The Scourge of God is the latest installment of Stirling’s Emberverse series, set in a world where electricity, explosives, and steam power no longer work. The first trilogy dealt mostly with survival and government. But this second trilogy is definitely taking a more metaphysical turn. Even though the first books were peppered with religious discussions, these latest books are going even further down that road.
This book picks up right where The Sunrise Lands left off, and I have the feeling that the next book is going to do the same thing. In this trilogy, we follow the descendants of the people who survived the Change as they follow their destinies. It may sound a little melodramatic to say it that way, but one of the thing to older generation of characters keep remarking on is how seriously the younger people take things like honor and guest-right and legends and destinies. It’s like finding yourself in one of those old legends about Roland or Siegfried or something.
It’s a little hard to write about the plot of this book because you really need the background for the previous four novels. In a nutshell, Rudi and his fellow questers continue to travel east and visit a neo-Buddhist monastery, neo-Lakota, and the remains of the American Midwest. They are still pursued by agents of a very creepy cult that has its own army. The cult’s army is also gearing up for war against our protagonists’ parents back in Oregon. When I got to the end of this book, it was clear that I wasn’t going to get a real resolution to anything. It’s one of the flaws of setting out to write a trilogy that the middle book always feels like a link between the first book and the last book.
As always, what keeps me interested in these books is seeing how the remnants of the American way of life and history are shaping up in this post-Change world. I like seeing how words and traditions and such evolve over time. (This is a big part of why I liked A Canticle for Liebowitz so much.) One of the most interesting things to see is the split between people who decided to use what they knew of pre-industrial history and society to create new societies and the people who tried to hold on to American ways of doing things. Stirling has a couple of his characters posit the idea that the United States is impossible to restore without mass transportation and continent-spanning communications systems. After all, this is a modern country, and Oklahoma, the last of the lower 48 states to actually become a state only became one in 1910. Plus, telegraph lines popped not long after the mass migrations of settlers came West.