Approximately two decades ago (2006 and 2008) S.M. Stirling came out with the two books of the then-duology Lords of Creation. These two books, The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings¹, were set in an alternate world where, approximately 200 million years ago, alien space bats² called the “Lords of Creation” started monkeying around with our solar system. Venus and Mars were terraformed, and populated with Earth life. The salutary effect of this was to make Venus and Mars to resemble the pulp-era planets of Burroughs and Brackett. Venus was a hot steaming jungle, materially primitive human inhabitants, and dinosaurs. Mars was host to a dying earth (or dying Mars) civilization of human-descended hominids with high (if decaying) technology, deadly decadent politics and all the rest you’d expect out of a John Carter or Eric John Stark story.
The novels respectively cover humans from Earth getting entangled in local affairs, and are set in the 1990s. This is a 1990s where the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc did not fall, where lots of the efforts of the EastBloc (USSR and China) and America are devoted to getting to and making footholds on the habitable Venus and Mars, respectively, with characters getting into adventures. In a way similar to L. Sprague de Camp Krishna novels, the books are a vehicle for Stirling to have plausible planetary romance pulp feeling stories in a science fiction context. I myself particularly like the second Mars-set novel.
The ending of that Mars novel, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, has the protagonist and her partner, the soon-to-be Empress of Mars, accidentally activate a piece of Lords of Creation technology, and open up a stargate on Mars (and as it turns out, one on Venus and one on Earth). On the other side is not a planet, but a fully habitable Dyson sphere…and a huge expansion to the playground of the imagination. That is where the novel and the duology ended, back in 2008.
I thought the series was done, but over a decade and a half later, a third novel in the series, aptly called The Lords of Creation³, has been published, and here we are.
So after covering Venus and Mars and opening up gates to a Dyson sphere, one might reasonably expect the third novel to have adventures on the sphere. But here I want to break for a moment and discuss the marketing of this book. This book is not from Tor, but rather a small press called Caezik, which also obtained the rights to and republished the first two novels. When I heard the book was announced, I was very curious as to what it might be about. So I am going to quote verbatim what the marketing copy, on Amazon (there is currently no page for the book on Caezik’s website, and the marketing copy on Stirling’s own website is minimal):
Lords of Creation, the eagerly anticipated finale in S.M. Stirling’s acclaimed Lords of Creation series, promises to be a masterful conclusion to a saga that has captivated readers worldwide. Following the remarkable adventures in “The Sky People” and “In the Courts of the Crimson Kings,” this third installment is set to weave the intricate tales of alternate Venus and Mars into a climactic narrative.
In this series conclusion, the richly imagined worlds of a habitable Venus and Mars, each with their own unique civilizations and ecosystems, come alive again. Stirling, known for his meticulous world-building and deep character development, is set to intertwine the fates of characters from both planets, exploring the culmination of their struggles and triumphs.
Um, yeah.
It is true that Lords of Creation is set in the Lords of Creation series. There was a richly imagined setting of a habitable Venus and Mars in those books. Stirling is known in prior works for his meticulous world-building and deep character development. That’s all true.
But! Did you notice that this blurb says nothing about what the plot or setup of this book is except that “the richly imagined worlds…come alive again. That he is “set to intertwine the fates of characters from both planets”. You might rightly ask…doing what, and why, and how does this all intersect? And wasn’t there a portal to a Dyson sphere in the end of the Mars book, what about that?
Also, the style and generic nature of this makes me wonder if this wasn’t written with the “aid” of an LLM, taking generic material about the Lords of Creation series and being asked to write promotional copy about a third book. If this was written by a human, in a sense, it’s even worse, it’s absolutely meaningless text. Had I not been interested in this ’verse for nearly two decades, I would not have picked up this book at all.
So what really IS this book, then?
Well, to continue working on that promotional copy, the novel is NOT set on Venus or Mars, although there are references to them. The novel is set several years after In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, in fact. Stirling in fact does not intertwine the fates of characters from both planets. The Martian Empress and her human consort from Court are *mentioned*. Marc and Tessa from the preceding Venus novel don’t even rate that.
Instead, this novel focuses on two characters, Janice and Lee. Janice is a scientist from America, and Lee is ostensibly a Chinese scientist from the EastBloc. Janice rightly suspects that Lee is either a scientist with spy training, or a spy with scientist training. Both are part of one of the first real missions to explore beyond the Earth Gate, set somewhere in international waters near the Bahamas. In a prologue set in 2001, they find out what we knew from Courts…the other end of these portals is a Dyson Sphere, here called a Freeman Sphere. With the Sphere being 1 AU in radius, that means the approximate area of the interior of the sphere is 500 million times the land area of Earth. Even with gigantic oceans (the gate conveniently connects on both sides to an ocean, unlike the one on Mars) that’s a nearly limitless canvas for exploration. And so an American mission, with the pair, proceeds to make a scouting expedition. After some unpleasant encounters with wildlife in the oceans, and the limitations of oceanic travel, we soon have our protagonists flying in an airship, seeing what there is to be seen.
This starts off well enough with the party coming across a bronze age society…but with a mixture of higher tech gear, including a few muskets. By accident, Janice and Lee find out that the bronze age society knows some French, and so after a raid kills most of her tribe, one of the villagers, Daclah, joins the expedition and together they head off to find “New France”. What they find is a French culture alive and thriving. This French society has been there for several centuries in fact and appears to be modeled on late 17th century France.
In short order, as they are assimilating the implications of this society, they discover a not as distant as they would like neighbor is similar modeled on Mid to late 19th century Britain, and of course the British and French are at odds. In a conflict that erupts between the French and the British, the French Queen is killed, and worse, the American airship takes heavy damage from the British and has to retreat. Now Janice and Lee are stuck in New France, with a technologically superior British army bearing down on them, hoping to survive the months, if not a year or more, that it will take for the airship to be repaired and return.
This is the heart of the story. And, unfortunately in my view, makes the book, and the universe, simply not work. The idea is, how long could a 17th Century French army and nation hold out against a mid 19th Century British one intent on conquest, even with a couple of 21st century scientists to try and help? The novel makes pains to have Lee’s grandfather be part of China’s Long March and resistance against the Imperial Japanese, and so her ideas are widely adopted to slow the British advance. Janice, on her part, tries to, as best she can, provide practical technological innovations to the French in the same vein. Stirling, with a near limitless canvas, decided that the story he wanted to tell was this one.
But the world he has set up in the previous two novels doesn’t make this world plausible, or worse, it weakens the rest of the series. The Lords of Creation ’verse has run on the principle that starting 200 million years ago and ending sometime around 80,000 years ago, the alien space bats terraformed Mars and Venus, and seeded them with life, and with some bits of high technology that make the plot of the two novels. All well and good, and as far as the first two novels go, that’s it.⁴
In this novel, before we get back to the immediate problems of this setup, it’s mentioned in one of the interstitial bits that this portion of the galaxy has other Dyson spheres visible in the night sky (given the strong interest in space travel technology to get to Mars and Venus, telescopes and related technologies are ahead of our own). So the lords of creation have created a bunch of Dyson spheres, which vastly increases the amount of their meddling in this part of the galaxy.
But it’s the working in historical periods where the novel breaks down and Stirling starts to forget the pyramid of modern or even Renaissance level society. There are records of the French that show that a French regiment in the 17th century was gated from Earth to the Sphere, and then set up their society. Presumably, the same thing happened to the British. You could, in the manner of the movie and tv show Stargate, take whole villages of Egyptians, Greeks, Mesopotamians or what have you, drop them onto a spot on the sphere, and they would go and continue their society, no problem. The latest in Earth history that we see in the Stargate universe try this, technologically, is the Norse of the first millennium CE.
But taking two regiments of 17th century French soldiers (even with all of the logistical support) and dropping them onto the sphere, how in the world would they ever have all the skills needed to make a New France? They wouldn’t. The novel explains how the overwhelming male regiment of course took native “brides” so that “solves” the population problem, but how do two regiments of soldiers manage to rebuild 17th century French society? Where are all the skills needed to actually make this possible, in a group of 2,000 male soldiers (and a few women)?
It gets worse when you consider the British. If you assume they had a similar seeding population, trying to reconstruct mid-19th century Britain, complete with steamships, is an even more dire proposition and I just can’t buy that 2,000 British soldiers are going to be able to reconstruct the Empire technologically, politically or otherwise, top to bottom. And they clearly do, or else the British are not going to use steamships, or Snider-Enfeld guns, et cetera. The technological base and know-how to make these in quantity and quality to field an army is no small feat.
I get how Stirling wants this to be cool, he wants to put his societies into conflict with each other, but his setup just broke my suspension of disbelief. And he knows better, because in To Turn the Tide, his sending Americans back to the Marcomanni Wars of Rome, the Americans have a ton of knowledge and information brought with them, and deliberately, and even so, the Americans are not providing the Romans with the know-how to make AK-47’s. They make primitive guns and cannon.
But further than that, is the implications of all this. In the first two books, it seems that the lords of Creation stopped meddling 80,000 years ago and finished their work. Where did they go? No clue. But they are clearly seen and viewed as a historical force. But this novel changes that. The Lords of Creation have been meddling on Earth as recently as 150 years ago (or, as the novel speculates briefly, perhaps automatic machines or the like). That makes the Lords of Creation an active force in historical times and completely changes the calculus of dealing with them, their technology and their impact. If they were still stealing and press-ganging people 150 years ago, they could be doing it “today”. Why aren’t they? And part of the background told In the Courts of the Crimson Kings is that the technology of Mars as created by the ancients is breaking down, untended by its creators in the last tens of millennia. But if the Lords of Creation are still active as recently as two centuries ago, that no longer holds water as being plausible.
And so the last line of this book irks me unreasonably. It should not be a surprise that Janice and Lee survive, their airship returns, and they go home. The last lines of the book have Janice reminiscing about her adventures and the lifetime of work ahead of her on the Sphere; her last thought, the last line of the novel, is “We’re the Lords of Creation now!” But in a world where the real Lords of Creation, less than two centuries ago, were stealing people off of Earth and sticking them on the sphere, that is patently not true. There seems to be no conception in Janice’s mind, or in Lee’s, that the existence of New France and New Britain requires a radical rethinking of hsow Humans of Mars, Venus and Earth have to think about the threat, for lack of a better word, of (historically speaking) recent major activity from the Lords.
And there is something that annoys me about the Bahamas Gate. The gate is permanently on and works both ways. The ocean of the Sphere is intermixing permanently with our own. That oceanic life on the Sphere is much more like the Venus of this ’verse than our world—there are in fact, mosasaurus in the ocean, big ones. The ocean salinity in the Sphere is less than our own, and it is mentioned that the mosasaurus “probably couldn’t” survive in our ocean and our creatures do not survive there. But I am not sure how true that is, and there is going to be a zone around both gates where the salinity is the same and in between the two. And given the size of the oceans on the Sphere…the salinity of the Earth’s ocean will eventually be swamped (and oh boy won’t that be a problem for the world), but even in the short term, a mosasaurus or three could soon start wreaking havoc near nearby islands. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Also, the gate is 10,000 feet high, which means things like the pterodactyls (yes there are pterodactyls, and fierce ones, the British have anti air guns to deal with them) are going to fly through free and easy.
There are some really cool things here, to be fair. Stirling is fascinating in how the French language in New France is more conservative than in the modern world. There is a real sense of Stirling playing with Victorian soldiers and Musketeers, there is even a meddling clergyman and a reference to “clerical guards” and a fight with them right out of Dumas. The whole milieu of New France is a fascinating world. The program of New France trying to resist the British is a fun and exciting adventure. Lee and Janice are both queer (but no, they do not fall into bed with each other, Janice does not trust Lee. Instead, in an Island in the Sea of Time motif, Lee winds up cohabitating with Daclah). The British, in one scene, apparently have domesticated Triceratops, and the French have Mammoths complete with howdahs. There is a lot of rule of cool to be had.
However, the underpinnings of the narrative, especially of the idea of dropping a couple of thousand men onto the Sphere and having them perfectly recreate their societies and technology, simply did not work for me and it drove me out of the story. It is a pity. I really wanted to like this book, love this book and recommend this book, But, unfortunately, I cannot, unless you are the kind of reader who wants this sort of adventure and does not care about its implausibility in its setup and the implications of its setup.
¹ Yes, a reference to the prog rock song “In the Court of the Crimson King” — this is that sort of book.
² That is a reference to the major Stirling series, The Change novels, where the change in local laws of physics around Earth was done by means unknown by entities referred to in the series as “Alien Space Bats”.
³ This annoys me. Stirling’s website has the book title as “The Lords of Creation”. Audible has the book title as “The Lords of Creation. The audiobook has “The Lords of Creation”. The ebook cover has “Lords of Creation”. The promo copy has it as “Lords of Creation” . Which is it? I don’t know. I am going with the author and audible here.
⁴ The setup as of the first two novels reminds me of the Traveller RPG universe, where the Ancients visited Earth about the same time period, took off samples of humanity (and other species, such as Earth wolves that they uplifted into the Vargr), and seeded them all on lots of planets in the galaxy, some of which were clearly terraformed for the purpose. The ancients are gone but a lot of their stuff lies around.
