The Praxis By Walter Jon Williams

The Praxis

By Walter Jon Williams

Mr. Williams was born in Duluth, Minnesota in the year 1953. His family moved to New Mexico when he was 13, where he went on to attend the University of New Mexico and graduated with a BA in English in 1975. He still lives in New Mexico despite his love of sailing and scuba diving (Just gives him an excuse for destination holidays!), with his wife Kathy. Mr. Williams became a prolific author, writing over thirty novels and short stories. As well as role-playing game rulebooks, movie scripts, and an episode of Andromeda (The poor soul). He also managed to become a black belt of Kempo karate during all of this. His first works in the early 1980s were historical fiction: the adventure series Privateers, and Gentlemen. In his own words the market for historical fiction dried up and he turned his hand to something a bit more profitable, science fiction. His first novel was Hardwired, a cyberpunk novel that drew a lot of praise and was nominated for a Locus Novel. Mr. Williams then proved himself adept at slipping from one form of speculative fiction to another, writing near-future thrillers, comedies set in the future, science fantasy works, and even straight-up fantasy. Mr. Williams is still writing today and a number of his more recent works have looked at modern events like crowd-sourcing, alternative reality games; and in one short story, influencers. A large number of his books have been nominated for awards with him winning a Nebula in 2005 and 2011. What we're going to look at is the first book in his space opera series, Dread Empire's Fall, The Praxis. A bit of a disclaimer, this isn't my first time reading the book, I read this series when still in college (As did I. Way back in the day. And in fact more recently in audiobook form)

The situation is, thousands of years ago a race of aliens called the Immortal Shaa came to the idea that they had developed not just the perfect organization of society, but the best and most perfect way of dealing with and observing the universe. They called this system the Praxis. Burning with the zeal of their conviction they set forth to bring all the universe to heel under the Praxis and... Succeeded. Humanity was the second species brought under the yoke of the Praxis and it was not a glorious or even long struggle. Instead, the Shaa showed up with their fleets and burned cities off the face of the Earth with anti-matter bombs until we surrendered to avoid extinction. Which is depressing but frankly realistic (Yeah, in the event of an actual alien invasion we would be fucked, even without antimatter bombs. Any spacefaring civilization is going to be able to pluck asteroids out of the belt and chuck them down the gravity well. The effect would be similar, but with fewer hard rads. Hell, at the acceleration their ships demonstrate with their mass, they could simply bake us with their propulsion systems…). The Shaa would march forward to bring every known sapient species under their rule. All six of them. They would hammer those species into line, using an oppressive system that controlled everything in a strict class hierarchy and placed careful limits on every field of endeavor. For example research into genetics, nanotechnology, cybernetics and so on is carefully limited or outright banned. A hereditary class system prevents the creation of any rising internal groups that could challenge this and the brutal Legion of Diligence, the not so secret police, hunt down any divergent thought or communication with the same fanaticism we would associate with the witch hunters of prior ages, with the same disregard for collateral damage. The Shaa stand over all of this pompously declaring that All that is Important is Known. However, the Shaa made a mistake. They let themselves become immortal but refused to advance their technology or their society to deal with that immortality. As a result, as a species they grew old. They stopped reproducing, found themselves increasingly dependent on computers to remember things that happened last week.. Growing old, bored, and lazy with no tasks to stimulate their interests and having no energy left to find new tasks to live for... The Shaa began to kill themselves. The book begins with the very last Shaa, looking out at the universe that bows to his every word and realizing that's not enough to live for. So he decides to die and his last wish is that nothing ever change, ever again. Sometimes you watch a wish that you know won't be granted and you just feel a bit of unwholesome glee at the train wreck that is coming.

The Shaa built a system that was supposed to maintain the Praxis even after their extinction with governing power devolving to the aristocratic class called the Peers. In theory, the Peers were people who had been made into their brother's keepers. Each Peer family given responsibility for a network of clients down which expanded until every citizen under the Praxis had a noble patron who was responsible for ensuring that they received the necessities of life and their rights under the law. With the increasingly absent oversight of the Shaa, the system had turned into one of the Peers enriching themselves, keeping a small middle class of specialists and craftsmen around to care for their needs and the vast mass of common citizens living lives of drudgery and want. While no one seems to be starving, despite having the resources of the galaxy at their beck and call, most of them are living lives that wouldn't compare well to your average worker in the 21st century. In fact, a good number of them are living in slums. While the Peers live in literal palaces as well as monopolize the profitable and powerful occupations. Such as the civil service, most of the officer class in the military (The military salute by the way? It’s literally standing at attention with your neck exposed to a phantom knife, because anyone at higher rank can execute you at will. The salute is an acknowledgement of that fact{in comparison, our modern salutes are said to have evolved from knights raising their visors to show a lack of hostile intent}) and ownership of most of the valuable resources (It is worth noting as well that even the lower ranks of the nobility - which are informal lower ranks but even there they stratify - must have the patronage of a higher-ranking Peer to get anywhere ever. They don’t have merit based promotion worth mentioning. It’s there, but it isn’t a realistic path for anyone.{Even their merit-based promotions are Patron based, it’s be so damn good at your job that someone wants to be your Patron}). The military, not having to actually fight a war in thousands of years has basically become a giant frat club, where ship captains are more obsessed with maintaining a good soccer team within the crew then military readiness. To be fair, it's hard to blame them, when there's no one to fight, why bother to be prepared for one? Unfortunately for the military that's not a state of affairs that is going to last. Every species in the empire has families that are Peers and under the Praxis there is no hierarchy among species. Only among social classes. There are some who object to that and think the Empire needs a species based hierarchy, with themselves standing in the place of the Shaa. So the battle for the spoils of empire beings. Let's meet our main characters though.

Gareth Martinez is a man with problems, but they're the kind of problems most citizens would love to have. He's a Peer but the wrong sort of Peer, being from an out of the way provincial planet, he has no connections or relatives in the Capital (One of the informally lower-ranked Peers). The Peers of the Capital consider him a try-hard schemer with a nasty accent and take joy in denying him chances to advance. Worse, just when he thought he had gotten his boss on his side, the Admiral he's working for decides to commit suicide with the last Shaa (To Die With Honor™after a corruption scandal involving his wife, if I recall). Thus his military career is frozen with him an eternal junior officer. Gareth is privileged compared to a lot of people but not enough to get anywhere near real power or responsibility. Sure he’s an officer but he’s stuck at the rank of Lt. Yes, he has a servant and can pursue all manner of hobbies but he can’t do anything that… Matters. He is, however, privileged enough that the people under him are utterly unsympathetic to his problems. After all, they can be executed at an officer’s whim. So Gareth is catching shit from both ends so to speak. The thing is he is honestly a good officer, he's efficient, intelligent and decisive. So he does honestly deserve more then he gets and he knows it. Of course, he's also a scheming, ambitious opportunist and a bit of a womanizer. Although I will note for the record, that he never lies to any of the ladies he pursues and is pretty open in what he's looking for. Additionally, he doesn't take advantage of the woman under his command or use his status to intimidate or otherwise pull women into his bed, so he's not a predator (And yes, he absolutely could do those things. Remember the salute?). I wouldn't call him a terrible person, just one where I can understand why some of his superiors might dislike him, especially with his rush to wring everything he can from any situation. That said, given that he's likely only got one shot at the big time, who can blame him?

For me, the real star of this book is our lady protagonist, the Lady Caroline Sula. While a lot is revealed fairly early in the book, I don't want to spoil too much about her, so forgive me for being a little vague here. Let me just say that according to the Praxis, Sula should have died in the same city, hell the same street she was born in. However, Sula wasn't going to let something as insignificant as the system that governs the entire known universe stop her from climbing out of the cesspit of her early life. Having seen what obedience to the system got her Mother and Foster Mother, Caroline, or Caro as many call her fought her way out of her home and into the military academy. She's brilliant, driven and utterly ruthless. She's also rather drop-dead gorgeous, something that several male characters note throughout the book. Caro in a lot of other works would be a pure villainous character both because of her past and because of her cold, pragmatic mindset. However, she is almost entirely a product of the system that created her and a living indictment of it. According to the Praxis, someone like Caro should be flat out impossible and yet not only does she survive in a system completely hostile to her, she thrives. Course she doesn't get to do this without wracking an impressive number of psychological and emotional scars, not the least of which is the dark simmering rage in her guts at the fact that just to get a seat at the table, she had to commit a number of black and foul deeds and everyone else just had to be born at the right place and time (There is no war but class war Caro…{You stop that, Caro has all the war she needs already}). I'll admit part of the reason I'm so sympathetic is it reminds me of how I felt when I saw how the world tended to treat my parents and realized the only reason I wasn't treated the same was I could hear. Frankly, it's hard for me not to admire a woman who when confronted with a rigged game, decided to steal the deck and rig it right back. Additionally, when you're up against as oppressive and brutal a system as the Praxis, being ruthless, pragmatic and cold aren't character defects, they're survival traits. The Peers can do without that but then they're already on top and if they follow the rules and mind their manners, the worse they have to deal with is the possibility of an arranged marriage. Which is miles above worrying about being put on the street or whether your partner is going to beat you to death.

The Praxis is a novel that vividly displays one of the great weaknesses of authoritarian systems. Not only are they cannibals, devouring their own citizens to prevent domestic uprising; they require a good amount of the energy of the ruling class to maintain and keep running. Especially if the goal is to prevent any and all change. Or as one with wit might say: it's all well and good to have a government-run by the perfect man, but what happens when the perfect man has a bellyache? Or in this case, commits suicide because of his inability to deal with immortality. Mr. Williams does a great job of embracing the logic of the situation and showing us the logical outcome. Because no one has fought a war in thousand of years, everyone is making ridiculous mistakes and this not only prolongs the fighting but makes it way more brutal then it has to be. On top of that, you have a ruling class that has never had to deal with an emergency before and it shows, painfully. There's a scene where the ruling body of the government fights off a coup attempt from rogue members and starts passing laws to deal with the situation, getting bogged down in an hours-long debate on the proper punishment for such acts only to realize during all of this... No one had alerted the military that the government was fighting off a coup. The fact that Mr. Williams can make me fully believe that this would happen is a credit to his talent and a testament to the decades he spent honing it. That said, there are over 250 pages of build-up to the actual fighting in this book. While none of it is taken up by info-dumping, there is a good chunk of it taken up by petty in-universe politics. This is honestly good world-building and helps develop the characters we're dealing with but I can't help but wonder if maybe some of that could be trimmed back in the interest of getting to the actual war. Additionally, I'll admit that some people might be put off by Martinez and Sula, who are both fairly gray characters. I will say that Mr. Williams does a good job of writing them as people however so their negative qualities are balanced out by humanizing ones that help us sympathize with them. The combat has a hard science edge, there's no artificial gravity for example so the crews have to suffer the high G's of acceleration and weightlessness otherwise. Most of the fighting is done via missile with the crews in hardened bunkers hoping not to be cooked alive or vaporized in an antimatter/matter reaction (It’s about the only science fiction story I’ve ever read that managed to have the words “Missile flares, estimating twelve hours until impact!” and have that scene actually be tense as all hell). Despite the long build-up, I deeply enjoyed this book although I recognize it's not for everyone. That said if reading about complex, flawed characters trying to keep their world from blowing itself up sounds like fun, or if you wish your space opera had a bit more of a hard sci-fi tinge? This is your book. Give it a shot. As for me, The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams gets an A. 

I fucking love this book. Gets an A from me.

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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.