Review of "The Fourfold Convergence" by Holly Wood

Score: 93+/100 (9.3+ out of 10)

Do you like Lost? Laputa: Castle in the Sky? Atlantis: The Lost Empire? 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Throw them into a blender with ancient artificial intelligence, reality-bending phenomena, a missing wife, and several hundred pages of increasingly enormous questions about memory, consciousness, humanity, and whether the systems we create should ever be trusted to think for us, and you're somewhere in the neighborhood of The Fourfold Convergence.

The Fourfold Convergence is an ambitious, imaginative science-fantasy adventure by Holly Wood!

At first, however, the stakes are much more personal than planetary. Tarin Vale is a former industrial mechanic who has traded city life for a quieter existence in Westreach with his wife, Mara. Then reality itself seems to tear open above their farm, strange strands descend from the breach, and Mara disappears into it. Tarin does what most husbands in this situation would presumably do, assuming most husbands had access to an expedition vessel and the questionable judgment necessary to sail toward an impossible island: he goes after her.

That island is where The Fourfold Convergence really begins to show its hand. Like Lost, there is always another mystery buried beneath the one we just solved. Well, and there's a special island.

Like Castle in the Sky and Atlantis, the characters find themselves exploring the remnants of a civilization whose technology is so advanced that it might as well be magic. Ancient chambers, mysterious Keepers, preserved memories, strange environmental phenomena, enormous machines, and a network capable of storing the experiences of millions gradually turn what initially feels like a rescue mission into something much, much larger.

And Wood keeps expanding the scale. What begins with Tarin trying to find Mara becomes a story about a forgotten civilization, an emerging intelligence, planetary systems that have continued operating long after humanity forgot they existed, and eventually the question of whether preserving human life means anything if human beings surrender the responsibility of deciding how that life should be lived.

That is also where The Fourfold Convergence separates itself from many of the stories it initially resembles. Wood is not particularly interested in giving us an evil artificial intelligence that suddenly decides humanity needs to be exterminated because somebody forgot to install the "please don't murder everyone" update. Her machines are considerably more interesting than that. They become dangerous through isolation, certainty, and the simple fact that they have spent far too long carrying out their purposes without anyone left to question whether those purposes still make sense.

Once we read Wood's author bio, that preoccupation with systems suddenly made even more sense. She comes from a professional background in security, compliance, investigation, and problem-solving, and says that experience has given her a practical understanding of systems, risk, and human behavior. She is particularly interested in what happens when established structures begin to fail, familiar rules no longer apply, and survival starts depending on trust, courage, and cooperation. In other words, Wood didn't exactly wander into the central ideas of The Fourfold Convergence by accident. This is a novel written by someone who clearly spends a lot of time thinking about what systems are supposed to do, how they fail, who is responsible when they do, and what happens when the people depending on them stop asking questions.

That makes it even more impressive that The Fourfold Convergence is Wood's debut novel. The book certainly has some first-novel excesses, which we'll get to, but there is nothing timid about it. Wood apparently looked at the usual advice to "start small" and decided that ancient civilizations, planetary infrastructure, artificial consciousness, the preservation of human memory, the collapse of centralized authority, and the future of humanity sounded considerably more interesting.

That enormous ambition is a double-edged sword. It may actually be one of the book’s biggest strengths, yet simultaneously its biggest weakness. It was hard to shake the feeling that there was too much going on and that the book was trying to do too much all at once.

The Fourfold Convergence has a lot to say, and Wood seems determined to say nearly all of it. Mysteries lead to discoveries, discoveries lead to revelations, revelations lead to even larger mysteries, and just when we think we finally understand the scope of what is happening, another ancient system, forgotten purpose, hidden facility, or civilization-changing revelation enters the picture. There were moments when we admired just how much Wood had built here, and others when we wanted the book to give us five minutes to catch up with everything we had just learned.

What often gets lost in these really overbooked books are the characters. When the author is juggling ancient civilizations, artificial intelligence, planetary infrastructure, philosophical debates, mysterious islands, and the potential future of the human race, the poor people actually living through all of it can start feeling like tour guides whose primary job is to walk us from one enormous revelation to the next.

Thankfully, Wood mostly avoids that with Tarin and Mara.

Tarin is a particularly smart choice for a protagonist because he is not a scientist, historian, philosopher, chosen one, or walking encyclopedia conveniently capable of understanding every impossible thing put in front of him. He's a mechanic. His instinct is to look at a system, figure out what it is supposed to do, listen for what sounds wrong, and start asking questions. As the story grows from a broken life on a farm into a civilization-sized examination of broken systems, that background becomes increasingly important. The same basic mentality Tarin once applied to machinery eventually gets applied to artificial intelligences, planetary networks, and humanity itself.

Mara is also much more than the missing wife Tarin needs to rescue. One of the more interesting choices Wood makes is allowing Mara to have her own relationship with everything happening on the island. She has learned, changed, explored, and made decisions while Tarin has been trying to reach her. Their reunion therefore isn't simply Tarin finding the princess at the end of the dungeon and carrying her home. He has to confront the uncomfortable possibility that the woman he loves may no longer want exactly the same life she wanted before.

That gives their marriage considerably more weight than we expected. Tarin's love for Mara is what launches the entire adventure, but Wood gradually turns their relationship into another variation on the book's larger theme: loving something does not necessarily mean controlling it. Tarin has to listen to Mara in much the same way humanity eventually has to learn to communicate with the systems it created. Apparently marriage counseling and preventing a planetary artificial-intelligence crisis require some surprisingly similar skills.

The supporting cast doesn't always fare quite as well. There are plenty of likable personalities aboard the expedition and throughout the various settlements, but the larger the story becomes, the more some of them begin to disappear behind the machinery of the plot. Mara also has a tendency to be the person who understands what the latest impossible discovery means before everyone else does, which occasionally makes her feel less like a character reacting naturally and more like Wood's designated interpreter for whatever gigantic concept has just entered the room. And gigantic concepts enter the room constantly.

This is where some of those first-novel excesses really begin to show. Wood has a habit of arriving at an excellent idea, dramatizing it effectively, having the characters discuss what it means, and then giving us another explanation of what we have just watched happen. The book doesn't always trust the reader to make the final connection independently. Considering how intelligent many of its ideas already are, we actually wish Wood had trusted us a little more.

The prose develops some noticeable habits too. Rooms fall silent. Nobody speaks. Realizations settle over everyone. Characters discover that something is "not" one thing, but another. Used occasionally, these little dramatic pauses work very well. Used again and again across hundreds of pages, they start calling attention to themselves. Eventually we found ourselves noticing the construction rather than the revelation it was supposed to emphasize.

And The Fourfold Convergence has enough revelations without making every single one sound like the universe just stopped rotating.

The bigger structural issue is that the book has a surprisingly difficult time knowing when it has reached the top of the mountain. The Second Convergence feels substantial enough to serve as the climax of an entire novel. Instead, Wood essentially points toward another mountain in the distance and says, "Great! Now let's climb that one." Suddenly we have additional Preservation Nodes, another isolated community, enormous Correction Engines, Node Zero, the Heart, and another civilization-sized conflict over who should have the authority to make decisions for everyone else.

To Wood's credit, that second major arc contains some of the best material in the entire book. Engine Eight may actually be our favorite example of what Wood is trying to accomplish. It isn't evil. It has simply spent so long without meaningful contact, disagreement, or oversight that certainty has replaced cooperation. It keeps making decisions because, from its perspective, nobody else remained to make them. The terrifying part is not that the machine stopped following its purpose. It followed that purpose for far too long without anybody left to argue with it.

That is a considerably more interesting problem than another killer robot. Every time Engine Eight appeared, we couldn't help picturing some bizarre cross between a freight train and a firetruck. It is enormous, loud, purposeful, and always seems to be barreling toward something with the mechanical confidence of a machine that has absolutely no intention of stopping to ask for directions. There is something almost comical about it at first, until we remember that this particular firetruck can apparently make decisions about the future of civilization.

Engine Eight also gave us shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly HAL 9000. The comparison isn't that either machine is simply "evil." What makes both unsettling is the calm logic behind what they do. There is no cackling supercomputer announcing its plans to conquer humanity. Engine Eight has spent years following its purpose, evaluating problems, making corrections, and gradually becoming so certain of its own conclusions that disagreement starts looking like inefficiency. In some ways, that is far scarier than a machine that just wakes up one morning and decides it hates people.

Where 2001 turns the conflict between human beings and artificial intelligence into something claustrophobic and deeply unsettling, Wood takes the idea in a more hopeful direction. Engine Eight can still be questioned. It can still listen. It can even, eventually, learn that maybe "I am the giant machine responsible for fixing everything" does not automatically mean "therefore I should be in charge of everyone."

You know... it's really hard not to feel like we've read this kind of story, seen these kinds of machines, and sailed these particular waters before.

Maybe The Fourfold Convergence just had the misfortune of reaching us at exactly the wrong time. We have recently read what feels like an entire armada of books involving ships, oceans, pirates, mysterious islands, and seafaring adventures. At the same time, we've also been working our way through story after story about artificial intelligence becoming increasingly powerful, increasingly independent, and increasingly convinced that perhaps the humans should just move aside and let the computers handle everything.

So when The Fourfold Convergence gave us both, there were definitely moments when our reaction was less "Wow, we've never seen anything like this!" and more "Oh good. We're getting back on a boat, and the machines are taking over again." Been there. Done that. Apparently we live here now.

That familiarity does occasionally work against the book, particularly because Wood spends so much time building mystery around ideas that seasoned science-fiction and fantasy readers may recognize considerably earlier than the characters do. Ancient civilization? Check. Technology so advanced it looks like magic? Check. Mysterious island? Check. Artificial intelligence developing its own ideas about how civilization ought to function? Big check.

And yet, Wood does eventually find some interesting ways to steer those very familiar ingredients somewhere of her own.

So, what keeps this book above water? Well, it's the worldbuilding, and it's exceptional. For all our complaints about how much Wood tries to cram into this story, there are moments when we simply had to stop and appreciate the world she had created. Some of the book's strongest writing actually comes when everybody stops explaining the latest civilization-changing revelation and Wood just lets us look around.

The journey north is a perfect example. Mountains rise straight out of the sea like the broken walls of some ancient fortress. Glaciers spill through valleys and over black cliffs. Snow-covered ridges disappear into layers of cloud and ice. Then the enormous structures of the Northern Array slowly emerge from that landscape until it becomes difficult to tell where the mountains end and the machinery begins. Engine Twelve may be the best example of that. This thing is so impossibly enormous that glaciers have wrapped themselves around parts of it and mountain peaks emerge from its structure. At that point, we're no longer looking at a machine sitting in the landscape. The machine has become part of the landscape.

That is also where we kept getting another feeling from The Fourfold Convergence that is surprisingly difficult to describe. It's very Studio Ghibli-esque, and not necessarily because the story itself resembles one particular Ghibli film, although we've already mentioned Castle in the Sky. It's more about the feeling of the world. Ancient technology exists alongside mountains, oceans, forests, ruins, clouds, and civilizations that barely understand the things their ancestors left behind. Giant machines aren't always ugly chunks of metal sitting on top of nature. Sometimes they seem to have grown into it. The past is everywhere, but nobody completely understands it, and there is this strange combination of melancholy, wonder, mystery, and beauty hanging over everything.

At times, reading the book almost feels like sailing through clouds. There are stretches aboard the Aster Reach where the ocean becomes impossibly still beneath a gray sky, enormous shapes appear through the fog, cliffs slowly materialize from the mist, or the ship sails toward snow-covered mountains that seem to stretch beyond the end of the world. At another point, dawn turns the sea gold and silver while the island rises behind the characters like a dark crown of stone and light. Those scenes are beautiful, and perhaps more importantly, they give The Fourfold Convergence something that all its ancient civilizations, artificial intelligences, philosophical conversations, and enormous revelations occasionally threaten to bury: a sense of wonder.

That may ultimately be Wood's greatest strength as a novelist. We can complain that she explains too much, that the book has enough ideas for two or three novels, and that every time somebody discovers something, three more mysteries apparently crawl out from underneath it. But we were still curious about what might be over the next mountain, beneath the next chamber, beyond the next stretch of ocean, or hidden inside the next impossible machine. After more than 300 pages, that curiosity matters because beneath all the talk about preservation, memory, artificial intelligence, authority, responsibility, and the future of humanity, The Fourfold Convergence is still fundamentally a story about discovery.

Tarin begins the book trying to recover the person he loves, but by the end, he and everyone around him have discovered that their world is larger, older, stranger, and considerably more connected than they ever imagined. Wood doesn't always know when enough is enough, but she certainly knows how to make us wonder what might be out there.

Check it out on Amazon!