Review: The Million, by Karl Schroeder

[Russ Allbery]

The Million
by Karl Schroeder

Publisher: Tor.com
Copyright: August 2018
ISBN:      1-250-18541-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     192

Gavin Penn-of-Chaffee should not exist. He lives on his family estate
with his father and his brother (who suffers from brain damage from an
accident), commands the household bots, and tries to keep is brother
out of trouble, but no one can know that he is there. Only one million
people are allowed to live on Earth, one million caretakers of the
cities and wilds, one million people who are richer than any human has
ever been but bound by treaties to very strict rules. One of those
rules is that they never strain the carrying capacity of the Earth's
ecosystem by allowing their numbers to increase.

Unfortunately for Gavin, his family is about to become involved in
something far larger than his hidden existence. When the auditors
attack their family mansion in force, it's reasonable to think someone
may have tipped them off about Gavin's existence. But it quickly
becomes clear that something else is going on, something murkier. With
his father presumed dead and his brother arrested for his murder, Gavin
stumbles into pretending to be a dead man to join the auditors, try to
free his brother, and understand what's going on.

Schroeder is perhaps my favorite idea writer in science fiction, but
he's not a very prolific one. This is his first book since Lockstep in
2014, and it's more of a novella than a novel. It's set in the Lockstep
universe, although that's not immediately obvious at the start of the
book, since Schroeder begins in media res and doesn't go back to fill
in the bones of the world until Gavin ends up in Venice and auditor
training. (Training classes are a good excuse for infodumps.) Gavin's
world is the Earth of the Lockstep future, and the treaties the great
families are following are (primarily) with the billions of humans
sleeping away the years in cicada beds.

Schroeder does explain the world background here, but I'm not sure it
would be a good idea to read The Million without reading Lockstep
first, primarily because it's such an odd world setup that a bit more
time to get used to it and think about the ramifications is useful. The
concept is fascinating: what if we could drastically reduce the
effective population without killing anyone, and use sophisticated
automation and computer systems to let those people who are awake live
like gods? Sadly, the technology is a bit less convincing. I'll give
Schroeder a pass on the utterly reliable cicada beds that can be
trusted to operate continuously for years or centuries, since a lot of
science fiction stories need one piece of semi-magical technology, but
Schroeder also assumes a lot in terms of near-instance manufacturing,
vast arrays of bots, and rather magical acquisition of construction
material with no sign of the material acquisition or recycling systems
that must be in play. It's possibly believable given such a low
population and thus low resource demand plus centuries of further
technological development, but I would have liked to have seen more of
the bones of that technology.

That's not the story Schroeder is telling here, though. Instead, it's a
fairly simple story of political intrigue, stumbled across by two young
adult protagonists. Elena, who we meet after Gavin, is far richer than
his family is, one of the ruling Hundred elite, and is joining the
auditors for family political reasons plus a dash of personal ethical
idealism. The story and protagonists are mostly an excuse for numerous
set pieces showing off what one million unbelievably rich and idle
people might do to pass their time (answer: specialize in and attempt
to become the best at some historic human activity), and the pageantry
they create in the process to amuse themselves. It gets more
interesting plot-wise towards the end, when Gavin finds some evidence
of what's really going on, but it feels like a brief prelude for a
larger story rather than a full story on its own.

All that being said, and despite the simple characterization and plot,
I liked Gavin, enjoyed the second half of the story, and liked that the
auditors were shown with a lot of nuance. They're not just villains,
and Schroeder hints that Gavin's world may be based on a more complex
foundation than he had expected.

This is more something to whet one's appetite between larger books than
a stand-alone story. I mildly enjoyed it, but it's missable if you're
not a Schroeder completionist. Hopefully it's prelude to a deeper and
more complex novel in the same universe. I want to hear more about the
AIs who represent natural resources! (Although I suppose I could just
re-read Ventus.)

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-24

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>