Orphans of Chaos

Orphans of Chaos. John.C. Wright ***( av 5)

This is one seriously strange book.
That said, I’ll try to elaborate.
In a British-type boarding school, three young boys and two young girls (Victor, Collin, Quentin and Amelia and Vanity) live and learn. But what do they learn? And how do they live? For starters, there is just the five of them as students, and about nine teachers, not counting the servants. And the boarders, especially to the south, seems to shift and take on strange proportions. The teachers are weird, to say the least, and the children get to learn things that five years as a professor wouldn’t tech you. And the kids themselves….
Victor can see the molecular matter of objects and manipulate them
Collin is a psychic, or rather an emphat – his desires charges his ability to change the world.
Quentin is a warlock.
Amelia can se in four dimensions and change objects matter/density
Vanity can find paths through space-continuum.
Truly, this school would make Hogwarts look sane.

However, this is not a superhero book. I don’t really know what to call it. An adolescence book? Well, yes, there is some love and growing-up going on. But parts of it is…disturbing in a way because its not what you would expect in an adolescence book. A theme of dominance – submission runs through the story in a slightly unnerving way.
A science book? Well it does require you to have a very firm grasp on Greek mythology (even more so than I have, I admit it), Einsteins theories of relativity (of which I have none, so I skipped those parts), astro-physics, astronomy, maths, hisoty, religion (all religions) poetry, legends from all over the world and it helps if you know a little something about the politics of Atlantis in the last thousands years or so and so on (and everyone’s new favourite Anansi does a cameo. He really seems to be the hot item of the year).
And all of this in a book barely 300 pages long.
Wow.
But in the middle, when your head is spinning in at least five dimensions, the author does tell you the trick. This is not a book about science, or growing up. This is a book about how we see the world, and how we change it merely by observing it. It is a book about how we all se the world differently and how the same event is interpreted differently because of it.
In other words, it’s a book about philosophy.
It is also a book about the war between different realities, but lets not go there right now.

I don’t know what to think of this book. I was disturbed by the dominance – submission theme, because even if these ‘kids’ are super-beings as old as time they still think and look like, well, kids. I was slightly bored at the endless ranting of philosophy – physics which I could barely even begin to understand. I was intrigued by the old Gods theme, but haven’t we all read a lot of that this last year? It has been done better.
But I did like the questions about what reality is, and how it changes depending on who’s looking at it.
All in all, a strange book. I’ll leave it at that.

Book quote: You do not have the energy relationship in the moral direction a person devoted to God normally manifests. You relationship structures are extensional rather than intentional, and form nodes going in two time-directions, but not toward eternity. This type of atrophy is typical of atheists and agnostics.