4 Stars - Strongly Recommended / Holy WTF Batman!
Pages:91
Publisher: Tor.com
Released: September 2016
Another barren wasteland. Another amazing novel that probes deep into what it means to be human and whether what you think you are, and what you truly are, really makes that much difference in the long run.
DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW UNLESS YOU HAVE ALREADY READ THIS BOOK AND IMMOBILITY.
If I'm right, I'm about to spoil a whole bunch of shit for you.
Ok, you've been warned!
Soooo many parallels to Immobility here.
In Immobility, the human protag Horkai had been awakened from storage to go on a mission to retrieve some material that had been "stolen". Accompanying him on his mission were two "mules", an identical pair of human-like beings who couldn't survive prolonged exposure to the harsh conditions outside, with names that shared the same first letter - Qatik and Qanik.
Could they be our X's ancestors, earlier even than those who have been imprinted in him and share thought space within his body?
In The Warren, we know X's ancestors were likewise made in pairs, for quite some time now, sharing the same alphabetic letter in their names - we are aware that their names were Ture/Tore, Unnr/Uttr, Vigus/Vagus, and then the solo Wollem, created alone because of a lack of material.
It appears as though our Warren humaniods have been left on their own for a very long time, replicating themselves based off of faulty memories as they each approach the end of their lifespan. Though, they are not really ALONE alone because the Warren's super computer AKA Monitor informs our curious little X that there is one true human, and he's alive and well. This human's name is Horak (a misremembered version of Horkai, maybe?), and he is stored away in a different location, outside of the Warren, a place that is above ground, which is still considered toxic to X and his kind.
Are you with me right now? Are you starting to see the parallels to Immobility yet? Horak is in storage; Horkai was in storage,, too. The outside is toxic to the identical "mules"; the outside is toxic to X and his ancestors, too. And if you follow the alphabet backwards.... watch. We are with X now. Wollem (W) is gone - he left the Warren ages ago to see if he could locate more material, and never returned. Wollem was created by Vigus and Vagus (V). Vigus and Vagus had been created by Unnr and Uttr (U), who were created by Ture and Tore (T). So it's not ENTIRELY crazy to back this thing all the way up to Qatik and Qanik, right? Oh and don't forget Olaf and Olag, who were also an identical pair, working in the Immobility community.
X is only able to remember as far back as Ture and Tore, but that could be easily explained - maybe Ture and Tore were the first humaniods to IMPRINT themselves, thus being the first pair to ever burn their memories into the two they were creating, thus ensuring that they will always be a part of those who come after them. Maybe the pairs whose names started with R and S, who would have come after Qatik and Qanik, are just not embedded in X's memories.
It's totally possible that X's group are all that's left of the cultish Immobility clan. Maybe they began as a small group of humans and humaniods that had broken off from that original group. Maybe shit was hitting the fan bad and some of the clan said screw this and made their way across the barren, poisoned land to build a new home of their own....
Maybe The Warren is Immobility's future self.
Boom!
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