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Title | Incrementalists
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Author | Steven Brust & Skyler White
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Tor - 2013
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First Printing | Tor - 2013
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Title | Fireworks in the Rain
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Author | Stephen Brust
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Cover Art | Wesley Allsbrook
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Publisher | Tor.com - 2013
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First Printing | Tor.com - 2013
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Title | Strongest Conjuration
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Author | Skyler White
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Cover Art | Wesley Allsbrook
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Publisher | Tor.com - 2014
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First Printing | Tor.com - 2014
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Title | The Skill of Our Hands
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Author | Steven Brust & Skyler White
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Tor Books - 2017
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First Printing | Tor Books - 2017
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Category | Urban Fantasy
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Phil, Ren, Ramon, Jimmy, Irina, Celeste, Oskar, Matsu, Kate
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Main Elements | Immortals
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Website | ---
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 The Incrementalists
"Secret societies, immortality, murder mysteries and Las Vegas all in one book? Shut up and take my money." —John Scalzi
The Incrementalists—a secret society of two hundred people with an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations, races, and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, just a little bit at a time. Their ongoing argument about how to do this is older than most of their individual memories.
Phil, whose personality has stayed stable through more incarnations than anyone else’s, has loved Celeste—and argued with her—for most of the last four hundred years. But now Celeste, recently dead, embittered, and very unstable, has changed the rules—not incrementally, and not for the better. Now the heart of the group must gather in Las Vegas to save the Incrementalists, and maybe the world.
Fireworks in the Rain
A tale from the world of Steven Brust and Skyler White's novel The Incrementalists, a September 2013 release. The Incrementalists are an ancient conspiracy to make the world better -- just a little bit at a time. "Fireworks in the Rain" tells a story not found in the novel, and serves as an equally beguiling introduction to the Incrementalists and how they work...
Strongest Conjuration
A tale of the Incrementalists—a secret society of two hundred people, with an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, a little bit at a time. Their ongoing argument about just how to accomplish this is older than most of their individual memories. They first appeared in the 2013 novel The Incrementalists by Steven Brust and Skyler White; subsequently, Tor.com published an Incrementalists story by Brust, "Fireworks in the Rain." "Strongest Conjuration" takes place directly after the events of the novel.
The Skill of our Hands
The Incrementalists are a secret society of two hundred people; an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, a little bit at a time.
Now Phil, the Incrementalist whose personality has stayed stable through more incarnations than anyone else’s, has been shot dead. They’ll bring him back—but first they need to know what happened. Their investigation will lead down unexpected paths in contemporary Arizona, and bring them up against corruption, racism, and brutality in high and low places alike.
But the key may lay in one of Phil’s previous lives, in "Bleeding Kansas" in the late 1850's - and the fate of the passionate abolitionist we remember as John Brown.
Ah...where do I start. Of the professional reviews I've seen they all say how amazing this book is, how it makes the reader work (which apparently is a Brust thing as he tries to explore different styles of writing), how the complexity was simply masterful, that this book is genius.
I simply didn't feel that way.
Location Las Vegas - honestly it could take place anywhere. Other than Phil making most of his income playing poker (which we don't really see him do, just talks about it) and the fact they mentioned how hot it was several times, it honestly played no role whatsoever in the plot. They could have been in Alaska complaining about the cold.
Concept - ok, cool idea here. This is a secret society of Incrementalists, people who "meddle" with the rest of us, to give us little nudges in the hopes of improving the world a little bit. They don't go around encouraging people to kill Hitler, but they might push someone to help sneak a Jew across the border to safetly...just one, not a whole Schindler operation. There's about 200 of them and while their bodies are not immortal their memories are, and when one body dies they implant the memories into a new body where either the old or the new personality will prevail. However, I didn't feel this was explored much. I mean it was, but not the shock of say being a male personality implanted into a woman (even Strongest Conjuration where this happens to one character, it's barely discussed other than they still refer to him as "he" even though he's now walking around in heels and trying to figure out how to put mascara on). We also never see the "meddling" bit except in Fireworks in the Rain.
Oh, and these people can access something called a Garden where each has their own plot where they can store memories, and share them with others, the process of experiencing these memories is called Grazing. This was also a cool idea, one that is explored in so much detail it mostly leaves the reader confused. Was is a memory really? Is a personality something tied of a physical body or something independent of it? Is it a collection of memories? Could we be seeking a disembodied soul? And you have to seek the location of a memory through three axes, Where/When/Why but one of the three must always be unknown or else things go really bad, so why is mostly the unknown, but then you can change they why...you can even change the Who and then things get really weird. There was a huge amount of, well, technobabble, and that's ok, I don't mind having stuff thrown at me as a reader and having to figure it out from context, after all the characters shouldn't be explaining to me directly something they have done for millenia (though some does get explained to Ren who is new). But the concepts get very surreal.
Plot - Also they were too busy trying to deal with a kind of murder mystery. Celeste was apparently murdered, or committed suicide, or something else, and things go horribly wrong when she is implanted into her new body, that of Ren. So we end up having to figure out this really complex existential problem when all I wanted is a book about these people "meddling" behind the scenes.
Characters - The big problem. Oh Ramon and Jimmy, Oskar and Irina all are strong clear personalities. But the book is written from the POV of Phil and Ren and flips between them, frequently, several times a chapter. I'm ok with multi-POV stories but there is a problem when I have to go back to the section title to figure out who is talking. You'd think someone who is a two thousand year old male shoemaker from Judea would come off with a very different voice from a modern day, 20 year old female UX designer, but nope, I couldn't tell them apart. Also for a two thousand year old guy Phil seemed pretty clueless about how the Garden and stuff works. On the other hand Ren, who just got a merest bit of Celeste's memories, couldn't even remember her most of the time, was doing a lot of the figuring out about what really happened.
So am I just a lazy reader who didn't want to work at it? I don't think so - I love Dune, I love the Chronicles of Elantra, both of those are tortuously mindbending...but there I cared about the characters! Here, yeah Phil is kind of sweet but I'd really liked to have picked up on the fact that he's actually ancient, but nope, he's just a dude that plays poker, eats pizza about 5 times a week, has only one bathrobe that Ren keeps running off with...and that's it. And you know if the pizza and the bathrobe are the bits that stick at the end of the book, then that says something about how the important bits just slide right out of the reader's mind. Author's out there, be really careful of repeating motifs, check how often your character is eating/showering/etc, yes in real world we do this daily, but a reader doesn't actually care about being given a play-by-play of every morning's coffee brew (oh sorry, Ren only drinks tea). I may not have figured out how the Garden works, but I know that Phil's current body will die of malnutrition in the next decade or so...
That said, there is just one more book in the series...my library has it...I'm a sucker for completing series I start so yeah, I'll see if now that the big mess has been resolved will things be more what I expected.
The two stories are free on Tor.com, I don't think they will make sense to anyone who didn't read the book, but the first one is a nice example of meddling, and the second, though I only read it yesterday, I've already mostly forgotten what it was about except that Ramon is now a woman (but that wasn't the point)...oh yeah, Ren met some Neanderthal ancestors and started fading or something since she was playing with symbols and kept getting sucked into her mudplain...
May 2022
Since there was only one more book in the series and the library had it, I figured I'd give it another go. For what it's worth I liked this one a lot better. I could understand what was going on more, partly since I had experience with the lingo from the first book, secondly Oskar makes a much more interesting narrator than Ren or even Phil, and I never did figure out what the heck happened with Celeste, just glad they didn't need to spend more time on her here.
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