Tell HN: Farisa's Crossing, by a member of our community, is worth reading

I’ve been following the technology economy since the 1990s, and I’ve always had a fascination with online communities like this one, where I’ve been a reader for more than ten years.

One of my colleagues convinced me to go through the blog posts of someone who, although overall obscure, used to be prolific here. I hadn’t heard his name for a while, and when I learned that he had written a novel, I decided to read it. At first, I didn’t have high expectations. I studied English literature in college, and my experience with “techies who write” is that most of them underestimate the difficulty of crafting a compelling story.

Farisa’s Crossing surprised me. Truly, it did. The Royal Road version (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/85592/farisas-crossing) is a free ARC, so there are a few typos, but they’re very minor. The book is ambitious, strange, and also... solidly written. I’ll definitely buy a copy when it comes out.

The author is gifted at characterization. Pann Grackenheit is the best incel character I have ever read. Hampus Bell, the villain who never swears, makes the banality of evil so banal it is almost infuriating. Farisa, the heroine, is a shining presence. She is conceited, impulsive, and occasionally reckless, but you end up loving her for her kindness, intelligence, and sheer drive to overcome malice and adversity. The worldbuilding is also rich, with religions, literature, and language given such detail you feel as if this vast universe must exist somewhere.

Of course, the book has weaknesses. The maximalist prose, dark subject matter, and ambiguous antagonist make it hard to describe succinctly. If I were its publisher, I do not know how I would market it. The pacing is slow by the standard of single-genre fantasy readers, but I doubt I’d be able to convince my wife’s book club to read a book with magic and orcs in it. A steampunk fantasy with brutal social commentary, existentialist theology, and a modern understanding of mental illness... feels like an attempt to create a new niche, which is always risky.

The ending is sure to be polarizing. The Global Company arc reaches a well-executed but absurd anticlimax. The last chapter feels like Farisa’s dark confession, in disguise. The novel is demanding and sometimes bleak, but leaves me with a strange feeling of hope. The joke-that’s-not-a-joke is that the Global Company’s world, with its oppressive two-facedness and pointless cruelty, is our world. Still, if the Global Company is secretly real, so must be Claes, Andor, Mazie, and Farisa, perhaps numbering each in the millions.

If anyone had told me this community would produce a serious literary novel one day, my response would have been condescending doubt. Intellect is not in short supply here, but artistic sensitivity is incompatible with cutthroat industries, including this one. Thus, it surprised me to find that there are people in this tribe, however on the margins, who can actually write. That, I believe, counts to our credit.