City Of A Thousand Suns by Samuel R. Delany (The Fall of The Towers #3)

This is the concluding part of the trilogy the fall of the towers, the earlier two volumes of which I’ve read over the past few weeks while welcoming my new babby into the world.

The first one (Out of the Dead City) I enjoyed a lot, and it has a phenomenal denouement during which three of the protagonists bounce through multiple different dimensions and realities facing off an interdimensional matter-changing alien entity intent on destroying the entire known universe… can stakes get any higher???

The answer to that rhetorical-seeming question is no, and so the second volume in the trilogy (The Towers of Toron) may repeat the previous book’s finale in a truncated form towards the start of the novel, instead focuses on intergovernmental policy, propaganda, lies around war and the blunt economics of conflict, and though engaging and entertaining, it is more of a lessening than an expansion of the previous book in terms of both its worldbuilding, characterisation and – wait, that’s already two things. If I say more, the word “both” is redundant. I’ll stop there.

This third one, City of A Thousand Suns, picks up where the second book left off with the empire’s war proven to be a fabrication and only actually happening inside the minds of a load of conscripted soldiers who had been essentially put into the Matrix were the Matrix from The Matrix set in a war in the future rather than in the 1990s. I don’t know which you would prefer, readers – a future war or 1997? Please let me and the rest of the TriumphOfTheNow.com community know in the Comments…

By the end of The Towers of Toron, the fake war had been exposed and the main characters had reunited and prepped for another showdown at a later date with the intergalactic interdimensional foe, which I naively presumed would form the main plot of this novel.

City of A Thousand Suns opens with a conflagration (a big meeting) of many different entities who exist within our universe, all talking about how the existence of everything and anything now is dependent on whether or not the protagonists from the earlier books will be able to defeat this villain when they re-encounter it again.

This meeting takes place in a city that Delany describes in a sorta fucking amazing sorta super interesting kinda way, in that it is a space that is all things to all people who are in it.

All the various life forms that Delany imagines from “our” universe all share the same inherent building blocks of life, the same atomic and structural pieces, but they all have very different sensory and material constructs, and thus their versions of liveable cities are very different.

Delany clearly has a lot of fun depicting the interlocking and contradictory yet simultaneous ways in which this one imagined city caters to all these needs.

The alien who is leading the meeting spoke to the characters in the earlier books, and here is telling his gathered alien brethren from different alien species (which means they’re not really brethren, right… like, the opposite of brethren)-

The alien who is leading the meeting is telling his alien non-brethren that the earthlings are going to come to their meeting and they’re going to bring with them three important texts that will explain humanity, and with the knowledge from these texts they’ll be able to figure out how to defeat the evil alien from a different dimension, as its sinister and unwavering interest in humans needs to be understood. (Many of the aliens think humans are the shittiest animal in the universe, which shows real wisdom.)

The three books which the protagonists need to find are all very easy to locate because the three writers are hanging out and basically workshopping each others’ texts, it turns out.

One of the books is a science tome written by the sister of one of the main characters, one of them is a really good history book on war written by her partner and the third one is a book of really good poems written by a former street thug who was mentioned by name in book two but didn’t appear.

The poet appears in person near the start of City of A Thousand Suns and is mad happy and in love, until his new wife is brutally murdered to death by a former associate from his days as a professional criminal. The hyper violence feels a bit out of place in this book (though is tonally similar to the previous war scenes), as a lot of the violence has moved off stage. (I know nothing here is “on stage”, but the last book I read was plays, which is on stage, and I’m not very clever, so mistakes inevitably happen.)

City of A Thousand Suns follows the protagonists as they try to find these texts without being consciously aware that this is what they’ve been told to do by the aliens, and they travel around the various locations from the first two books and they find a sort of anarchist utopia being constructed a little bit out of the way in in the jungle area, and this city shares its name with the name of the book. Yes.

At the end, two of the main characters seem to end up in the city that the book starts in (which is not the city of a thousand suns) and it isn’t quite clear (to me) if everyone on Earth is dead or not. The other major plot thread was that the big computer that was running The Matrix style war simulation in The Towers of Toron has achieved sentience and – a terrible combination – has control of all of the world’s actual military hardware, and is desperately trying to destroy humanity. Yes.

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There’s an author’s note at the end of this book (in addition to the one at the beginning about Delany rewriting and reworking this text from earlier versions), which talks about how the writer intentionally attempted to put into this trilogy every idea he could think of.

This is incredibly fucking apparent, and why The Fall of The Towers is both really engaging/exciting, yet ultimately a little disappointing.

This is Delany flexing his muscles, rather than doing anything super satisfactory with them. Driftglass may feel like a plethora of great ideas rendered perfectly in a series of short form texts, and that may well be where Delaney’s strength lay, at this point in his career…

Ideas that are huge, complex, exciting, yet ones that don’t really coalesce into a novel. YET!

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There’s a lot in City of A Thousand Suns to enjoy… a lot to like a lot… a lot to like a lot, but ultimately there are too many threads, too many ideas, too many elements that never quite connect with each other satisfactorily…

This doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, or a bad trilogy by any stretch of the imagination… certainly not by my imagination, as I couldn’t imagine anything as complex as this!

(The only time I have ever tried to think of a concept for an SF type novel, the idea I came up with was “what if there was a future society that didn’t shit and in that future society where pooing has become unnecessary due to, y’know, like because food has been refined to nutrient and vitamin supplements only so there’s no slack and because no one consumes any waste products they don’t need to poo, but in this society a group of people have discovered like organic vegetables rather than like vitamin pills, and thus the pleasures of excretion, and society is about to go crazy when people realise just how satisfying the experience of pooing is, what if that happened, yeah? What is that happened?”)

It’s super exciting to encounter Delany’s myriad ideas here, his imagination firing on all cylinders even at this early point in his career…

As I’ve said before when reading these other early books of his, having read Driftglass and seen what this guy can fucking achieve once he’s all warmed up and and and and y’know, like, working exceptionally well, I’m absolutely ready to continue ploughing through his oeuvre.

Yeah, sure, It’s not the best book I’ve ever read, but I’ve read my own books.

It’s a pretty good book all the same.

Thank you for reading. I’m off to cuddle my baby. Bye