Review: The Philosopher's War

The Philosopher's War by Tom Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A year and a half after Tom Miller debuted with The Philosopher's Flight, here he gives us a look at the Great War as fought by empirical philosophers abroad. The result is a little like the 2017 Wonder Woman film, a post-steampunk war movie with villains trying to take the chemical weapons we know were used in our real history and make them even worse - a scarily easy proposition given how, in this universe, the earliest smokecarvers made some pretty decisive and poisonous moves to end the Civil War. Not to mention the Franco-Prussian War, which is discussed here as a distant prelude to World War I.


But here, in 1918 France, Sigilwoman Robert A. Canderelli Weekes and all his smokecarving sisters-in-arms have their work cut out for them as they struggle to bring the war to an end. A huge challenge, to be sure, because while the French don't pay much importance to empirical philosophy, the ever-efficient Germans were quick to take it up and have been studying it for as many decades as the Americans have.

As with the previous book, The Philosopher's War builds an alternate history that feels authentic to its time period, but with undeniably a 2019 sensibility as well. We not only filter World War I and the Franco-Prussian war through this fantasy lens, but also get a look at the Spanish-American War through the eyes of Filipina-American smokecarver Alta Andrada, who has very little nice to say about either the Spanish or the Americans who colonized her islands. Miller continues to shine a light on racism and the absurd degrees to which Americans will zero in on the tiniest sixteenth of whatever in people's blood - we already knew that Danielle Hardin, mixed as she is, presents Black, while Robert similarly has a small amount of Chilean ancestry - enough to tan deeply enough for Danielle to take notice after a long absence from him - but presents white. All in all, a reminder that all we need to see color is the naked eye, not a microscope that provides too much insensitive analysis.

I won't spoil the ending, but I'll say that it's absolutely bloodydamn AMAZING, and that it actually calls to mind a few World War II campaigns as well. Which makes me wonder, since Miller has at least two more novels planned, and plans to take this alternate history as far forward as the 1960s...how greatly will he diverge from real history and create an even more truly fantastical timeline?

View all my reviews