Isolate – L.E. Jr. Modessit

I saw a blurb describing this book as “gaslamp political fantasy”. That’s fair. It’s not science fiction, though I got it from a shelf labeled as such. There are hints that the characters are not human (e.g., prolonged exposure to sunlight makes their skin lighter, rather than darker). The notable difference is that a small proportion of the population is empathic - able to sense and project emotions - and there are also a few Isolates (cannot sense or be sensed) and Susceptibles (very vulnerable to projections). As of this first book, that has very little influence on the plot.

Gaslamp … okay. The society is late-industrial-revolution, with social and technological elements drawn from our nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. (There is a good deal of steam-powered traffic, for instance, but electricity hasn’t become practical.) Politics is a balancing act between industrialists-becoming-robber-barons, a declining nobility, and increasingly-unhappy workers. That balancing act is written into their constitution. And some people have become unhappy enough that they are using bombs as a way to encourage constitutional reform.

The main characters are Obreduur - a prominent Crafter politician (see “increasingly-unhappy workers”) and his two guards/aides, Avraal - an empath - and Steffan - an isolate. (It would be much the same book if both were normals.) They represent the work-within-the-system and try-make-things-better center that is under attack from both directions. Literally under attack. Some of the assassination attempts come from the industrialist faction, which can be thought of at this point as the subvert-the-system-for-private-benefit party, and the rebels, who want a political system that resembles ours.

The book does a good job of portraying the slog that is practical politics. The protagonists can’t right injustice. They can write memos. They can’t bring about social change. They can push it a little further along. They can’t tell the rebels “It’ll be better next year”, just “We’re working on it.”

I started with classification. I got this book from the science-fiction section of a bookstore, but it wouldn’t have been a very different book without the sf overlay. (Probably wouldn’t have sold as well, since the author has an established reader base.) The political system is different from ours - but it’s embedded in a society whose differences from ours (allowing for a century of technological progress) are largely cosmetic. The political debates - explicit and implicit - apply to us.

Happily, the author doesn’t hit the reader over the head with the political debate. It’s embedded within a good enough story to keep the pages turning..

(An admittedly-minor complaint. We’re told about every meal and we’re told what Steffan ate at each meal. It got distracting after a while.)