Lewis Powell

The main master, and instructor of the other seven, Wang Ch’ung Yang, commences his journey to enlightenment because he had a vision at/of a nearby mountain. In order to cultivate himself he deceives his spouse and family and pretends to be ill so that he can have solitude. He then goes out in search of students (abandoning his family), and encounters a couple, Ma Yü and Sun Yüan-Chen, who are worthy of being his disciples. But only if they sign over all their wealth and family property to him.

It is one thing to have a spiritual leader say “you need to divest yourself of material possessions to pursue this course”; it is another thing to have them say “actually you need to formally sign all your wealth and property over to me, so I can use it to build a spiritual retreat/school, and to require them to formally and legally arrange the transfer rather than, as they initially offer, letting him use the funds without transferring them.

The couple then creates an elaborate lie to get the transfer done with the approval of the couple’s other relatives, claiming the transfer is temporary and related to the husband’s ill health. Immediately upon getting the transfer done, the Master then creates some charitable activity to create the impression that he is just a custodian of the couple’s wealth, and then the couple decide that instead of husband and wife, they will be brother and sister in the Tao.

If you’ve watched literally any documentaries about cults and how they operate, it is impossible not to parse virtually every part of this as red flags!

I picked this up after reading Rosewater, and I think I’m in a position to say that I generally expect I will like Tade Thompson’s writing, but that Rosewater was more my thing than Far From the Light of Heaven wound up being. 

The characters got slightly shorter shrift here, and there was less conveyance of the world-building than I would have liked (I suspect that the world is thoroughly built, from Thompson’s end, I just wanted to have better breadcrumbs of, say, what the lambers were, and the intergalactic politics, etc.). The story is simultaneously trying to be a locked room mystery on this space ship, and paint the world of intergalactic politics where there are wormhole bridges and a couple of nascent colonies, and it can't serve both masters at the same time.

Thompson apparently really likes to bounce around perspectives when writing (in Rosewater it was jumping back and forth in time, here it is switching who we are focused on) and I think it would serve the story well to ratchet that tendency back a bit. I noted in my review of The Loop that I don’t particularly value gore; it is good that I am not bothered by it, though, as Thompson does not shy away from gore in his writing.

I liked the character Shell, I liked the character Fin. I liked Servo from what we met of him, but would have appreciated more depth. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joké, who was written a bit too much as a sort of manic pixie dream girl (imo).

ebooks at least are low effort to checkout, and easy to return. But it is exciting for me to be able to mark books as “looked promising, try again later” and also to have the whole array of which books I have checked out browsable via tags. 

The biggest downsides are that I can’t link my university library to it, as far as I can tell, and that audiobooks and magazines don’t lend to my kobo for what I assume are very silly rights related reasons. I can borrow them to my phone though, and there is no real situation where I want to audiobook and my kobo would be workable but the phone wouldn’t. The magazines is a drag though!