The Sword and Laser discussion

I often find when I'm reading Sci Fi and Fantasy that sometimes the author falls back on relying on tech/magic in order to solve extremely unruly problems. The author sets up a villain/dilemma so impossibly large that you wonder how the protagonist is going to win and then in the last 10 pages everything is neatly tied up with a bow because magic/technology.

Recent books that I've found this in were the Wheel of Time book 1 and Dreamships.

As both a techy book and a magic book, I wonder to what extent everyone feels Alif the Unseen challenged this/succumbed to this and whether when it did have an instant problem solver what that signified?

I have to say I loved how Alif kept hoping for the fantastic creatures to solve all his problems and was certain things would be like the fantasy books he read only to learn that that's not life worked. It reminds me of discussions people of faith have had on relying on deities to solve their problems. (Silly e.g. Praying to pass your exam. xD) On the other hand, I felt the ending was tied up a bit too neatly in terms of how the villain was dealt with. This time using the all-power of technology! However, perhaps I'm looking at the ending too black and white. It was far from a 100% happy ending. Perhaps the author was trying to make the point that as a society we have gone from expecting omniscient beings to solve all our problems to expecting technology to solve all our problems. Does putting faith in technology make more sense, itself inherently being a problem solving tool? I'll stop babbling on now. xD

What does everyone else think? : )

I agree, it's not a tight fantasy world. There's sort of a gradient where if you have a more mysterious world then deus ex machina solutions become more likely. A less mysterious world with more clearly stated magic or technological systems can easily avoid deus ex machina resolutions. All genre books are on this gradient somewhere I think and this book swings more towards mysterious. Mystery is something you often want so it's a balance.

The ending was a bit neatly resolved, but yea it wasn't that neat.

Because of this I think Alif probably wouldn't survive being an epic series. Books this far on the mystery side of things don't survive into another book (or they shouldn't). As a one-off novel (maybe a trilogy) I think it's fine.

Anja wrote: "Perhaps the author was trying to make the point that as a society we have gone from expecting omniscient beings to solve all our problems to expecting technology to solve all our problems. Does putting faith in technology make more sense, itself inherently being a problem solving tool?"

Max Gladstone wrote an essay addressing this. In summary, he notes how magic in older fantasy fiction was treated with awe, wonder, or fear, while in newer fantasy fiction, magic is treated like a formal rules-bound system with generally predictable, replicable results. Meanwhile, in science fiction, the opposite seems to be happening with technology. It's a good read.

Back to your original point, I think I know what you mean about SF&F plot resolutions. I don't think this book is a particular offender, though, because the antagonist wasn't set up as infallible or overwhelming. He takes the Tin Sari code Alif created to try and control his country's network infrastructure--and ends up making a terrible mess of everything and fomenting revolution in the streets. He throws Alif into a detention centre to torture and "disappear" him--and Alif is freed by a sympathetic member of the royal family, because the same system of hierarchy and deference that gives Abbas his authority also grants it to NewQuarter. Abbas has allies among demons and evil djinni, but that gives Alif and his friends the opportunity to recruit the djinni who oppose such creatures to his cause.

In other words, I don't think this was a case of The All-Powerful Evil Villain Can Only Be Stopped By The All-Powerful Magic Artifact/Spell. I think the resolution was much better built up than that.

I thought it was interesting that the magical maguffin, the Book of Days, turned out to be a trap; while it was the human made Tin Sari that allowed Alif to take down the villain.
And ultimately the villain failed and Alif succeeded due to resistance of the temptation for absolute power.