QUIETUS is an interesting, well-written and ambitious science fiction novel.
Populated by engaging characters, and with a scope that grows as the novel unfolds, it's a very good read.
Definitely worth reading if you're a fan of hard science fiction and are looking for a debut author to try/support.

Not for me. On the outside, a lot to draw me in. However points aren't awarded for premise -- they're based on execution. And that is where this fell apart for me. The author's style and writing were not to my taste- a lot of filler, repetition and infodumps. A DNF for me.

Niccolucio is a devout monk of the Florentine Carthusian order. When the plague known as the Black Death claims the lives of not only most of the villagers near his order, but also all of his brothers. Despite being spared for the time being, Niccolucio can’t help but have doubts surrounding his piety.

Niccolucio is saved from near death by Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe that is suffering from the plague. She is overwhelmed with grief for all the suffering on the worlds. But in breaking the rules of observer neutrality Habidah finds herself and Niccolucio in a galaxy-spanning conspiracy.

In so many ways this book is really two different books. The first portion sets up the severity of the Black Death and the struggle to find something to believe in when in the face of devastation and despair. It is an engrossing beginning that really draws the reader in. Habidah’s arrival and the early mystery surrounding who she is also draws the reader into the story quite well. In this early going I really expected that I had found another five star book.

But all of this early work is set-up – background information on the characters and the worlds. The plot of the book comes after Niccolucio and Habidah get together and the plot actually slows the story down and makes this character study less interesting.

A big part of this is simply that author Tristan Palmgren did such a good job with the early portion of the novel that I didn’t want the story to change. I was enjoying the book and then got a big story shift that I wasn’t prepared for and so I was taken out of my reading comfort. Going in to the next book in the series (because of course there will be a next volume because no one writes just a stand-alone book any more) I’ll have a better understanding of what I’m getting in to (unless Palmgren gives us another complete story shift), which I suspect will make the progress a little easier.

Looking for a good book? Quietus, by Tristan Palmgren is a well-written historical/alternate history fantasy, but be prepared for a big story shift.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

At first, Quietus by Tristan Palmgren reminded me a lot of the excellent Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. The basic premise is about the same: anthropologists from another world (dimension in the case of Quietus and time period with respect to Doomsday Book) visit 14th century England just as the Black Death is taking hold and laying waste to civilization. In the case of Doomsday Book, the main character arrives in 1348 by mistake. In the case of Quietus, our main character, Habidah, is exactly where she wants to be or, rather, exactly where her superiors want her to be. In her dimension, a plague very similar to the Black Death is ravaging entire worlds, and so Habidah and her team are sent to study the 14th century version of the disease and the effects it has on the populace in hopes of developing a cure for their version of it. Turns out they’re not being told everything, and so the plot becomes much bigger, the stakes higher, and, for the medieval people Habidah begins to develop a connection to, the danger much greater.

Backing up, Quietus begins with great promise. Habidah is a likable character, the leader of a team whose mission is to study and record; they are not to intervene under any circumstances. Despite the tragedies they must witness over and over, their purpose is not to cure the medieval version of the plague or to assist the people affected by it. This is a tough pill to swallow for our dimensional travellers, but they do it because they must. Habidah, however, is blessed (cursed?) with a conscience that will not allow her to stand by and do nothing. A small infraction is reprimanded with a slap on the wrist and a warning not to do it again. A second violation, more serious this time since she brings a certain monk onto her ship for treatment, sets the story on an entirely different course from where we started. Quietus truly becomes interesting at this point and wholly diverges away from the premise set forth in Doomsday Book.

Niccolucio, the monk whom Habidah rescues from certain death, is just as interesting a character as Habidah. Raised to affluence, he forsakes his family fortune for the simple life of a Carthusian monk. But when he is forced to care for his brothers as they die one by one, he begins to question his god’s purpose and his own. When he learns the truth about Habidah, or at least the version of the truth she reveals to him, his path becomes something unexpected as he plays a major role in the unfolding of the bigger and primary storyline revealed later on.

There are other supporting characters, none of whom really made an impression on me, as well as some other subplots that were mostly stereotypical and not really needed to support the main storyline. The writing is good but didn’t strike me as exceptional. Mr. Palmgren’s prose does the job but won’t knock you off your feet.

I want to thank the publisher for giving me a free electronic copy of Quietus via Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. I’m giving Quietus three rockets because, while a good read with some likable characters, ultimately the story meandered a bit too much for my liking. Niccolucio’s awakening was of particular interest, but it goes off-track when certain entities interpose themselves. It was almost as if the story became maybe a bit too complex; that extra level was not needed. In any case, I enjoyed Quietus and recommend it quite readily.

Published by Angry Robot on March 6, 2018

Quietus is a novel of big ideas. Like many good books about big ideas, the story focuses on small people, the kind of people who seem insufficiently consequential to drive big ideas. In the end, Quietus reminds us, we are all consequential, even if we seem insignificant in the vastness of the multiverse.

The two central characters in Quietus are Niccoluccio, an Italian monk who is questioning his faith during the plague years, and Dr. Habidah Shen, who doesn’t understand Niccoluccio’s need “to forever be watched and judged” by a higher being. Perhaps Habidah doesn’t understand because she is not from Earth. She is from Caldera, a member plane of the Unity, one of countless planes in the multiverse.

Habidah is working for the amalgamates, who emerged from the AI wars as the most powerful minds in the multiverse (or so they believe). They assured their supremacy by developing “neutered” AIs who could not develop beyond a fixed level. Finding humans to be more useful than other sentients, the amalgamates maintain an empire of human civilizations from many universes. From their residences in core worlds and planarships, the amalgamates protect the Unity from threats, including rival transplanar empires, rogue AIs, invasive species, and nonhuman xenophobes.

Habidah is a researcher who leads a team that is studying how humans on Earth are coping with the plague. The research is important because the Unity is suffering its own plague, one that only appears to infect the demiorganics that make it possible to receive datastreams from machine entities. It also only affects transplaner civilizations — those that have the ability to move across the multiverse. Having defeated disease, the Unity no longer knows how to address it. By studying survival strategies adopted by more primitive societies, the Unity hopes to preserve its existence.

Niccolucio’s crisis of faith comes as he buries his Brothers before abandoning the Monastery and returning to his home in Florence, which for political reasons is even more disheartening than the monastery. Niccolucio and Habidah meet before Niccolucio goes to Florence and meet again after he leaves. At some point, they both discover that the amalgamates’ notion of protecting the empire will require the subjugation of a good many human planets.

The novel takes an unexpected turn when about three-quarters of the story has been told. At that point, the stories of Niccolucio and Habidah are joined as Niccolucio’s beliefs about the nature of the universe evolve to something that is beyond his former religious understanding, while Habidah’s beliefs evolve beyond a science-based understanding of how things work.

The story raises philosophical questions about existence while offering alternatives to traditional religious explanations for being. Just as Star Wars fans can choose to think of the Force in religious terms or not, Quietus imagines the existence of a purposeful and powerful intelligence, a “primal force of the cosmos” that might or might not be understood in a religious sense. It lives between the planes, a place that (to Habidah’s understanding) does not and cannot exist. To someone of Niccolucio’s religious background, that force might seem to be a divine power. To someone of Habidah’s scientific background, the force appears to be an entity of vast power that purports to protect the infinite diversity of the planes from undesirable interplanar contact. But if the power between the planes is the cure for the amalgamates’ ambition, the cure might be worse than the disease — at least from the standpoint of the inhabitants who populate the countless worlds that comprise the Unity.

Quietus touches on fundamental issues of individuality and free will. It asks whether death is a meaningful concept if each of us exists in infinite universes, an infinite number of whom will not die when we die, an infinite number of whom have not yet been born. It asks whether it is possible to believe in an unseen, all-powerful being without worshiping it. In some sense, Quietus asks the reader whether it is necessary to rethink the history of philosophy in light of the multiverse theory. Those are the kinds of questions that make science fiction not just fun, but meaningful.

I admire the sophistication and complexity of thought that underlies Quietus, as well as the depth of the characters. I love the message it delivers — the ultimate purpose of a civilization is not to gain power over other civilizations — yet the novel recognizes that the message is one that the powerful do not willingly accept.

On a more superficial level, I enjoyed the story. A good story is an essential component of fiction, and Quietus tells a story that makes humans from Earth and humans from elsewhere both allies and enemies, while asking whether machine intelligence will be the enemy that finally unites human intelligence or the friend that helps humans reach their full potential. Quietus is ultimately a story about manufacturing miracles — not the miracles made by supernatural powers, but the miracles we must devise for ourselves if we are to survive as a species.

RECOMMENDED

Although I didn't finish the book, I gave it a high rating, which is unusual for me. Here's why:

The book is about a multiverse, part of which is ruled by supposedly benevolent AIs. However, a threat from outside this multiverse has the AIs send humans to research other worlds to see how calamaties have been handled (or not handled, as the case may be).

The researchers that we follow have been tasked to observe the Black Death years in fourteenth century Europe- one of the grimmest times in European history, and that's saying a lot.

What I liked about the book was the feel of the way the researchers were a part and yet apart from the time in which they had been placed. The author has a gift for description and for making a very detailed and immersive setting. The perspective of the observers, removed from the religious and cultural milieu of the time, gave me the feeling of observing history myself.

The POV of the 14th century monk whose abbey is hit by plague wasn't as interesting to me, unfortunately. I must not relate well to 14th century men who believe that privation of the flesh is the way to salvation. When the story shifted to this POV, I lost interest.

And the book is loooong. After about 100 pages into the book, storylines hadn't converged and I wasn't interested in several of them. I had an idea about what might be going on with the godlike AI manipulation in the background. I had one character I liked and several I didn't. Although there were some very admirable things about the book, I petered out and skimmed the end instead of reading it properly. And this is really not a book you can skim- it's dense and you'll miss something if you don't read carefully. Maybe at another time I'd have persevered, but right now my brain isn't functioning at peak capacity and I needed something that was less laborious.

This book manages to be many things at once: historical fiction but also sci-fi/ space opera; clever but not too cerebral; and examination of whether we should do something because we can do it; and an engaging space conflict story. Others have already summarised the plot so I won’t go into that. Suffice to say that I’ve never seen historical fiction and sci-fi mashed up quite like this although Kim Stanley Robinson probably comes closet. The two main characters – Nicoluccio, a fourteenth century monk, and Hebidah, an intergalactic anthropologist – are well depicted and engaging. I enjoyed the parallels of the two plague story lines too. This takes a little while to get going with the first half of the book really concentrating on Hebidah’s outsider perspective on the Black Death in all its historical horror, it then changes to become a fraught space conflict for the last half. Unusual and compulsive, I highly recommend this clever sci-fi.

Ahoy there me mateys! I received this sci-fi eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So here be me honest musings . . .

quietus (Tristan Palmgren)
Title: quietus
Author: Tristan Palmgren
Publisher: Angry Robot Books
Publication Date: Available Now!! (paperback/e-book)
ISBN: 978-0857667434
Source: NetGalley

This book appealed to me because it's about anthropologists from another plane doing research on the Black Death. Their plane is also suffering from a plague and they are hoping the research can save lives back home. Anthropologists are supposed to stay neutral but one member of the team, Habidah, breaks the rules and rescues a Florentine Carthusian monk named Niccolucio.

Now I abandoned this book at 48% but, to be fair, I loved the first half. I thought the story of Niccolucio was excellent and really enjoyed reading about the research of Habidah and her team. The imagery was well done and I really cared about both of the characters. The problem arose once the politics of the other plane got involved. The entire tone of the book switched, and I began to feel like I was reading a different book.

Because apparently the expedition had another goal besides the one that Habidah was given. I won't get into it here but basically it spoiled the premise for me and I didn't want to read about where the author wanted to take the story. I wanted a book more along the lines of the Doomsday book rather than a space opera. I did attempt to keep reading several times because I wanted to know what ends up happening to Niccolucio specifically. But alas I couldn't stay engaged once the plot switched. I do have other crew members that loved it though so it might work for ye.

So lastly . . .
Thank you Angry Robot Books!

Goodreads has this to say about the novel:

A transdimensional anthropologist can’t keep herself from interfering with Earth’s darkest period of history in this brilliant science fiction debut

Niccolucio, a young Florentine Carthusian monk, leads a devout life until the Black Death kills all of his brothers, leaving him alone and filled with doubt. Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe racked by plague, is overwhelmed by the suffering. Unable to maintain her observer neutrality, she saves Niccolucio from the brink of death.

Habidah discovers that neither her home's plague nor her assignment on Niccolucio's world are as she's been led to believe. Suddenly the pair are drawn into a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.

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Tristan Palmgren - Author

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quietus - Book

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Yer Ports for Plunder List

It is the time when the Black Death swept across Europe, and the population, decimated by its effects and unable to understand the science of how it spread, thought the world was coming to an end.
Into this tumultuous time comes Habidah and her team of scientists, closely observing the population in an effort to find a solution to the onierophage, a similar plague affecting the population of her own world made up of a vast network of political alliances of ruling races.
Although I was aware from the start that Habidah was someone not native to Niccolucio's world, I experienced all the sights, filth and smells of this historic world through her. Niccolucio's viewpoint only cemented this effect, leaving me with the impression that were the author to write only historical novels I would be an avid fan. But that Palmgren managed to effortlessly shift from fantastical technology and a sense of space opera to an authentic sense of time of the fourteenth century Plague and then bring them together, really immersed me in the story.
Out of all the people Tristan Palmgren could have chosen from the Middle Ages to be yanked to safety by someone from a mind-blowing technologically advanced race, Niccolucio, is just perfect. His self-doubt and humility, but at the same time open-mindedness and unbiased approach to the world, makes him a wonderful foil for Habidah's constant moral questioning.
The plot is complex, with no end of scheming and wondering where alliances truly lie between the servants of the ruling alliances and the vast alliances themselves. This was certainly the part of the book where you had to pay attention because of the complexity of the associations and interactions.
Throughout it all are the constants of Habidah and Niccolucio in their developing and very special relationship in the face of Habidah wondering who she can trust.
Palmgren demonstrates remarkable poise for a debut novelist with regards to the depth of world building and character development in a cleverly conceived plot, making him a writer to watch in the future.

Good first contact stories are as much about philosophical interplay as they are about cultural differences. “You have a unique vision”, interdimensional traveler Habidah tells 14th century monk Niccoluccio, about halfway through Tristan Palmgren’s debut novel, Quietus. She continues, “All of the Abrahamic religions on this world do. Few in the Unity see the body and the mind as separate in the way you do.” Habidah is from the Unity, the largest known planar empire in the multiverse, one that presumably functions under a more holistic philosophy than the medieval Italian culture she encounters on Niccoluccio’s plane of existence. The intersection of Niccoluccio’s dualism and Habidah’s holism tests what they understand (or misunderstand) about each other’s motives and has consequences for both their worlds.
Like the best genre fiction, Quietus has a premise and plot that juggles some familiar elements with fresh ideas: Habidah is a Unity anthropologist studying the effects of the Black Death on European civilization. The Unity is suffering from its own devastating plague, called the onierophage, the only disease its god-like overseers, the amalgamates, have been unable to produce a cure for. Habidah and her team are assigned to report on how medieval culture responds to, and possibly recovers from, a pestilence it cannot cure or contain. When she first encounters Niccoluccio he is wandering the wilderness after all watching all his brothers and their charges die from the plague; he is near-starving and being hunted by a pack of hungry wolves. Her mission dictates that she not interfere with the natural progression of events on his world, but she has reached a point where she can no longer stand to see everyone she encounters suffer horribly and die. She decides to cross that red line just once, and so rescues him from certain death and nurses him back to health. She is surprised, and a little confused, at what little chiding she receives from the amalgamates for her transgression, and how readily they agree to let her use Niccoluccio to “spy” on his hometown of Florence for them. Before long, Habidah comes to understand why: the amalgamates’ interest in this plane goes well beyond the academic, in ways that Habidah and her associates would never be comfortable with.
On the surface, the premise of Quietus is austere in its design, its early plot mechanics hinging on the ethical quandry of non-interference. The Unity can easily cure the Black Death, so don’t they have an obligation to intervene? It is a question that science fiction has asked and answered many times, and Habidah’s answer – to intervene on behalf of one person and give that person a role to play in the grand scheme – is an impulsive response, though she believes she can justify its value. The repercussions come not because her choice was an unethical one, but because she was asking the wrong question to begin with. As Niccoluccio digs his heels into the political realities of a society faced with sudden, rapid decline, Habidah continues her work, largely unaware (or at least unwilling to recognize) that she had been facing the same problems all along. Not being political animals by nature, the question neither of them wanted to entertain was: What obligations do structures of power in a society have to its body politic, and vice versa? And who gets to decide the answer?
Palmgren is the kind of writer that knows how to bait and reward attentive readers. There are points in the first half of the novel when characters behave in ways that seem to contradict their established motives, or when time overlaps from one chapter to the next, but events don’t seem to match up. It’s a bit disorienting because otherwise the story seems to develop in a rather straightforward manner. It all pays off and shows its receipts – and not in the ways you expect. Palmgren isn’t the kind of storyteller who resorts to disingenuous trickery to pull the rug out from under you (as in, “Ha! He was a ghost the whole time!”). Surprises come because the author assumes his readers are as smart as he is and are willing to chase that rabbit down the hole with him.
Quietus is contemplative without being ponderous or overly cerebral. It is intelligent and engaging from the start, carefully conceived as both an intimate character study and a grandly epic adventure. Like its wonderful cover (yes, go ahead and judge it by), it seems to emerge from the mist, bathed in warm light, while its scale is terrifyingly sublime.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

With the assistance of a Carthusian monk, anthropologists from distant planes of the multiverse study the spread of the Black Death on Earth to better understand the plague that is ravaging their home civilization.

Ah yes, the ol’ Carthusian monk meets transdimensional anthropologist story that we’ve all read a thousand times before. But seriously, this is a bold swing from a fresh new voice in speculative fiction. Author Tristan Palmgren deserves major points for creativity, even though this historical fiction/science fiction mashup wasn’t totally my cup of tea.

I very much enjoyed the characterization of the monk Niccoluccio Caracciola, who, aside from having a great name, was my favorite character to follow. He functions as a reader proxy, who experiences the infiltration of the anthropologists and gets swept up into a massive conspiracy while tackling his own internal conflict that evolves over the course of the novel. Niccoluccio’s perspective grounds the narrative in some semblance of reality before the story careens away into a somewhat convoluted direction.

Quietus functions most effectively when it’s focused on its historical fiction beats and stumbles as it delves deeper into inaccessible science fiction elements. This, combined with slow pacing, and a story that feels 150 pages too long, leads to a lower rating than I wanted to give. Author Palmgren has a knack for original storytelling, but the blending of two disparate genres didn’t quite work for me.

Thank you for sharing this book with me. The premise is a future anthropology team observing the spread of Black Death in Europe to glean ideas for handling a pandemic occurring across their interstellar civilisation. During the first half the history research is detailed, much of it around a monastery and the city of Florence, while the second half of the book describes political and moral questions in both the civilisations. The two main characters, an anthropologist and a monk, are both compelling and the writing is fine. I found the pacing slow and more historical detail than I expected, but others may enjoy.

Quietus by Tristan Palmgren
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

This book is going to be a difficult one to review because it breaks a lot of normal conventions. The first half of the novel reads like a good outsider/anthropological exploration of our Black Plague from the PoV of a visitor from an alternate universe (the many-concurrent-universes brane). The second half reads like an outright space-opera full of huge ships and a truly immense population across space and branes and a plague that threatens to wipe them all out.

Similarities? Of course. Direct-line similarities, even, and it gets even more interesting when we have nearly godlike extradimensional civilizations involved in long conflicts with each other and with their own followers. Adding a monk from the middle ages asking important questions about God and why he lets bad things happen becomes another direct mirror to the subjects in these huge extradimensional empires and god-like beings involved in plague warfare.

The structure of this novel is pretty top-notch. I can ruminate about it for a long time and still find some really great questions and explorations. I've barely scratched the surface here.

On the other side of the coin, the factor of how much fun the novel is, how easy it is to read, boils down to how much you like heavy doses of historical fiction. I saw HUGE comparisons to be made between the front half of this novel and Connie Willis's Doomsday Book. Her's was time traveling historians getting stuck in the Black Plague and Tristan's was the moral and ethical quandaries of a multiverse-hopping anthropologist. I enjoyed it well enough and it went in quite interesting directions when it came to messing with indigenous cultures (in a very Prime Directive way) and the question of unintended consequences in timeline-development.

The second half of the novel was spaceships and AI companions and godlike beings messing with all us puny mortals in a very high-class SF full of action, more ethical quandaries, the fate of two vast empires.

My initial reaction as I was reading it was mixed. I liked it well enough but I wanted something juicier and more exploratory. It just felt like a number of other novels I've loved, also including KSR's Years of Rice and Salt and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim.

I did eventually get it. It just took a while to really flow into the historical fiction slant because, with that cover, I really expected the later explosion of big SF. :) No worries. It's there.

This was something rather interesting. I really enjoy the chances it takes. :)