Polaris, by Reis Murphy, is a scifi epic that’s conscious of other famous virtual worlds and dream worlds. It’s not a homage or reinvention as much as it considers the themes and technology of familiar cyberpunk and virtual world fiction, and then gives us a young Midwestern art student as the protag, and considers what our world of 4chan, AI and LLM could do to building a virtual world.

College student Arthur Bland lands a strange job collecting topo for a virtual world — basically logging sights, smells, tastes, and experiences in general for the bots of the secret new virtual Polaris to replicate. Collecting topo is a poet’s dream of noticing every flower detail, every taste and scent, until one of the sensations Arthur decides to log is the taste of blood with a split lip.

There’s a darkness overall in Polaris. Instead of the 90s cyberpunk creativity of Da5id, Hiro Protagonist and their friends coding the Black Sun together, the virtual world of Polaris is a shady startup, planned with an eye to attracting investors and appealing to rich visitors. Most of the developers don’t give their real names or anything that will identify them dirtside. (Arthur! Get a clever code name! Don’t be so bland…. oh,  ok, I see what you did there.) We can’t even call them a dev team, since there’s not really teamwork, but they’re all working on building the same thing, a virtual world that’s not illegal, because there aren’t laws about this yet.

Parts of the novel are so gross, so basically I just skipped sections where the novel showed the LLM had trained on the absolute dregs of the internet. These are signposted, just like the Lovecraftian dream horrors are signposted, so you can skip the icky parts too.  The narrative uses the gross parts to talk about revenge porn, generative AI, dark impulses, and cruelty, and to make interesting connections, but still. SO GROSS.

Arthur’s friends, since they not idiots, know this job at Polaris and the whole setup is shady from the start. Alena in particular knows Jack is a creep and warns Arthur that this is a bad idea.  This is because she is not an idiot. Your true friends will warn you about that shady startup job and about having ChatGPT do all your homework for you.  I liked the friendships a great deal, too. Many novels with such a focus on the virtual world (Snow Crash, Ready Player One, etc.) have the protag living a bleak offline existence, so it was charming to read of Arthur’s dirtside life of Midwestern college friends, diners, and homework. Readers will actually believe that Lonnie, Alena, Parsley and Arthur are friends. Yes, ok, this could have been shown in 2-3 college hangs, instead of recounting dozens of movie nights and breakfast menus, but still.

Polaris is an intriguing story, but it’s also uneven. The pacing is off, with sections that absolutely dragged, but oddly, not from infodumping.  I enjoyed most of the descriptions and establishing the world. (Again… I skipped the yucky scenes) I think it was the repetition, I felt like the first third of the book is mostly poor Arthur asking what something is, and Jack or one of the other Polaris team saying, geez, Arthur doesn’t even know what that is.  Then Arthur asks how something works, and it repeats. And then the last third of the book is various people telling Arthur that he doesn’t understand yet, and he has to come see to understand, because he doesn’t understand yet. The main Polaris story is also interrupted by a fantasy story, about a wanderer in maybe a post-apocalyptic world, which worked as a meta reminder of Arthur’s dual lives, but at the same time, I felt like I was being pranked. There’s a fascinating, unique 400-page novel in Polaris, but it costs over 700 pages to read it. 

Starting with the name, Polaris uses interesting devices to reference other works, and build meta layers of narrative. This is a scifi epic that’s conscious of previous scifi works and also very conscious that it’s a book. As most scifi readers know, a novel about a virtual world requires a character whose persona and actual gender are different than expected, and I loved that Polaris did this dirtside, not starside, and signposted the nickname fakeout so cleverly.

At another point, a struggling character asks questions of CHORUS, the Alexa/chatbot of the future,  which functions like a Greek chorus as we get closer to tragedy. It is a “chat, are we cooked?” mixed with the inescapable end of a doomed classical hero. 

Plus, this is a novel in which pretty much all the women characters are described as petite with <color> hair, and two of the women characters discuss an author who loves to describe women characters by their boobs. It’s a literary scifi world, that is constantly conscious of being a literary scifi world, and it’s a delight to watch the layers unfold.

Towards the end of Polaris, I wondered how the plot could all resolve, and then I realized that it wasn’t going to resolve. I know there’s a real love for epic series among scifi/fantasy readers, so I think my annoyance is my personal taste, not reflective of publishing trends. Even when I’m reading a series, I like endings that resolve the majority of the plot points, maybe with a few hints that questions (Foley’s arrest! Black flag!) will be explained in a sequel, but unfortunately, here we got a bunch of unresolved new reveals in the last few pages.