The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach (4 stars)

This is very unusual sci-fi. It's told in a series of short stories, each zooming out from a culture built entirely around making carpets out of human hair. The whole novel is a pursuit of the question: why? Where do they go? Who started this? Subsequent stories unveil the sheer scale of the production and it is astonishing.

The characters are almost non-existent, change every chapter, and a bunch of them die. It's one of the most plot-driven books I've ever read. Every character and previous chapter is just background to understand the implications of the next chapter. I think this structure of disconnection made the scope of the story easier to tell (no need to invent ways for the initial characters to cross the galaxy), but also harmed any possibility for character development.

The structure is actually quite clever to motivate the reader to search for answers: gradually giving us who, what, how, when but holding back "why" until the last page.

The vignettes are brutal, more than one ended with me exclaiming "daaaaaamn!". Usually when a book does that to me, it's a very good sign. It's very short, and I read it in about a day. I was completely consumed with finding out why these hair carpets were being made. On this fact alone it deserves 4 stars.

SPOILERS

But I'm not sure how to feel about the ending. Was it good? Kinda? I certainly didn't want it to be happy, or unexplained, and it delivers in those dimensions.

This story feels like a thought experiment for what would happen if a ruler has almost infinite power, but is also a narcissist and easily provoked into petty revenge. What would the petty revenge of an infinitely powerful being look like? This: destroying and reforming an entire galaxy of people and planets into a machine to demonstrate your own personal superiority over someone else.

I'm not sure what the "point" was. Perhaps it's a demonstration of what can happen with too much power and too little empathy?

4 stars.