The first review

Perpetūra has had its first review. Lupe Farkas read both books early, back to back, for her Imperfect Rebel feature, and gave each of them five stars. I laughed the whole way through it, and somewhere in the middle of laughing I found I was also very touched, in the particular way that only happens when a stranger has clearly paid attention.

She noticed a few things I want to talk about, carefully, because I cannot explain any of them without ruining them.

The first is the feeling the series is built around, the one it never gives a name to. Lupe likes naming things, and she could not name this one by the end either. She calls that "Rude, honestly." I take it as the nicest outcome there is.

The second is what she calls the book's quiet way of working. Something small is left on the page, a hand, a doorway, a colour, and then something like it turns up again somewhere else, until you start to become suspicious. I put those things down without knowing whether a single reader would ever pick them up. She picked them up. She names hands in particular, and says she is "never getting over the hands."

I am not saying anything about the hands. I will say only that she is right to be suspicious of them, and should keep being suspicious. That is the correct response to a hand.

She also has a word for the whole project that I have never used myself and now cannot stop thinking about: architecture. The novels, the free interactive edition in the browser, the codex, the atlas, the soundtrack, the way it all looks, and in her words, "It is all one house." That is closer to how I think about it than anything I have written here.

The books and the browser are the same house entered by different doors. Each book takes one road through each story, start to finish, with nothing to choose. The interactive edition keeps every road, all of them equally true, and asks you to pick. And every story has its own sung song, which she wrote about too, and which I was very happy to see her send people to after they finish reading.

Of Book Two she writes that it gives answers without making the questions smaller, and that she said "OH YOU CLEVER WOMAN" more than once while reading it. I am going to leave that exactly as generous, and exactly as unexplained, as she left it.

She has read Pantheon early too, and told her readers they have no idea what is coming. I am choosing to take that as a good sign.

And I am going on the Imperfect Rebel Podcast, where she has promised to ask about the writing, the choices, the objects, the music, and what she calls the things I planted. I am looking forward to it enormously, and I will spend every minute of it trying very hard not to give any of them away.

Thank you, Lupe.