SF/F Review - A History of What Comes Next

A History of What Comes Next, by Sylvain Neuvel

Synopsis: As WW2 winds down, a mother and daughter that are secret alien infiltrators are covertly kick-starting humanity’s space age so they’ll be ready when a conquering alien fleet arrives in the future. Meanwhile, a hidden stalker is trying to find them before they succeed.

Book Review: A pretty basic story, but well executed. The action is of the spy-thriller variety, dealing with how to accomplish big things without being discovered as aliens, and while hiding/fleeing from a distant Terminator-style pursuer. It was a lot of fun to read on a fundamental level, it kept me turning the pages.

The Historic Fiction angle lent it some great flavor. It feels authentic and well-researched, and you keep wanting to go google the persons and events of the story, to see how they compare with what actually happened. Again, that’s good fun! I may have a soft spot for this kinda stuff as a fellow historic-fiction writer, but I think this sort of thing will intrigue anyone when it’s well written, and What Comes Next certainly is!

The narrative style is strongly on the experimental side. It starts out fairly standard, but soon morphs into a stream-of-consciousness style, and stays that way for the rest of the novel. Rather than the reader being told what is happening, we are mostly given access to the inner thoughts of our protagonist as they are doing things. It is very much like an old radio drama, where instead of reading “Badguy swung the pipe at heroine. Heroine ducked, then lashed out with a kick to his kidney.” we hear instead “Oh shit, he’s swinging the pipe at my head! Whew, ducked just in time. Now if I’m fast… there! Kicked him right in the kidney! Hah, he’s doubled over now!”

In addition, the dialog stops appearing in normal format and turns into back-and-forth without speech-tags (so you infer the speaker by context.) Rather than “ ‘Who is that?’ asked Mother. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, to which Mother harrumphed.” We get
"-Who is that?
-I don’t know.
-Harrumph.”

I like this sort of structure play, so this worked well for me. Also, I listened to well over half of the novel. Since the structure play would absolutely decimate any attempts to do this as a standard audio book, it was instead presented as an audio drama, with different voice actors for the different characters. This made figuring out who was talking trivially easy, and honestly very much fit the written style. I think this book is significantly better as an audio book, and should be read that way if possible.

All that being said… it’s a standard spy thriller with cool flair. I’ll remember the stylistic elements for a while, but the story and characters are already fading from memory, and I doubt I’ll remember this novel a year from now. I would put this at the very top of my light/fun reading pile. But I try to hold “Recommended” opinions for things that I legitimately want to encourage & cajole people to go out of their way to read. I can’t really do that for What Comes Next, it doesn’t go extra on deeper thematic or emotional levels. So, not because it’s bad but just due to default - not recommended.

Book Club Review: I was out on ill-advised adventures when the book club met, so I dunno how discussion went. I must abstain again. Sorry.

Weird Stuff That Hints At The State of Publishing: There’s a couple really weird things about this novel, that caused me to notice my confusion.

The first is that a Chinese character is given several chapters in the novel in order to just be present in the novel. He doesn’t interact with our protagonists, or anyone else in the narrative. He doesn’t effect the action in any way. He has no character arc. He reveals nothing new to the reader. He just is there, and is Chinese. The book would have been unchanged without his presence, aside from having a smaller word-count.

The second is that the mother-protagonist starts getting worried about global warming, and looks into that. This is in the mid-40s to late-50s. It is completely unrelated to the primary action of escaping a Stalker, and turbo-boosting human rocketry tech so they can get space-born before Incoming Alien Doom. Much like the Chinese character, it does nothing except inflate word-count, and is basically forgotten about whenever the actual narrative is happening.

WTF? In a poorly-executed fanfic I would understand these are just elements of sloppy writing. But this is an otherwise well-written work that demonstrates playful deftness using esoteric structure. Doing that, while keeping the reader engaged and crafting solid prose takes skill and discipline. I would not expect such beginner mistakes.

In reading the Afterwards, I noticed another such inconsistency that crystalized an explanation. While talking about researching the time period in question, Neuvel apologizes for sexism existing. Specifically he calls out the challenges of writing women characters in a time when women couldn’t get bank accounts without a male sponsor, and how much this limited his heroines’ actions.

Our heroines are super-intelligent and super-strong aliens hiding in human bodies. They regularly get in situations that require them to murder a fair handful of humans with their bare hands in order to keep their alien nature secret from humanity, which then requires that they abandon the area, take on new identities, and continue in a new place—often a different country. They never have any problems getting money, and the fact that bank accounts aren’t a great tool has much more to do with their need to be nimble and flee a country at the drop of a hat than due to any sort of sexual discrimination.

So what the heck, why is that apology in there?

I strongly suspect it was a condition for publication by a major publisher (Tor). Sylvain is a white male, and he’s lucky he was allowed to write from a female perspective at all. To prove himself One Of The Good Ones he had to acknowledge that oppression. The other two anomalies could be extensions of this same Danegeld. All the characters in the novel are white (the aliens are all white-passing) so the Chinese POV character was required for some balance, even if he never did anything at all. And the global warming subplot was inserted so we don’t forget what the real threat is, even with an alien fleet coming.

I could be very, very wrong, of course. Neuvel would be a fool to ever acknowledge any of this, so I’m not even risking making a falsifiable prediction here. But it’s my head-canon now, and I’m sorry that this is the environment writers live in today. “That’s just what you have to do in this industry” has always been an awful thing to swallow.

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