I was almost totally lost, mostly because of the multitude of characters and my persistent hope that the latest introduced player would turn out to be the real main character like in a proper science fiction adventure, and it just kept not happening. I didn't do too well with the prose style either, which had my eyes sliding right off the words every few paragraphs due to some particularly distracting oddity of language. Like, just for instance, the names. Ned O'Tennis the Aesirai would seem like something out of Monty Python if he were portrayed with the slightest hint of levity.
I guess that my better comprehension of the story this time around is mostly due to the benefits of reading it again, so that I'm not laboring to assimilate the dozens of minor characters, place names, and neologisms, while also figuring out what's going on. The rest of it is being willing to stop and think about what it's trying to convey, instead of just watching the text roll past while waiting for something recognizable to happen. Along with my larger store of referents, the latter particularly helped with all the goings-on in the overworld.
As for the philosophical point, about living in the face of a universe that does not exist for your benefit, well... well, duh. That an SF writer would mount such a formidable armamentarium of prose style, a sprawling setting, the latest-and-greatest buzzword-science, and a dramatis personae running into scores of names, to deliver such a commonplace observation, seems pretty silly. When I think back, though, back in the day I was only just gaining a bare grip on the idea, so for me it was wasn't silly, or obvious, or even subtle; it was just baffling. It seems like plain sense now, but if I account for the benefit of hindsight, the observation turns out to be not so commonplace, after all.