Witch Hat Atelier 9

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 9

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2022 

 

 

It's been a minute since I've read any Witch Hat Atelier. In volume 8, Master Qifrey agreed that he and his students would help run a booth at the upcoming Silver Eve festival with the wandmaker and his grandson Tartah. Coco and Tartah are clearly developing feelings for each other, but neither seems to know how to say so out loud yet. Coco and Tartah are also both harboring doubts about some of the witch laws against magical healing, and they help Custas (the son of a traveling performer who was injured in a landslide) by making him a new mobility aid he can use instead of a walking chair - a cloak that allows him to levitate.
 
At the start of this volume, one of the Knights Moralis, the special order of witches who enforce their laws about magic (mostly by erasing the memory of anyone who breaks them), learns that Custas has returned his magical walking chair to the hospital, not because he recovered, but because he got other help and no longer needs it. This is unusual, and the knight finds it suspicious. I don't think Coco or Tartah broke any rules, but it's still not great that the witch police might suspect them.
 
Qifrey and the girls are taking a horse and wagon to the festival so they can perform acts of service along the way, something that's required of full-fledged witches as a kind of noblesse oblige. In this case, they're fixing worn out magic fenceposts that help keep wild animals from venturing into settled places. When they get to the festival, they'll be selling magical devices at their booth.
 
Tetia plans to sell walking sticks that let you make a tent anywhere by pulling up the surface of the ground like it's a tarp. Riceh made paired bracelets that will shine a light between them when you push a button, which causes two half-sigils inside the bracelet to line up and activate. She also made six rings for everyone in the atelier plus Tartah; I suspect will see this emergency locator beacon get some use in a future volume. Coco made more levitating cloaks, like the one she gave to Tartah - not enough to sell, but a few so festival goers can essentially put one on to experience the power of magical flight as a carnival ride. Surprisingly, Agott hasn't made a contraption, because she wants to perform a spell in the parade, which Qifrey and Olruggio seem reluctant to allow her to do.
  
When they arrive at the festival, the kids go explore for a bit before helping set up, and we get an interlude to check on a couple other things. Our first stop is inside the royal palace, which has been enchanted so that no magic will work inside, and no magic devices can even enter. The local kingdom is on a peninsula, and has five member states. Several of the state-leaders are hassling the new witch-ambassador to request that, in addition to helping with natural disaster, the witches start helping to protect people from bandit attacks. (In fact, we saw Custas and his dad get attacked by bandits at the very end of the last volume!) The king shows up and reaffirms his commitment to the witches' independence, but it seems clear that relations between the general public and the powerful, secretive, self-governing magicians in their midst are a bit tense.
 
The old witch-ambassador is very surprised to learn he's been replaced, and the Knights Moralis arrest him for accepting bribes to do personal favors for rich patrons that go beyond the scope of what the king and new ambassador just laid out.
 
Then, separately, we see one of the knights rush off to arrest someone for selling an illegal magical device, in this case, glasses that can see through clothing. He makes excuses, but she's having none of it, and arrests him. The case causes her to think back to when she was an apprentice and her teacher lent her to a rich patron who tried to abuse her. She got in trouble with her teacher when she complained. He even tried to get the Knights Moralis to erase her memory so she'd stop protesting. But the knight who handled the case believed her and stood up for her, which I suppose is why she became a knight herself.
 
It's interesting to me that twice in this volume, we've seen the Knights Moralis portrayed fairly positively. Up until now, their inflexible moral code and incorruptible resistance to any requests for mercy have basically made them, if not exactly antagonists, then at least a looming threat to Coco, but here we see some value in those traits. Because Coco has done what no one is supposed to do - become a witch by learning the secret of magic, which is that it's not innate in the caster, it's a skill that anyone can learn to use by drawing sigils. Coco also accidentally turned her mother to stone by copying a sigil from a book of forbidden magic, and she wants to learn how to undo the process. If they knew all that, the knights would probably erase Coco's memory all the way back to before she learned the secret, and also leave her mother as stone forever. But here, we see them doing necessary self-policing of witch misconduct.
 
Tartah and Coco walk around the festival together. Coco is sad because she remembers being like so many of the non-witch kids who are attending. She loved magic and wished she could become a witch. She's not allowed to tell anyone the truth, but she can't bear lying to them either, or seeing their dreams crushed. Tartah really wants to hold hands with Coco, but instead gives her the custom wand-pen he designed for her, with a grip like the chalk stone Coco used to use to mark fabric when she worked in her mom's tailor shop, before she learned magic. Tartah doesn't know about that, but he saw how Coco wrote with her old wands, and inferred the right shape for her.
 
And because you just know that things can't remain calm all the way to the end of the volume, Custas shocks Coco and Tartah when he shows up at the festival. He's walking now, thanks to some new magical wooden leg braces, given to him after the bandit attack by a witch who uses forbidden magic, and he now seems unhinged and angry with Coco and Tartah for not healing him. The leg braces can like, grow terrifying root-tentacles, which he uses to capture his former friends, and up close, his legs now look withered and dying, which I guess is a consequence of the spell. I kind of think his wild-eyed derangement is because of the spell too, but Coco and Tartah feel guilty regardless, because they both secretly want to break witch law to heal people, although they haven't done so yet. The witch who gave Tartah the braces shows up too, so the next volume is going to be exciting! 

Lost Letters

 
Lost Letters

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Magnetic Press

2024 

 

 

 I feel quite torn about Lost Letters, because I really liked almost the entire book ... and really didn't like way it ended. Lost Letters is a French graphic novel that feels like it was inspired by manga and anime, and while this comparison gets tossed around a lot lately, I think that creator Jim Bishop has created something that's so influenced by Studio Ghibli that you could pretty easily imagine them adapting it for the screen. The book is marketed as being for a YA audience, and that's probably generally fine, but the ending is so dark, so sad, and because it's the ending and nothing comes after it, so un-processed, that I wouldn't really feel comfortable handing it to a teen unless I really trusted them to seek out someone to talk to afterward if they needed it.
 

Lost Letters takes place on a picturesque island with a Mediterranean climate and a population that is predominantly talking fish-people, with only a few humans around. From the start, we're following Iode (short for Iodine), a boy of 11 or 12 who lives alone with his pet pelican, and who's waiting for a letter from his mother. Iode's mother is a pilot, she and her husband are no longer together, and Iode is convinced that she's looking for a new island for the two of them to go live on, and that when she finds it, she'll send him a letter telling him to come move back in with her. In fact, he's really, super convinced that she already sent this letter, and that the only reason he hasn't received it yet is because it's gotten lost in the mail.
 
So let me say that it's obvious from the outset that this is going to be a sad book. No matter how lighthearted its adventures might appear, the audience knows, we know, that whatever the situation with Iode's mother is, it's definitely not what he thinks it is, and it's definitely not that the letter he's hoping for is just stuck somewhere else in the island's mail system, simply waiting for him to find it. And we may suspect that, on some level, Iode knows this too, and he's in denial. So we know that parts of this book are going to be sad, especially when Iode learns and finally confronts the truth about his mom, but we may also hope that he'll maybe make a new friend or two, or maybe reconcile with his father, in a way that lets him reach a point of acceptance. And things sort of go like you'd expect, right up until they suddenly don't.
 

A sample of Jim Bishop's art.
From the left: Sista, the goldfish cop, and Iode.

 

 
Iode takes the family car and drives into town on another part of the island, so he can go to the post office. On the way, he meets Sista, an older teen girl who's hitchhiking to get to town. Sista is involved in a bunch of hijinks, and basically all the action and excitement in the book emerges from her plotline. Sista is a courier for the mob, headed into town to deliver a mysterious briefcase. The mob boss is an octopus. Sista is also an undercover agent for the royal guard, who's infiltrating the mob by working her way up through the ranks as an errand girl. The royal guard is Sista's found family, filling a void in her life since she was abandoned as a child. Her handler's codename is Mom.
 
Iode assumes Sista will help him at the post office, which already has an hours-long line when they reach town. She immediately sneaks off to continue her covert operation. Iode, apparently unable to conceive of any other reason she wouldn't hang out with him, jumps to the conclusion that she was kidnapped, and calls the police. 
 
An incompetent goldfish cop (he has a humanoid robot body, but his head is just a goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, wearing a police cap) briefly takes on the case, but he's much too busy chasing glory to bother with kid stuff. Unfortunately, he does mention all this to a corrupt fish cop, who immediately tells the mafia that their secret courier is attracting too much attention, and just like that, Sista is burned, both from the mob and from the royal guards. 
 
There's a lot of moving parts between cause and effect here - including that the mob wouldn't have wanted Sista to hitchhike, or take the cablecar across town, she was supposed to walk the whole way - but to be clear, Iode made a silly, childish assumption and then called the police about it, which is a roll of the dice every time, and that resulted in Sista getting fired. In fact, without some timely help from Iode at the aquarium, that phone call likely would've led to Sista being shot, or drowned. Neither Iode nor Sista seems to realize the connection, and it's unclear to me how much responsibility, if any, Bishop assigns to the phone call, but there it is.
  
Anyway, there's a shoot-out, an aquarium collapse, a last minute rescue. Iode and Sista do start to become friends, and the next day, she joins him at the post office, and rides with him when he borrows a seaplane to chase down a mail flight, which circuitously leads to a final confrontation with the mob. It's all very exciting, even fun. Bishop's art is excellent, just the right blend of realistic and cartoony. His poses are dynamic, his faces expressive. You practically feel like you're already watching animation when you read it.
 
When none of Iode's attempts to find the letter go anywhere, Sista goes with him to see his estranged father, who tells her the truth his son won't accept. Iode's mom left five years earlier, because she had terminal cancer and wanted to enjoy one last flight before she died. She wrote a letter to explain all this before she left, and Iode received the letter. Sista takes Iode back to the beach house, where she finds the letter, right next to the mailbox, where he read it then refused to accept it and blocked it out. Sista gets Iode to face the truth, and he instantly ages five years, suddenly appearing 16 or 17. It's a powerful visual metaphor of how he was stuck, and how he's now achieved catharsis. It's sad, but acceptance is better, right?
 
And then there's the epilogue. It's one year later. The incompetent goldfish cop is now a janitor, and actually good at it. Iode is becoming a young man. He looks awkward, but time is passing for him again. And what about Sista? We see her commit suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning. Then Iode receives her suicide note as a letter. She explains that she's never recovered from the loss of her found family in the royal guard, and sees no future for herself without that job. 
 
And that's that, that's the end. We explicitly see the other characters able to accept things and move on. But Sista does not, and the way Bishop chooses to present it sees especially cruel. Her death is presented as a thing that happens to Iode, as one last chapter in what remains fundamentally his story. And as I said earlier, there's no more context, no more explanation. It's shocking, and then it's over. Why did her friendship save him, but his friendship didn't save her? I know that can happen in life, but this is fiction. Bishop didn't have to write it this way; he chose to. And his decision really soured me on a book that I otherwise really enjoyed up to that point, and made it hard for me to recommend despite how much there is to like in it.

The Shadow of the Torturer

 

The Shadow of the Torturer

by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1980, reprinted 1994 

 

 

The Shadow of the Torturer is the first book of a quartet, known as The Book of the New Sun, which is considered to be Gene Wolfe's masterpiece. The series is a science fantasy story, set so far in the future that the sun is dying, or at least aging to become less and less hospitable to human life. One time marker, offered late in this book, put these events at least 30 thousand years in our future. 
 
The series is narrated by Severian, who is writing it down at the end of his life. At the time of he's writing this, Sevarian has become the Autarch of the whole planet, now known as Urth. At the time depicted in the book, he's a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. An orphan, raised by and apprentice to the Torturer's Guild in the city of Nessus. If I understand correctly, his parents must've been among the Guild's victims. Nessus is an enormous city on a southern continent, built near the coast along a great river that runs north to south, and that's south of the world's greatest rainforest ... so possibly far-future Buenos Aires.
 
Severian claims to have a perfect memory, although there's some reason to not take him entirely at his word on that. At several points he fails to recognize someone he's seen before until after it's too late for the recognition to do him any good. Once, when he brings someone a food tray, and that person asks him what's for dinner, Severian can't answer, because he can't see the tray sitting behind her, and can't remember what's on it. He doesn't point this discrepancy out himself, but I noticed it, and it sort of made me wonder whether his memory has limits he's not aware of, or if it's something he somehow acquires later on in his life.
 
Wolfe does a few things that make this a challenging, but hopefully rewarding read. One is simply to not have any character point out certain features of the tale. No one says the old name of the city, for example. And based on its description, I'm pretty sure the tower the Torturer's Guild occupies is a space shuttle, but no one says anything to hint at that. Another is the pseudo-archaic diction of the book. Rather than invent a lot of neologisms, Wolfe draws on older words, or at least older word-stems, and invests them with new meaning. The diction of the narration is formal and strange too. Not stilted, exactly, but also not conversational. There are also a number of incidents in the text whose full meaning is unclear at the time, and whose true importance is revealed only later in the book. (And, I presume in some cases, later in the series.)
 
There are also a couple things Wolfe does to help the reader out. While some features of the future world pass unremarked, others are pointed out and explained. When young Severian sees a portrait that sounds like a photo of an astronaut on the moon, the curator cleaning the old image confirms this interpretation to the boy. When Severian is tricked the most badly, and fails to heed or understand a timely warning note, others help him to explicitly figure things out, though belatedly, after he's already barely survived. 
 
And in a couple situations with the most potential to be ambiguous or confusing, the most straightforward explanation is the correct one. At a lake where preserved dead bodies are sunk in mud, we meet an old man who's spent decades trying to find his wife's bog-mummy. When a mysterious, mud-covered young woman with amnesia swims to the surface later, we may not know how or why one of the dead bodies has come back to life, but yes, that is what's happened, and yes, it is that poor old guy's wife. When Severian sleeps next to a giant and dreams of even larger alien giants who now live in Urth's oceans, we may not know the mechanism by which this information is transferred, but yes, these aliens now do live here underwater; yes, that's why Severian saw a giant woman's face when he nearly drowned as a child; and yes, the giant Baldanders is a member of this same alien species, just young and small enough that he can still survive on land. These situations are strange, and there's not initially enough information to understand them fully, but Wolfe is careful not to mislead us, and to provide a few extra, supernatural guideposts.
 
I really do like Wolfe's writing. Here's Severian in chapter 1 espousing one of the central tenets of sociology, for example: "Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things far weaker than our words for them." There's not some profound aside like that on every page, probably not in every chapter, but amid the narrative, Wolfe manages to leave us with a few observations about life and human nature of the sort that book lovers occasionally get as tattoos.
 
Severian's story seems like a dark reflection of the classic hero's journey, where every step comes out wrong. (Or perhaps, each step is doubled, with one version inverted and the other more traditional?) Rather than reluctantly but voluntarily leaving home because he's called away by a problem in the broader world, Severian is thrown out of the Torturer's Guild in disgrace for showing someone mercy. His punishment is to become an executioner. Instead of meeting a wise mentor or a friendly sidekick, he's targeted, first by the suspicious-seeming impresario of a traveling show, and then by a femme fatale. He gets a special, named sword, but Terminus Est is a tool, an executioner's beheading blade.
 
Although he doesn't admit it, Sevarian is naive and repeatedly finds himself trapped in situations he doesn't understand, doesn't even recognize as being dangerous until it's almost too late to escape. Wolfe's high diction and learned prose hides a lost teenager, playing at adulthood too soon in a cruel society, without understanding the rules or the stakes, with his life hanging in the balance.
 

The Shadow of the Torturer contains a complete chapter in Severian's life, but it's clearly not a stand-alone novel. The book literally ends with him crossing through the gate out of the city of Nessus on his way to the hinterlands town where he's been assigned to work, and I know that the next book will start with him emerging from the gate into the world beyond the city. I'll be reading the next in the series later this year.

The Three Astronauts

 
 
The Three Astronauts

by Umberto Eco 

art by Eugenio Carmi

translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

1989

  

 Did you know that Umberto Eco write a children's book? Yes, the author of Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose and the famous essay describing the features of fascism, that Umberto Eco wrote a children's picture book near the end of the Cold War called The Three Astronauts, about representatives from America, Russia, and China traveling to Mars.
 
The three countries each want to be the first to put a person on Mars. Their three separate rockets launch around the same time, and land on Mars almost simultaneously. The astronauts discover a planet covered with canals, blue plants, and vibrant alien birds, perhaps inspired by Tweel from Stanley Weinbaum's classic story "A Martian Odyssey." Eco's depiction of the space programs is scifi of course, because we couldn't and didn't go to Mars in 1989, but it's fairly realistic. His depiction of Mars itself is more fanciful, the sort of thing that was common a half-century before, that fell out of favor as scifi authors sought to incorporate discoveries made by real-world space programs.
 
Eco's three astronauts, each speaking their own language, initially don't understand each other, and don't trust each other. Then night falls. The astronauts feel lonely, homesick, perhaps a bit frightened in this strange place. The American calls out "Mommy!" The Russian calls out "Mamouchka!" The Chinese astronaut calls out "Mama!" And even though they're still speaking different languages, they each recognize that the others are feeling the same way. (Thank you, proto-Indo-European language group, for retaining that bit of commonality!)
 
Next the astronauts see a Martian. It has green skin, six arms, a trunk and other strange features. At first the astronauts are all afraid. They think the Martian is a monster and want to destroy it. Then a baby bird falls from a tree and looks hurt. Each of the astronauts feels sad and sheds a tear. The Martian exhales blue smoke and goes to pick up the baby bird. The astronauts recognize the smoke as akin to a tear, and they see that the Martian cares about the bird. On the basis of this beginning of mutual understanding, they're able to become friends.
 
The art in The Three Astronauts is a mix of collage and watercolor. Eugenio Carmi depicts the Earth using a map of the globe, but Mars is a blue-grey watercolor circle. Each astronaut is depicted as a scrap of paper. The Chinese astronaut is a large character, and looks to me like a logo. The Russian is a scrap of a newsletter printed on red paper. The American is a Chiclets wrapper, which amuses me. The alien bird is an engraving, watercolored in pinks and purples. The Martian is assembled from several engravings. I suspect the six-armed torso came from an illustration of the sort of people Greek philosophers imagined living in other parts of the world, which is a nice touch if so.
 
I wish peace really were as simple as Eco makes it seem here, although I think his point that we need to recognize each other as sharing common emotions and experiences is sound. And I think it helps that, by caring for the injured bird, each is able to demonstrate their benign intent. While misunderstandings can happen, even among people who speak the same language, if you're approaching each other in a spirit of equality and cooperation, you're already halfway there. So much conflict comes from one person, or one group, trying to dominate another. The conflict is inherent in the approach; no amount of understanding will make it go away. What's required is for the aggressor to renounce their attempts at domination, and to seek peace through equality instead.

Too Like the Lightning

 
 
Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer 

Tor

2016 

 

 

Too Like the Lightning is the first book of a planned duology that later expanded into a quartet. There are a few series I've restarted this year, where I read the first book some time ago, and liked it, but never went further. I'd felt burned by the sequel to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, I think, and had decided to only enjoy first books as stand-alones for awhile. Anyway, several of the series I'm reading right now are ones where I'm rereading the first book, and then continuing on ahead. So it's possible that I'll eventually get in a similar mood again, and come back and decide to finish Ada Palmer's series, perhaps because curiosity someday gets the better of me, but I really didn't enjoy this first book, so I kind of doubt it.
 

Too Like the Lightning is set in the 25th century, in the 2450s, as far from our time as we are from the Early Modern era, and there are a few conceits at work here. First is that we're being told the story of a moment of revolutionary change, when the system of world governance that is already so different from our own is about to collapse and be replaced by whatever follows it. It is written as a document for that further future, explaining how their world came to be. The second conceit is that the narrator, the extremely chatty and not terribly reliable Mycroft, is intentionally writing in an archaic style, as though this book were the product on one of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire.
 
One way that manifests is that Mycroft often includes asides of his imagined future audience members scolding him for the way he chooses to tell the story. Things like 'but Mycroft, thou'st were not present for this exchange, how can'st thou quote it so precisely.' This is a matter of personal preference, but I fucking hate that sort of thing; I really can't stand when columnists and bloggers do it, and I find it equally annoying here. 
 
Another manifestation is that Mycroft refers to everyone as 'he' and 'she,' as Enlightenment authors might (and as Palmer and her actual readers are accustomed to), but which most of Mycroft's 25th century peers would find akin to referring to everyone by a slur. In almost all spoken dialogue, everyone refers to everyone else as 'they,' and it's unclear to me if people actually have gendered identities that they never speak about, or if Mycroft is taking additional liberties by assigning genders and not only by announcing them. He seems to expect his future readers to recognize these pronouns and to assume they correspond to specific anatomical features, so for every, I don't know, tenth character or so, he explains why he's calling someone by one pronoun when you the reader might expect another. I found this annoying too. It's an impressive effort at making the familiar strange, but I would genuinely hate for someone describing me to point out which of my features might tempt them to call me a man, but then insist that I'll count as a woman in their narrative because I work in a library.
 
I will credit Palmer that she clearly put a lot of thought into her worldbuilding, and that she's willing to throw us into the deep end and trust us to eventually take it all in, even as we're trying to keep up with the plot. Palmer's world is maybe a bit like what the Earth of A Half-Built Garden might become after enough time. Both Palmer and Emrys are grappling with imagining how people might adjust to omnipresent internet, to changes in gender and other norms of politeness, to the transformation of the nation-state system into some other kind of political power. 
 
In Palmer's world, religion is effectively banned, with three or more people allowed to discuss belief only if a 'sensayer' is present. Households have been replaced by 'bashes', which are larger and mostly voluntary rather than hereditary, as though the most common living arrangement was something like a commune or a sorority house. Nations still exist, but their importance is nearly erased by omnipresent public transit in the form of flying cars that can get you anywhere on Earth in, at most, a couple hours. People identify with their ethnicity about as much as they do with their jobs (limited to 20 hours a week, except for workaholic 'vokers') and their many and varied hobbies. The seven world governments are called Hives, and you can only join one after you become an adult. You can also choose to remain Hiveless, and if you do, choose what level of obedience and protection you're willing to offer the law. Blacklaw Hiveless are basically anarchists who are allowed even to murder each other, though it would still be illegal for one to kill a Hive member, and I think a Hive citizen would still be breaking their own laws, which they voluntarily consented to be governed by, if they killed a Blacklaw.
 
Mycroft, our narrator, is a Servicer, a prisoner who is a kind of public slave. Servicers aren't incarcerated, but they also aren't allowed to have money or own property, and spend all day doing public service proects in exchange for their meals. Palmer apparently got this idea from an Enlightenment-era thought experiment. We don't find out what Mycroft's crime was until halfway through the book, we barely even get any hints, but once we learn, he talks about it frequently and matter-of-factly, which I think is emblematic of the way Palmer uses Mycroft to dole out key information. The book is a mystery, and it doesn't get solved in this volume, so maybe in book 2? But by the end I'm half prepared to think that Mycroft did it, and simply won't let on until some other character proves it. It's one thing for a narrator not to spoil the ending of their own story, quite another for them to withhold things they and the other characters all knew before the story even started. Based on Mycroft's obsession with gender and sexuality, I initially thought he might've committed some sort of sexual crime, perhaps voyeurism. When we eventually find out, it's so much worse than I expected. One character who learns the truth reacts like Mycroft is Jack the Ripper, and certainly, we discover only after this point in the book, he is equivalently infamous, and not someone you'd expect to be trusted to be a Servicer. The way this sort of information is withheld makes understanding the worldbuilding harder, because Mycroft will keep something secret from us for hundreds of pages only for it to later turn out to be common knowledge. (Although the fact that THIS Mycroft is THE Mycroft Canner is a secret. The public assumes that that criminal was executed, so people who meet him just think he has the same, previously relatively common, first name.)
 
As I said, the story here, which purports to show how one world order collapses and is replaced with a new one, is also a mystery. Every year, the world's most important newspapers publish their Seven-Ten lists of the most important people on the planet. The first seven are usually the Hive leaders, and the next three are other influential citizens. A few days before the lists are published, someone steals the list from the pan-Asian Mitsubishi Hive's paper, and sneaks it into the a Humanist bash, specifically, the bash of the extended, chosen family who operate the flying car network. It's not initially clear why anyone would do this, except that the investigation into who and why threatens to make all kinds of secrets public.
 
Among the secrets are the exact nature of the relationships among the world's ruling elite. Power is highly concentrated, and many of the Hives' leaders have public relationships - the Humanist President's sister is married to the Mitsubishi Chairman, for example. The Mitubishi Chair's many adopted children each have jobs close to the other leaders. JEDD Mason, the adopted son of the Masonic Emperor, has a high-level job in every Hive, and like Paul Atreides, is revered as some kind of chosen one by each, which looks a lot like forbidden religion. As with Mycroft's crimes, once you eventually learn the truth about all this, it's a lot more uncomfortable than you probably expected. Also, Mycroft is some sort of confidant to each leader, which is already unusual for a Servicer and would be a global scandal if the public found out.
 
Mycroft has one more secret that's threatened too, although this one we learn on the first page. In a secret room on the estate of the bash that operates the flying cars, with the help of one bash-member but without the knowledge of the others, Mycroft is raising an orphaned boy whom he found on the estate as a toddler. The boy, Bridger, has the supernatural power to turn any representation of a thing into the real thing, like turning a drawing of food into real edible food, or bringing his plastic army men to life. Bridger is a sweet kid, who seems to understand the risk of turning into the kid from that one episode of  Twilight Zone who sends people to the cornfield, and tries to use his miraculous powers responsibly. Mycroft claims that by the end of the story, we'll see that it's Bridger, even more than the intimately entangled Hive leaders, who will be responsible for transforming the world. Although that doesn't happen until book 2 or later, so I guess I may never find out how or why everything changes.