Review: Unsong

What a positively bizarre book, with emphasis on the 'positive'. I'd try to out-weird the author's blurb, but frankly nothing I say can summarize it better:

Aaron Smith-Teller works in a kabbalistic sweatshop in Silicon Valley, where he and hundreds of other minimum-wage workers try to brute-force the Holy Names of God. All around him, vast forces have been moving their pieces into place for the final confrontation. An overworked archangel tries to debug the laws of physics. Henry Kissinger transforms the ancient conflict between Heaven and Hell into a US-Soviet proxy war. A Mexican hedge wizard with no actual magic wreaks havoc using the dark art of placebomancy. The Messiah reads a book by Peter Singer and starts wondering exactly what it would mean to do as much good as possible... Aaron doesn't care about any of this. He and his not-quite-girlfriend Ana are engaged in something far more important – griping about magical intellectual property law. But when a chance discovery brings them into conflict with mysterious international magic-intellectual-property watchdog UNSONG, they find themselves caught in a web of plots, crusades, and prophecies leading inexorably to the end of the world.

The story is fairly split between modern day events, and snippets of historic events taking place since discovering that the broader universe isn't real; it was a lot of fun to see (don't read the rest of this sentence if you want to avoid minor spoilers) Nixon frustrated with the deletion of Tuesdays and spontaneous mastery of the piano, Satan in the UN, Niel Armstrong ascending to heaven, and tricking the universe into letting you get away with stuff. All the indidivual historical threads do tie together nicely at the end of the book/serial. Uriel is easily the best character; the history of the ten commandements, his inability to interact with people or other archangels, the summit at Madrid, and the general concept of the universe being analagous to a computer he's desperately trying to bugfix was super entertaining. Finally, the overall concept of magical copyright on the names of God is absolutely bizarre and was fun to explore.

I have two minor sore points. The first is that the broadcast section was personally hard to read; the website gives ample warning, so if you're antsy about torture, then you'll be well warned (and won't miss much if you skip it). The second is that a lot of the Kabbalah sections went right over my head (or rather, my eyes glazed over and the words bounced off them). I may or may not have skipped a chunk or two, although I think I got lucky with the plot-relevant ones (although the author is also good about re-iterating important points when they become relevant).

Overall, Unsong is strange and wonderful; if you're on the fence, you can read it on the author's website!