Notes from the Burning Age

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Everything after is a dance: Ven and Georg and Yue, trying to start a war, trying to prevent one, trying to protect the world, trying to free it. As a whole, Notes is a novel of cycles, of transitions. It is about the terrible cost of disposability, the burden of secrets, the power of faith and recycling. But more than that, it is a top-tier spy story, a very physical war story, a mature love story, unromantic in the way that it doesn't lie or add glitter to anything. It begins as an idyllic homage to A Canticle For Leibowitz, becomes a Cold War mole-hunting LeCarre pastiche and ends in an Ayn Rand-vs-Margaret Atwood philosophical cage match. Cycles within cycles, all of them brilliant, horrifying, cool. There's enough in NFTBA to satisfy SFF fans but I hope that when NFTBA is officially released that its also marketed to entice fans of spy thrillers as they'd be best pleased with this offering from Claire North.

North sets her tale in a futuristic dystopia, a vaguely-recognisable Europe where the predicted environmental destruction is in full swing. The politics is initially a little convoluted, but patience is rewarded with some rather good action once the groundwork is laid. The pronouns used for those of undefined gender do, at times, cause a little confusion. Ven was once a holy man, a keeper of ancient archives. It was his duty to interpret archaic texts, sorting useful knowledge from the heretical ideas of the Burning Age—a time of excess and climate disaster. For in Ven’s world, such material must be closely guarded so that the ills that led to that cataclysmic era can never be repeated. Story: This was an absolutely fascinating listen. I thought it would be a little heavier on the climate, but glad when it turned out to be more of a spy novel. The writing is clever and the storyline suspenseful. The characters are well-developed and the dialogue is full of philosophical contemplation and intrigue. Very thought provoking and enjoyable! (4.5 stars)Claire North's new SF is climate-punk without as QUITE an uber-bleak outlook as usually comes with such cli-punk SF. Lots of intrigue, repressed societies, quasi-religious cultural restrictions that summon up the monsters that burned the old world, but still enough technology going around to make this world quite interesting and believable. Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North is about a utopian society built from the ashes of a burning world. Scholars and archivists of the Temple have long searched and collected artifacts from our present age, preserving the knowledge so it may not fall into the wrong hands. The world has been at peace, keeping these spirits (“kakuy”) at bay. But man is bound to get greedy and want more. There will always be people for whom equality and equity are not enough, people who need praise and power, and that will be the downfall of utopia. Thoughts on Notes from the Burning Age

The novel follows Middle-European Ven who is one of a few people of his time to have spotted a Kakuy. He becomes a priest, learns dead languages like English or German to translate the Notes of the Burning Age. Many are forgeries, most contain silly content like WhatsApp conversations, or porn. But here and there are valuable “heretical” information about technology. Ven goes rogue and sells the information outside of his monastery, ends up disgraced. He works as a bartender in the city of Vien at the beautiful river Ube.North, Claire (11 May 2019), The Pursuit of William Abbey, ISBN 9780356507439 , retrieved 1 December 2019 Ven becomes a priest, Yue a politician. Ven learns dead languages and becomes a translator of Burning Age documents and data, is booted from the priesthood for stealing heretical information and selling it, ends up disgraced, working as a bartender in a dive bar in one of the few cities left on earth. Yue rises. Becomes an aide to one of the most powerful members of the Council — the political class trying to hold the ruined world together. One night at the bar, Ven is approached by Georg, a leader of the Brotherhood, who want a return to humanity's primacy and the knowledge of all those things that doomed us in the first place: strip mining, eugenics, sub-prime mortgages and atomic bombs. He wants, ultimately, to kill the Kakuy and free mankind. The plot is big and covers a lot, but I never felt my interest flagging. Claire North combines a tale of espionage with philosophy; North’s world is vivid, and Ven’s life and interactions are full of tension, and many times suddenly violent. At the same time the text is frequently beautiful, and has scenes full of sound and wonder. In North's pure and early Eden, there is a fire. An accident that consumes the forest surrounding a village. The three children run. One of them dies. The other two — Ven and Yue — survive. In the midst of the conflagration, one of them (Ven) sees the Kakuy of the forest. He watches it die. The other (Yue) sees only fire.