Log Horizon 10: Homesteading the Noosphere By Mamare Touno

Log Horizon 10: Homesteading the Noosphere

By Mamare Touno

“I don't want that to have been temporary!”  page 233

    It's been half a year since I discussed Log Horizon so let me go over the high points.  Elder Tales was the world's most popular MMO and was releasing a new expansion across the world.  It hit midnight Japan time, the moment the new expansion went live every logged in player found themselves in the game world, for real.  The novels have focused mostly on Japan but book 9 gave us peeks of the rest of the world.  Given that this is a Japanese novel series written by a Japanese author, one can't be surprised that Japan is the center of events for the most part.  Now in the player starting city of Akiba, a self-governing organization was set up due to the machinations of our protagonist Shiroe.  Shiroe is a young man, who in real life is a graduate student but in-game has a reputation as a brilliant if somewhat diabolical strategist.  Through a combination of bribery, reasoned argument and blackmail, he created the Round Table Council of Akiba, where the representation is done by Player Guilds.  It's not very democratic but it managed to bring order and a measure of prosperity to Akiba.  However the players (referred to in story as Adventurers) aren't the only sapient beings on the world, as there are the People of the Earth, who were NPCs in the game but now are fully sapient beings (or were they sapient the whole time?) as well as the various monster races who prey on the People of the Earth if the adventures don't keep them under control.  Neither was the Round Table the only organization set up by stranded players, as the players on the western half of Japan chose to unite under a single guild (Plant Hwyaden) and make an alliance with the leading People of Earth State of the region, the Holy Empire Westelande.  The combat power, magic, and technology that those adventurers provide have caused the Holy Empire to engage on an increasingly aggressive foreign policy.  The Holy Empire considers itself the rightful successor state of an empire that united all of Japan and thus the other People of the Earth states in rebellion.  Including the one that has allied itself with the Round Table, the League of Free Cities of Eastal.

    Meanwhile, Shiroe is also trying to head off internal problems in the city of Akiba as the expanding economy isn't working for everyone.  Yes, some adventurers are able to create new technologies and services and reap the rewards but others... Others are barely coasting along and the emerging class divide could cause rifts in adventurer society.  However, there are limited ways of addressing that, since the Round Table isn't a proper government but a self-governing organization.  That might sound like hair-splitting but the distinction would become very important to you when it comes time to discuss who has the right to tax you or enforce laws by imprisoning you or seizing your goods.  So far in the prior novels, Shiroe has acted decisively and even ruthlessly to solve or minimize these problems before they get too big but he finds himself paralyzed with doubt as what an effective solution that is acceptable to everyone might be.  Especially since he also has to deal with the fact that a major war might be kicking off on his doorstep and he's not sure what to do about that either.  As if this wasn't enough, another problem rears its head.  It turns out that there's yet another group of sapient creatures knocking about and they have their own agenda as well (fair warning, spoilers past this point).

    It turns out that a group of alien beings was also pulled into the world of Elder Tales, although this might be all their fault.  They're artificial life forms from an alternate universe and they're running low of an energy resource that they believe is plentiful on the world of Elder Tales.  They were created in their home universe to come to the world of Elder Tales and harvest this resource and get as much possible home. However, their understanding of the laws of reality states that there can only be one type of intelligence in every universe so they figured any place they could reach wouldn't have any intelligent natives to protests their resource harvesting.  Turns out they landed in a place where sapient creatures are actually kind of plentiful.  Interestingly enough when discussing sapient creatures they don't make racial distinctions, to them an elf Person of the Earth is pretty the same as a human one.  To them, the only real distinction in intelligence types is between the Adventures, themselves and the People of the Earth.  In response to realizing that there were other people involved in this giant beautiful mess, they responded by splitting into two factions.  The book translates the two factions into Fools and Genius but some research on my end has suggested the better translation might be Inspector and Collector.  That said I'll use the book terms to avoid confusion.  The Fools, believe in observation and making contact with the Adventurers and trying diplomacy and possibly cooperation to achieve their goals.  If nothing else they can exchange their superior understanding about how they all got here for services from the Adventurers.  The Geniuses feel this takes to long and is a silly way to solve problems, they'll use the monsters to take the resources they need and if the People of the Earth and the Adventurers get in the way?  So much the worse for them!

    Now the aliens in question didn't have physical bodies the way we understood them.  So they had to, well... Borrow bodies they could find lying around.  These bodies tend to belong to inactive accounts and one of them is an alternate character of Shiroe.  See when you play an MMO, you often create more than one character so you can try out different classes and story-lines.  In this case, Shiroe had kinda parked his spare on the bloody moon, which suggests that's where the Fools are hanging out. Interestingly it seems that there were a number of bodies on the moon, which the characters state a test server was located.  The Fool in question, going by Roe-2 also helps out by sending a letter to Shiroe to give him some additional information.  Now, Roe-2 was a character that had met the younger members of the Log Horizon guild, so this letter does clear up the mystery around her character.  That said, it feels a bit like an info dump and I have to honestly say the insertion of the Genius/Fool plot was rather sudden.  It's clear in hindsight that he had something like this in mind but I feel it could have been foreshadowed a bit more.  Meanwhile, Shiroe has to figure out a way to contact the rest of the Fools and he also has to do while keeping the Geniuses from burning down the planet in the meantime.  Which is gonna be harder than you think because they kinda lit the match on that fire 35 minutes ago.  In the face of a sudden and surprising threat, Shiroe has to react quickly and decide on what goals he's going to prioritize here.

    This is actually the main conflict of the book, as Shiroe's hesitation in deciding on a single goal and carry it out bogs him down and degrades his performance.  Which is honestly true to life, nothing will cripple your ability to achieve your goals than your own hesitation and half-hearted measures.  This is one of the reasons why the Marines will teach their members that an imperfect plan executed aggressively and with commitment will beat out a perfect plan that is carried out timidly or too late to matter.  Shiroe has actually been pretty good about this once he commits but getting him to commit is sometimes a problem.   I actually like this, it's a real flaw that drags Shiroe down.  He is by nature indecisive, he wants to sit down and think things through and carefully plot out his response.  Mamare Touino shows a good level of skill in writing characters that are flawed, in a way that would normally drive me insane but he manages to make me root for them in the end.  Whether they be lazy princesses, anti-social ninjas or hesitant plotters.  That's a skill worth developing in a writer.    Log Horizon 10 is carried on the strength of the characterization and character interactions, it's also where we see a new plot development in full.  That said, there is a bit of clumsiness here and I'm not sure if it's due to the translation or not but I have to grade what I see.  Log Horizon 10: Homesteading the Noosphere by Mamare Touno gets a B+. 

Next week, the Poppy War by R.F Kuang.  Additionally, I have been informed that our editor has been brought to ground so he will be rejoining us next week.  Keep reading!