Book Review: She Was Both Called God, as Well as Satan
Next book review. I know right? What could make me write another one of these after raising my expectations for good material with Adonis?
So, to hit it off, 'She Was Both Called God, as Well as Satan' is a psychological/fantasy story, for me at least. It's of course not as polished as something like Adonis, but it has it's own concepts that I haven't really seen anywhere before, and to the author's credit, it's executed very well.
Although the main character disappears for a while at the later parts to let other characters go through their arc, they're present through most of the story. Well, it is about them.
In summary, the main character, nameless, is hundreds of millions of years old in an immortal body. She lives on an indestructible artificial island and spends her days doing things to keep herself entertained. Her infinite lifespan coupled with her boredom and the way that it's written really puts you into the mindset of this person, who is for all intents and purposes, dead inside. For example, she spends months, completely motionless, staring at an insect in her garden as it lives through it's entire life. Having done so, she then laughs and dances for the next few years non-stop.
It's clear that our main character is about to go insane, however, that happens perpetually, because technically, she has gone absolutely bat shit insane millions of years ago, but her engineered body chemically doesn't allow her psyche to break. So, she's basically edging insanity until the heat death of the universe and beyond.
The explanation for all the wacky science stuff is also very well written. It portrays an advanced and superior human galactic empire. One where all needs and pleasures are met, where immortality is a given and where people are lab grown from their parents' DNA with the vast knowledge of everything already implanted into their cybernetically enhanced brains. Of course, they're also massacring the entire universe and it's various races as well and they are overwhelmingly winning. To put it simply, not a single human dies while they eradicate trillions of other lifeforms. So yeah, pretty wh40k-ish until this point. However, there comes a time when humanity collectively decides that they have done everything there is to do, achieved everything there is to achieve and known everything there is to know, so they collectively kill themselves.
It really isn't explained, but basically across the universe all humans just vanished into thin air in an instant, leaving behind their incredible technology and territory. I don't find this bad writing. I mean, if these fuckers are literally immortal since birth and the only way for them to die is by choice, then doing so by somehow dissipating isn't that far-fetched. Anyways, not every human decides to kys, but at the end only a handful remain, a few thousand at best. These people of course start dropping like flies over the years until there are only two humans left, our main character and her neighbor. The story actually begins with the announcement that her neighbor has decided to die, so yeah, she's all alone now.
Enough background info. Let's get to the meat of the story, new humanity. As our main character suddenly finds her new exciting hobby of watching things live and die, she basically scans the entire planet and finds that new humanoid creatures have started evolving on earth. This leads to her watching them through multiple drones for hundreds of years. They slowly develop more and more and make ships to travel the seas. A few of these ships bumping into the barrier that our main character's artificial island is surrounded by and thus sinking. The new humans basically make a religion around her, then antagonize her for everything wrong in the world and set out to vanquish her. However, they always leave defeated, not even denting the protective barrier.
Meanwhile, we also have the plotline follow humans as they discover 'magic', which later turns out to be just malfunctioning nanites scattered across the world. Upon a bit of tinkering, our main character realizes that the new humanoids have developed a biological organ to use said nanites to do their bidding, however unbeknownst to the neo-humans, at considerable cost. See, what our MC finds out is that the process by which the humans use 'magic' is terribly inefficient, polluting the surroundings with too much leftover nano-junk. This pollution in turn leads to animals mutating into gigantic monsters, hellbent on killing anything that has a 'magic organ' and purifying the waste left behind by human 'magic'. Of course, no one other than our MC realizes this, but she doesn't care one bit. Intervening in such a matter would be the biggest disappointment in her 'watching over everything' hobby.
So, of course humanity blames everything on the unknown 'god' residing on the island again, making our MC quite proud and happy to watch her 'children' trying to figure things out. They attack again, unleashing gigantic amounts of 'magic' and pollution with it, basically sealing their fate. Skip forward a few years and human settlements are fortresses, isolated from each other and under constant threat of extinction by wilder and bigger monsters, still unaware it is their own fault. From here on, the plot goes away from our MC and focuses on two sub-protagonists. One is a religious zealot who believes our MC to be his god, branded a satanist and sent to die in the wilderness by the monsters and the other a researcher who actually starts thinking about why the monsters scientifically exist, leading her down a tragic rabbit hole.
One thing these two characters have in common is not being attacked by the newly mutated animals/monsters. That is because if the 'monsters' don't detect a magic organ in a human and with it pollution, they behave quite docile unless provoked. Our religious friend was born without an organ due to a mutation, while our researcher gal' cuts out hers in a shady alley by some doctor. They both go through their arcs, which I won't expand upon, but they're really well made.
Meanwhile our protagonist is torn away from her fun hobby when earth's defense grid reports to her that the united armies of the universe have finally come to take/destroy earth, the homeland of the devils that had almost eradicated them before vanishing. They arrive in a giant fleet of spaceships, their technology not having improved one bit, only managing to scrap some human technology on the surface level together. However, they themselves think of it as advanced tech, much to the amusement of our MC. Well, you can guess what happens next. The allied fleet arrogantly enters the solar system, nearing earth. Some generals talking mad shit about defeating humans, when in reality humans just fucked off by themselves, never to be actually defeated.
Anyways, our MC reaches her breaking point when her fun little activity is on the verge of being disturbed, so she orders all hidden military fabs on earth to produce warships and to go to war with the enemy fleet. Of course, fabrication AIs first improve older earth warship models before pumping out a few hundred thousand ships within minutes, quickly dwarfing the allied fleet which only consisted of about a hundred thousand ships. Our MC goes on to the biggest ship, her command vessel, in full uniform and just starts fucking shit up. Well actually, more like the AIs fuck shit up. She delegates control of her entire fleet to a super intelligent warring AI, which then goes apeshit, sending the allied fleet to Valhalla.
In the end she makes a half-hearted and very one sided truce with the allied forces. She will give them a piece of human technology (technical documents, etc.) in exchange for leaving her alone. The other side agrees and leaves, only to implode over fighting about the newly acquired technology. That was the short lifespan of the unified universe v2.
Back to our new humanity, they evolve exponentially. Conquering the stars, gaining immortality and walking the same path as the ones before them, never being able to pierce the protective barrier of the artificial island. I mean, how could they? Their entire progress relied solely on nanites developed by humans. So in a way, they were much less advanced, not discovering actual technology.
Anyhow, this humanity as well slowly but surely disappears, our MC watching it happen with joy, until one day, the last 2nd gen human arrives at her barrier. This human tries breaking through endlessly with sheer determination, which sadly doesn't help her. However, our MC, finally feeling a small bit of loneliness, reduces the output of the barrier until that other person finally breaks through.
They get acquainted with each other to the point of the 2nd gen human becoming her neighbor on the island. Our MC shares with the other bored and immortal person her hobby. They discuss until they both notice something exciting. A group of humanoids lighting a fire in the wilderness. Seemingly, the cycle of humanity starts anew and thus the story ends.
All-in-all the thing is a fun read and much better in reality than how I summarized it here. If, you're interested, definitely give it a read. I personally got some few thoughtful moments while reading it and thoroughly enjoyed our main character and her story.
As I've said at the beginning, this was genuinely something new when I read it and to this day is one of the most unique pieces I've managed to read. There are a lot of preexisting elements like “hurr durr humanity bad”, but generally it paints over those overused concepts with fresh paint, that being our character. She is so uninteresting that she becomes interesting.
Yes, I've seen multiple flat characters that are supposed to be 'dark' and to not show emotion. This itself has become a ridiculously overused trope, being used to justify bad character writing, “Oh my character is uninteresting and lame b-because thats his/her thing. What a cool character, right??”. However that's not the case here. The character is actually well written, which makes her behavior and flatness justifiable and actually cool to read. Add in her little moments of wackiness and pure insanity, it just combines into a well built character.
Overall, I loved the concept. There is only a very small amount of works that try to tell a story from an omnipresent view point, truly, and a lot of them fail. Either with bad character writing or not being able to cope with the perspective they're writing from. This work is the only I've found to date to execute on this concept well enough. Hence I made this post to just share my fondness for this unique piece of work.
So, verdict? A solid 9/10. It's not perfect, but it delivers on a very well executed concept. Until next time :D