Palaces Of The Crow by Ray Nayler

I really liked Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea. I also liked The Tusks Of Extinction. But reading those back-to-back gave me pause: At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy. I said: I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species. Well, when I cracked open Palaces Of The Crow, my mind was immediately put at ease. And I mean immediately. Before the story even begins, the book opens with two quotes. One is the closing passage of Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species describing “the war of nature”, but the other quote is from Kropotkin: Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. That sums up the themes of Palaces Of The Crow. On the one hand, we do indeed get the worst that humans are capable of. But on the other hand, we also get not only the best that humans are capable of, but non-humans too. As with The Mountain In The Sea, this is a…