Two investigators from an advanced interstellar civilization land on a planet that looks, at ground level, almost entirely medieval, swords and horses and feudal politics, except the “winds” that shape the weather are actually a vast nanotechnological terraforming intelligence that’s gone rogue and possibly sentient. That collision, hard sf concept wearing a fantasy costume, is the whole engine of the book, and for the first stretch it works better than it has any right to.

I’m someone who usually bounces off exactly this kind of genre-blending, and Schroeder mostly won me over, though the prose itself has real rough edges, sentences that could’ve used one more editing pass, and the narrative jumps between a lot of point-of-view characters, not all of whom earn the real estate they’re given. A few of the potentially great arcs feel rushed in a way that’s hard to put a finger on precisely, more that certain developments get told to you rather than lived through. I kept thinking of Iain Banks while reading it, the way it wants to talk about heavy AI-and-materialism ideas but keeps cutting away before it fully commits to the conversation.

Where it earned its four stars from me is the sheer inventiveness of the winds themselves as a concept, the way the book slowly reveals what’s actually going on underneath the medieval surface, and I’m still thinking about certain scenes half a year after finishing, which by my own rule of thumb means the book did something right. Not a clean read. The quasi-medieval pageantry grated on me the way it does in Dune sometimes, but the ideas underneath earned my patience.